“THE RED RENAISSANCE” IN CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN PROSE: ARTISTIC MODELS

Abstract

The Ukrainian literature of the 1920s and 1930s (the interwar twentieth century, the Executed Renaissance, the Red Renaissance) is gaining in relevance today. The generation that was destroyed by the totalitarian system at that time left behind works of art that sound contemporary. There is a considerable corpus of literary texts analyzing the works of the masters of the word of that time. Memoirs, epistolaries, and archival materials of various kinds by writers of this period are published, and documentaries and feature films are made both on the works of the authors of the Executed Renaissance and their artistic activities. The purpose of the article is to analyze the texts of contemporary prose writers about the general atmosphere and literary activities of the representatives of the Red Renaissance, identifying three models: historical, psychological, and biographical. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks: to make a general overview of personal texts (memoirs, correspondence); to systematize the available examples of contemporary fiction, identifying three models; to analyze prose texts and find out their artistic specificity. The novelty lies in the fact that fiction (“Martha” (2014) by Lilia Cheren, “My Madwoman” (2016) by Andriy and Svitlana Klimov, “The Witness” (2007) by Varvara Zhukova, “Zerov. The Funeral Oratorio” (2020) by Yevheniia Kuzhavska) has not been studied in terms of creating and analyzing a generalized picture of the socio-literary process of the Red Renaissance. Conclusions. Contemporary Ukrainian prose writers offer three models of depicting the literary process in their fiction: historical, psychological, and biographical. The tendency of the interwar twentieth century is understood through the analysis of the peculiarities of the era and the main characteristics of the artistic and literary process. Using facts from the biographies of writers, and applying the author's fiction, contemporary prose writers convey important features of the era and offer artistic biographies of writers of the 1920s–1930s.