THE SPACE OF OCCUPATION IN THE INSERTED SHORT STORIES OF VOLODYMYR RAFEYENKO’S NOVEL THE LENGTH OF DAYS

Abstract

The article analyzes the cycle of inserted short stories from Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel “The Length Of Days” (“Veresaiev’s Tales”) from the perspective of the representation of the occupied space of Donetsk during the Russian hybrid aggression of 2014. The study focuses on the forms through which occupation “death worlds” affect the axiological and ontological dimensions of the character through the analysis of the artistic strategies employed in the author’s narration. The relevance of the article is driven by the necessity of a deeper examination of the nature of “death worlds” in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war and the challenges connected with de-occupation and the reintegration of people who experienced life under Russian occupation.
The aim of the article is to examine the non-mimetic poetological devices and artistic techniques that reconstruct the phenomenological mechanisms through which the space of occupation affects human identity under conditions of epistemological and axiological uncertainty. The article provides an overview of the poetics of the entire short story cycle “Veresaiev’s Tales,” with a detailed analysis of the short story “Klara’s Cat,” and also demonstrates the chronotopic correlation between the cycle and the novel’s main narrative. The methodological basis of the study combines a postcolonial approach to the analysis of necropolitics in occupied territories with a hermeneutic investigation of the phenomenological and axiological aspects of representing occupied space in literary texts. The short story cycle of “The Length Of Days” as a complete artistic whole is analyzed in the proposed aspect for the first time.
The study demonstrates that Volodymyr Rafeyenko continues the European tradition of non-mimetic representation of the experience of war by combining phantasmagorical and realistic discourses on the chronotopic level. The article reveals the representation of the transformation of urban space during occupation from epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic perspectives. It is argued that the principal forms of the occupation space’s influence on human identity consist in the destruction of axiological and epistemological horizons through the production of uncertainty and the collapse of the social axiological consensus. The article also shows that in Rafieienko’s short stories the space of occupation acquires autonomous agency and functions as an independent acting force.