ARTISTIC MODELING OF THE UKRAINIAN VILLAGE CHRONOTOPE IN THE LARGE EPIC PROSE OF KOST HORDIIENKO

Abstract

The article provides a comprehensive literary analysis of the specific features of artistic modeling of the Ukrainian village chronotope in the novel trilogy by the prominent twentieth-century Ukrainian writer Kost Hordiienko. The trilogy unites such large epic prose works as «Chuzhu Nyvu Zhala» (Reaping Another’s Field), «Divchyna Pid Yabluneiu» (The Girl under the Apple Tree), and «Buymyr». The evolution of the artistic time and space coordinates of the Buymyr topos is thoroughly investigated. Within the author's creative intent, this space transforms from a local center of class contrasts during the revolution of 1905–1907. Further, it passes through the illusory dimension of the Soviet collective farm «prosperity» of the pre-war era. Finally, the topos expands into a tragic space of nationwide ordeal during World War II and the post-war revival, fundamentally cleansed of totalitarian myths. Particular attention is focused on identifying the dynamic tension between the normative prescriptions of the socialist realist canon and the immanent laws of the writer's artistic truth. The study analyzes the system of semantic inversions, «Aesopian language», and the author's unintentional «slips of the pen» through which official Soviet myths are deconstructed and objective historical reality emerges. The alien nature of Bolshevik agitators in the Ukrainian peasant world is proven. The paper reveals the mechanisms of corruption schemes within the collective farm system of manual management. Additionally, it highlights the phenomenon of self-organization and spiritual resistance of the people left by the authorities at the mercy of the enemy under the conditions of the German occupation. It is determined that the national-ethnic identity of the trilogy’s artistic space is marked by the richness of the folk language, the calendar-ritual code, the folkloric microchronotope, and the archetypal connection of the Ukrainian farmer with the land.