Migration in the rhythms of breath, or How to overcome existential crises: Maryna Manchenko’s novels

Abstract

The subject of the study is Maryna Manchenko’s novels Bitter Oranges (2025) and A Bag of Unicorns (2025). The object of analysis is the ways of artistic representation of frustrated behavior of characters in crisis moments of life and artistic techniques for overcoming them. The relevance of the study lies in the reality of the modern world, which provokes stressful situations, filling a person’s life with deep emotional experiences; the experience of fiction, along with research in modern psychology, appears no less relevant in the processes of harmonization of mental states.

The purpose of the study is to comprehensively analyze the artistic understanding of the ways of conveying the depressive behavior of characters as a result of their experiences in existential crises, as well as to clarify the means of figurative and plot-compositional organization of novels that express the processes of overcoming stressful situations. To achieve this goal, the achievements of psychoanalytic, structural-semiotic, and cultural-anthropological schools were applied. In the context of such approaches, the writer’s novels are being studied for the first time, as her prose is being introduced into modern Ukrainian literary circulation, which underscores the scientific novelty of this study.

The study ensures the analysis of a number of authorial metaphors (“bread edge”, “icy water”, “inhalation”, “exhalation”, “prana”, “sciroccati”, etc.); the productivity of the application of existential a priori concept in establishing the emotional horizon of the characters’ crisis consciousness has been established; the role of the symbolic-metaphorical approach to the artistic depiction of stressful situations has been revealed; the productivity of applying the theory of rhythmicity of literary prose developed by Ukrainian literary critic M. Hirshman has been updated and the prospects of further research into rhythmicity in the plot-compositional organization of literary prose have been emphasized. It is confirmed that rhythm serves as an active meaning-making element that shapes the dynamics of the variability of characters' psychological states. The prospects for further study of the problem are outlined as the update of the application of new interpretative models to the analysis of the figurative world of literary texts, the need for a more in-depth view into the context of the development of modern Ukrainian bibliotherapy.