YAROSLAV MELNYK: VOLYN SUBTEXT IN «EUROPEAN TEXT»

Abstract

The prose by Yaroslav Melnik is considered in two aspects: a) as a «European text» containing a number of essential attributes (existential problematics, parable character, poetics of the myth, parabola and absurd) with the patterns of European modernism (F.Kafka, A.Camus, H.Hesse, B.Shultz), including modernist discourse in Ukrainian literature of XX century (Mykola Khvyliovyi, Mykola Kulish, Victor Petrov- Domontovytch, Ihor Kostetskyi) and from the point of view of the implicit «Volynian subtext» which is hidden in the text and keeps characteristic features of «fore» identity formed by historiosophic and mental space, memory of national olden times and of the heroic character of historically recent struggle against powers hostile to Ukraine. In the frames of general concept paradigm for Y. Melnik’s works anti-totalitarian motives, the topic of distant levelled personality dissolved in a «great number», constant metaphorical images-concepts («a man of a forest», «selfness», «another reality», «close space – distant space») are being analyzed. Basing on the analysis of Y. Melnik’s creative work as a prose master the author of the article formulates the following thesis: simultaneous and organic inclusion of universal principle into the national literature environment and of the national Ukrainian component into the universal context, into the European literary polylogue – these are the two sides of the united process.