Journalistic publications features of columnist Viacheslav Medvid

Abstract

The subject of the inquiry is the peculiarity of Ukrainian literary columnistics. The main problem of the paper was to find out the reasons for the flourishing of Ukrainian columnistics at the intersection of fiction and journalism, to outline the main range of its themes, motives, images as exemplified by V. Medvid’s publications. Only ever some theoretical aspects of author’s columns in national magazines were the object of research of Ukrainian scholars, without a thorough analysis of particular journalistic works, so a detailed description of the writer’s columnist output has determined the scientific novelty of the paper. The objective of the paper is a comprehensive study of the individual uniqueness of the content in author’s columns by V. Medvid against the backdrop of the development of national columnistics and journalism in the 1990s and 2000s. For this purpose, a cultural-historical method was used to determine the reasons for writing and the context of specific publications of the columnist, their place and role in the work of the writer and in the intellectual life of Ukrainian society; a philological method was used for the analysis of texts of these publications and a comparative method was used to determine the commonalities and differences in the materials of the author’s columns by V. Medvid and other Ukrainian writers of this period. The results of the study are: 1) Among various definitions of the author’s column for Ukrainian columnistics, the most acceptable is its understanding as a rubric, which contains works of different genres, but in a specific column — works of one genre and one style, as evidenced by the output by V. Medvid. In the rubrics “Literary Pages” and “Librarian-review” V. Medvid finds himself as a literary critic, publishing reviews of anthologies of modern literature in the former and short literary portraits of contemporaries in the latter. Publications in the columns “From the Heights and Lowlands” and “Light and Shadow” are descriptive, essayistic. 2) V. Medvid’s columnistics emerges as a synthesis of public attention to key social, moral and ethical problems, an unbiased author’s worldview and a unique parable style of a writer-publicist. 3) It is stated that publications with clear, mostly simplified, conclusions, as well as clear accents in the division into positive and negative, are popular with readers of magazines, so V. Medvid’s columnistics was not very successful in general. His writing requires of the readers a high intellectual level, intended for a narrow elite audience. The application of the paper lies in the possibility of using its results in works on journalistic genre, the history of Ukrainian journalism and literature of the XX–XXI centuries, in the study of V. Medvid’s work.