REINTERPRETATION OF KOST HORDIIENKO’S CREATIVE LEGACY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Abstract

The article provides a comprehensive analysis of the reinterpretation of Kost Hordiienko’s creative legacy within the cultural and literary discourse of the twenty-first century. The study focuses on the transformation of receptive models in the perception of the writer’s prose, which for a long time had been interpreted within the framework of an ideologically conditioned socialist realist paradigm. The main vectors of the contemporary reception of Hordiienko’s works are outlined through the prism of modern humanities approaches, including reception aesthetics, postcolonial criticism, cultural memory studies, and a renewed reading of socialist realism as a complex and contradictory artistic phenomenon. Special attention is paid to the shift in interpretative strategies in the perception of the writer’s artistic world, manifested in the reorientation of scholarly focus from ideologically programmatic aspects to issues of psychologism, moral choice, the existential experience of war, traumatic memory, and human dignity. The article analyzes how Hordiienko’s wartime and postwar prose, in contemporary readings, emerges as a multidimensional artistic space in which normative elements of socialist realist writing coexist with latent humanistic meanings. It is demonstrated that under current sociocultural challenges, Kost Hordiienko’s works acquire new resonance, entering into an active dialogue with issues of historical memory, the artist’s responsibility to history, national identity, and collective traumatic experience. The reinterpretation of his literary heritage in the twenty-first century contributes to broadening perspectives on twentiethcentury Ukrainian prose and deepening the understanding of the interaction between literature, ideology, and cultural memory.