Poetics of modeling realism in modern Ukrainian drama plots

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In present paper the author reviews peculiarities of poetics of modeling realism in the plays "Last face" by O. Rosych, "Garnet, the River" and "Railway station and people" by I. Lypovskyi, "Gospel of John" by A. Krym. The researcher pays attention to the original mosaic connection of the elements of realism, existentialism and theater of absurd, symbolism and psychologism in the plays under analysis due to distinctive structure, dynamic and expressive story lines. Artistic syncretism in the means of expression, simultaneous use of theatrical, cinema and pictural art means is peculiar for plot and image-bearing system of modern Ukrainian dramaturgy.

Key words: plot, modeling realism, initiation.

У цій статті автор розглядає особливості поетики моделювального реалізму у п'єсах О. Росича "Останній забій", І. Липовського "Ріка Гоаната" та "Вокзал і люди", А. Крима "Євангеліє від Івана". Дослідниця звертає увагу на своєрідне мозаїчне поєднання у аналізованих драмах елементів реалізму, екзистенціалізму та театру абсурду, символізму й психологізму при чіткій структурованості, динамічних і виразних сюжетних лініях. Для сюжетно-образної системи сучасної української драматургії притаманний мистецький синкретизм у способах вираження, симультанне використання прийомів театру, кіно та живопису.

Ключові слова: сюжет, моделювальний реалізм, ініціація.

В этой статье автор рассматривает особенности поэтики моделированного реализма в пьесах А. Росича "Последний забой", И. Липовского "Река Гоаната" и "Вокзал и люди", А. Крыма "Евангелие от Ивана". Исследовательница обращает внимание на своеобразную мозаику в анализированных драмах, состоящую из элементов реализма, экзистенциализма и театра абсурда, символизма и психологизма при четкой структурированности, динамичных и выразительных сюжетных линиях. Для сюжетно-образной системы современной украинской драматургии характерен творческий синкретизм в способах выражения, симультанное использование приёмов театра, кино и живописи.

Ключевые слова: сюжет, моделирующий реализм, инициация.

The texts of modern Ukrainian drama simulate reality, imbuing it with transcendental reflection, psychoanalytic experiments, ironic "life play", symbols of neo-baroque and romantic worldview, tragic manifestations of modernism and "scrappy" postmodern consciousness, exhibit focusing on the ontological problems of life, understanding the existential problems of individual choice.

Certain features of poetic manner of dramaturgy of the period under consideration have been the research subject of the papers by O. Bondarieva, L. Bondar, N. Veselovska, T. Hundorova, M. Hutsol, V. Danylenko, B. Zholdak, L. Zaleska-Onyshkevych, N. Miroshnychenko, R. Tkhoruk, M. Shapoval. Modern Ukrainian dramaturgy with prevailing poetics of modeling realism as a postmodern phenomenon has not been thoroughly studied which makes our study urgent.

Objective of the article is to define main features of poetics of modeling realism in the plots of modern Ukrainian dramaturgy.

The objective can be achieved by fulfillment of the following tasks:

- define specific features of plots of modeling realism;

- view features of existentialism in the analyzed plays;

- follow the structural play of archetype codes and define their role in structuring of narrative matrix.

Volodymyr Danylenko defines the state of contemporary Ukrainian drama as a "theater in the drawer", in his review he analyzes tragicomedy "Last face" by Oleksii Rosych. He stresses the social urgency of the latter, "about the deadlock into which the working class of Donbass got after the collapse of the Soviet Union. (...) The whole play is imbued with the spirit of the tragic doom of people brought to the state of plough cattle, which are allowed neither live or die. Miners and their families pushed by the society beyond the boundaries of human existence have not lost a sense of humor, courage and generosity" [2, p. 320-321].

The plot of the drama "Last face" by Oleksii Rosych is built into one single unit out of several whole life episodes and the fates of its characters. The play is marked by the techniques peculiar to the cinema - occasional inclusions of simultaneously unfolded events are deepened by psychoemotional perception of actions that are happening; combination of life / home stories of leading characters. Thus, desperate miners (Vovka, Vitka, Romanych, Andiukha, Zooloh) decide to go down into the pit and bury themselves out there hoping for posthumous compensation for their families that will break the vicious circle of hopelessness. The structure of the drama is sometimes associated with the structure of baroque drama and stage space division, but the story of the modern playwright the t "underworld" denotation of mine takes a slightly different perception. It is not only a place of their only income - a place of initiation - for the former teacher of zoology who is not able to look at the emaciated, feeble and exhausted by constant malnutrition children of miners; Romanych who keeps the body of the deceased friend Busok in the refrigerator to trip into the face and in this way help his granddaughter to get compensation. In this play, impressive power and monumentality of true, the whole man is reflected in the images of ordinary people. They are willing to go to death for the sake of saving their families, hoping to give them a chance for better life.

Their last tripping into the face - immersion into the bosom of the Earth, a way to Self, which is embodied into the image of God. One of the main characters - Vovka, having decided to do this, states: "Guys, if I meet this God out there, I will beat him up", and his words are followed by Romanych's: "I'm with you" and Vitka's "After me". But the men go to church being aware of the sin they are going to commit, as love, no matter how paradoxically this sounds, is a compulsion for their actions. This is love for their wives who get beaten up every day; children who struggle for their living or who cannot enter either medical college or conservatoire for several years in a row; sick mother who has no money to buy anesthetics; beloved girlfriend who has already got compensation for her father's death and he is a ragamuffin...Thus, the play is filled not with a motif of theomachy but a motif of a Human being, who is searching for truth, higher equity for oneself and people around, addressing God.

Although the suicide attempt has an optimistic ending: "a coal rock breaks down from above and the auditorium is pierced by a bright, rich light beam. The crash becomes harder. Dazzling light beam. SCREAM FROM ABOVE: GUYS, HOLD ON! SALVATION IS NEAR! THE BEGINNING." [5, с. 469]. However, the salvation in this plot is not the final projection of the initiation model or symbolic death.

A different model of modern reality is proposed by Ihor Lypovskyi in his drama "Railway Station and People" [4]. Topos of the railway station comes as a laminar place - a boundary which people start their way from and always return to, and at the same time it is demonologiazied: "Are you, railway station, just a head of the monster called a world!" (.) And a trunk of that monster is huge like a furnace, bottomless like mountain lakes and insatiable like an abyss. People enter it - some on their own will, some under compulsion - and one can only hear a distant voice from the inside - either moan, or satisfied rumbling" [4, с. 256]. The characters of this play are rather symbols or allegories, which arise within the context of information society of total "globalization". The plot is structured according to the principle of binary opposition - confrontation of this (the Motherland) and other world (foreign countries represented by Italy and Greece where women go in search of a living).

The motif of loneliness is determinative in this play, being revealed in the fate of almost all its characters. Granddad Ilko is lonely as its consciousness refuses to accept the fact that his three sons are dead, that's why hoping for a miracle he looks out for them every day at this station. As his fellow villager Mrs. Vokzalna (a daughter of Mytro Khytryi) says about him - "a person - different from us, a fragment of the past life who bothers everybody, who is being push by everybody as he is not in time with the crazy pace of modern life, this wild turmoil. (...) Have you seen a person dressed differently from others wearing the clothes of your ancestors in this grey, featureless crowd, when you see him - stop, look attentively - he might be the last!" [4, p. 254-255]. Lonely and unnecessary old Italian - senor Juseppe - embodiment of a special type of earning "at home", who was like a luggage sent to this railway station but they forgot to take him back, just left a cover letter. A story of the war between tsar Horokh and mushrooms becomes a code of escape for two lost in the pace of modern life granddads. They understand each other without interpreters, as kindness, sympathy, and humaneness don't require interpretations and help them solve this paradoxical situation, because as granddad Ilko (archetype of Wise Old Man) sums up: "Well, my friend, that's what we have come to: nobody needs us, I see there is something wrong there where you are from that they send old men into the wide. What is happening in the world?" [4, p. 243].

A complex - ambivalent image, which is traced simultaneously in two planes: realistic (a man, whose wife went abroad to earn better living and took their daughter with her) and symbolic (the one, who sells flowers from glass, becomes glassy himself and can get broken towards evening). His loneliness had sense - a daughter in another country. He had not broken into pieces, and has preserved a human in himself, a loving father and husband. But fragile mental equilibrium has been destroyed by the news that his daughter got married without letting him know. The wife who has come for vacation values only property (a flat).

Three women in search of better living who get to the station at the same time have only different wigs (white, yellow, red), but are united by female misery. Their symbolic images project the archetype of Great Mother/the Terrible. In the play "A Liar from the Lithuanian Square" by Oleksandr Irvanets a man is ashamed to confess that he is Ukrainian and he passionately tries to convince a policeman of his love for European Union. The playwright confabulates time and space of the railway station, even creates railway myths about tragic love between conductors Marichka and Ivan, whose shadows still roam about the tracks.

Modeling realism achieves an effect of certain anthropomorphization of foreign Differentness through the means of symbolism, thus, creating virtually living picture - illustration of the archetype "blue are the hills that are far from us". At the same time in the plots of this period Ukrainian phenomenon of social orphanhood (children of people who went abroad in searching of better living, their parents, and spouses) becomes extremely evident.

Main characters of Ihor Lypovskyi's play "Garnet, the River", River and Investigator, are abstracted as well. Banal opposition a criminal - investigator has been slightly coloured with psychological sketches from Sigmund Freud. River identifies her mother as characterless, rises against those who "crush us on the pedestrian crossings, those law enforcing agents who sell drugs, those faceless monsters who want bribes for performing their state duty and when the legs look good they want to "get paid with sex", as they allow themselves to frolic..." [3, p. 9]. This is a girl with Eton crop, who does not like radio point and "loud" singing of Baiko sisters, considers herself totally free which, as Investigator thinks, indicates the signs of psychotropic influence.

The space of prison sell expands, and the line between day and night becomes flared. Investigator sees nothing in the sell, and blindness which captures her reminds of another absurdist hero of Samuel Bekket's play "Waiting for Hodo" Potstso. Instead of investigating, she chases spiders, ignoring the warnings of the girl that this is a bad sign. This episode decodes the plot of apocryphal writings about spiders which covered the entrance into the cave where Virgin Mary hid with her son from Herod the king of Judaea's warriors.

Eventually, characters switch places and River tests Investigator, by illustrating her assumptions with excerpts from life practice of gender psychology and sociology. A bluestocking who has nothing to do but "reluctantly go to work. Here she is: juvenile criminal who made a stab at the sacred - indestructible social system. Does not matter that it is rotten and smells worse than a close-stool but it gives an opportunity to make a career... And you have seized it..." [3, p. 7].

The author demonstrates conceptual gap between essence and name, body and mind, originality and public reality which we present to the society. Distinctive twinning of Investigator and River demonstrates their confusion in the labyrinth of their own "Self", realizing social and life "mismatch" with the situation. The topic of searching for universal code while entering the being and beyond - is through. River tries on bound texture of lattice which symbolizes intrusion by the society artificial, partially profaned moral norms, material and social welfare. Jan Bodriar states that the authorities speculate in real, crisis, new development of artificial objectives (social, economic, political). It's a life-and-death-issue for them. But it's too late" [1, p. 37].

Struggle with nonexistence is typical of the poetics of drama of the Absurd, even terrorist sabotage has turned to be ineffective as "everything the grenade was filled with, came through everyone not having touched anything around, because everything around - is a big NOTHING...we have made an error!" [3, p. 13].

Anatolii Krym in the plot of drama "Gospel of John" [3] alternates "crying" and "glorifying" (H. Shton) matrix of Ukrainian national myth, actively receiving the concepts of "land", "nation", "faith" in both projections. Social myth dominates over national where latent stereotype codes developed by social and realistic canon can be seen. These codes show through the nature of main hero (instead of bank loan he got party membership) as well as in the post totalitarian modeling of simulacrum of cosmogony on the same principles: "too the bottom, and after." Archetype of home rises through the image of unfinished house which is a metaphor of chaos and mayhem, having engulfed the country when the high pathetics of intentions and dreams faces strict realia of market relations of post soviet format.

The plot is formed as antileaflet of transition ages with a view to "post totalitarian epoch", and the material for reflecting within the nature of Ivan "village psychology" has probably been also taken from the report of the last secretary general. Petro Hyhorovych, who possesses old life wisdom for preserving body and spirit despite all authorities and reforms, is probably the only true character in Anatoli Krymov's play. Foreseeing moral and financial reprisal against his friend, he decides to hide "five tones of wheat", "swine", spare parts for tractors, being sure that it is easy to assemble a tractor out of two others.

Farmer Ivan's love for land is identical with national character and mentality of the Ukrainians. Head of village council - Hryhorii - is an image of a sad clown, who was thrown by the King (soviet system) to the wolves, i.e. his former employees, in a plundered state with all its problems and failures. Makukhovych personifies local district authorities, and Voldyriuk, the banker, can bee seen in the context of classic personality of Hlytai. Accountant Vasylyna, head of village council Hryhorii - it seems that all of them are stuck morally and psychologically in the past.

The play, despite its name, stated in the context of Christian discourse is deprived of religious pathos and main concept - the Good News. An image of main character farmer Ivan elicits associations with a type of romantic soviet top performer of village development period in one of leading collective farms, who suddenly got into realia of hostile capitalism.

Due to dichotomy between real and unreal cultural universals find their artistic implementation. Modern playwrights implement main philosophical concepts of existentialism, breaking the boundaries of daily routine and illusions in their absurd manifestation; instead antagonism between a system and an individual is projected into the plane of confrontation of collective and individual subconscious within the context of creating simulacra for each other. Absurd situations are being modeled simultaneously in allegoric and psychological plane.

Reference

1. Bodriar J. Symuliakry i symuliatsiia (Simulacra and simulation) / J. Bodriar translated by V. Khovkhun. - К.: Vydavnytstvo Solomii Pavlychko "Osnovy", 2004. - 230 s.

2. Danylenko V. Lisorub u pusteli: Pysmennyk i literaturnyi protses [Woodcutter in the desert: Writer and literary process] / V. Danylenko. - К.: Akademvydav, 2008. - 352 s.

3. Krym A. Yevanheliie vid Ivana: trahicomediia (Gospel of John: tragicomedy) / A. Krym // Yevanheliie vid Ivana: piesy. - К.: VTS "Prosvita", 2006. - S. 3-76.

4. Lypovskyi I. "Rika Hranata" dniv (Garnet, the River) / I. Lypovskyi. - Kalush. - 17 s. (Arkhiv avtora).

5. Lypovskyi I. Vokzal i liudy (Railway station and people) / I. Lypovskyi. - Kalush: Aktsent, 2010. - S. 202-257.

6. Rosych О. Ostannii zabii: trahikomediia (Last face: tragicomedy) / О. Rosych // U poshuku teatru: antolohiia molodoi dramaturhii. - К.: Smoloskyp, 2003. - S. 424-469.

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