Overcoming alienation. Humanistic existentialism and expressionist technique in Ihor Kostetskyi’s prose
Part one
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2311-259x.2024.3.4Keywords:
alienation, expressionism, existentialism, humanism, “stream of consciousness”, “text-in-text” technique, short story, post-war periodAbstract
The paper deals with the existentially significant problem of alienation in Ukrainian emigration literature and the ways of its artistic realisation in the prose of Ihor Kostetskyi of the second half of the 1940s (in particular, in such ‘extroverted’ experimental works such as The Train Stopped Every Now and Then, A Novella for You, We and Nedzh, The Poet and His Women, The Divine Lie, Six Lanterns and the Seventh Moon, The Story of the Last Match, each of which is based on a person in the system of his or her connections with the world and with oneself). This problem is considered in the context of humanistic existentialism as a certain type of the writer’s thinking and the ideological and worldview basis of his works, as well as through the prism of expressionist poetics of his fiction. The purpose of this study is to analyse the significance of the problem of alienation and the ways of its artistic embodiment in some prose works by I. Kostetskyi of the 1940s, and, accordingly, to expand the understanding of the existentialist basis of his prose thinking and expressionist technique of fiction writing. For this purpose, the article uses socio-cultural (to determine the theoretical aspects of the concept of alienation), biographical (to understand the relationship between the text and the author) and comparative (to clarify intertextual parallels and intertextuality) methods of analysis.
The scientific novelty of the study lies in its first-time exploration of a range of themes, images, and motifs in Kostetskyi’s prose of this period within the context of alienation, revealing the existentialist and expressionist aspects of his work. The analysis incorporates literary criticism and studies from Kostetskyi’s contemporaries (notably Yurii Sherekh, Volodymyr Derzhavyn, Viktor Petrov, Hryhorii Kostiuk, and Vasyl Barka) as well as current researches.
The result of the study is the conclusion that expressionism, as a dominant mode of artistic interpretation of the phenomenon of alienation, has influenced the imagery system, character development, narrative style, and is realized at various levels of aesthetic integrity in each work (problematic-thematic, plots-compositional, and temporal-spatial). The mechanisms of alienation’s emergence are examined as a result of the clash between the personal and the socially conditioned, as well as the disconnection between the individual and the world. Additionally, the paths to overcoming alienation and the artistic means that enable the writer to achieve their goals (including factors such as a language, play, mask, etc.) are analyzed.
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