MILITARY LITERATURE THROUGH THE PRISM OF SYNERGY (TO THE QUESTION OF ARTISTIC INTEGRITY OF “THE SHADOW OF THE CAT” BY OLGA KRYAZHYCH)

Abstract

The object of the article is the novel by the modern Ukrainian writer Olga Kryazhych "The Shadow of the Cat". The action in the work reflects the events of 2014, when Russian troops entered the territory of the Luhansk region, when the creation of the Luhansk People's Republic was proclaimed as the result of the separatist policy. Therefore, "The Shadow of the Cat" is a component of that megatext of Ukrainian literature, which can be defined as military prose. Taking into account the nature of the artistic picture of the world in the novel, the author of the article set a goal to study the work at different levels of it as a system in order to identify the author's concept of reality and the nature of the artistic integrity of the text. In this regard, synergetics was chosen as a research strategy, which considers dynamic systems in a state of transition from chaos to integrity. As the main feature of Olga Kryazhych's novel its looseness was considered at several levels: 1) as a reflection of the state of the world in which the heroes of the work find themselves, a world in which stability, natural connections, reliability, and certainty of the future are destroyed; 2) as a characteristic of the character system: the novel has a large number of both central and secondary characters, as well as "off-stage" persons who are only mentioned, which makes the picture of the novel's heroine's environment multifaceted and contributes to artistic cognition of the state of the world; 3) as a sign of the meta-genre nature of the work: it contains features of both fictional and factual text; both a novel, a story and an essay; both an epic and moral-descriptive work. The article also noted the incompleteness of the plot lines, which is motivated by the uncertainty of the state in which the characters find themselves. As a result, it was concluded that Olga Kryazhych’s “The Shadow of the Cat” is a complete work in artistic terms, and the looseness on which attention was focused can be considered as the artistic strategy of the author, who set himself the task of conveying his understanding of the state of the world as a dynamic chaos, putting before the reader important problems of ways to overcome chaos, the future fate of Ukraine and Ukrainians as a nation.