Conceptosphere of the chronotope of the war in the book by Kateryna Kalytko "The land of all those lost, or little scary tales"

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Oles Honchar Dnipro National University

Conceptosphere of the chronotope of the war in the book by Kateryna Kalytko “The land of all those lost, or little scary tales”

Goniuk Oleksandra Valeriivna, Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor at the Department of Ukrainian Literature

Sydorenko Olha Yuriivna, PhD Student at the Department of Ukrainian Literature

The article studies the leading components of the conceptosphere of the chronotope of the war in the book of the small prose of the modern Ukrainian writer and translator K. Kalytko “The Land of All Those Lost, or Little Scary Tales” on the example of the cycle of short stories with medieval and chivalrous temporality, and the short story “Martyn”, which artistically enlightens the current war in the East of Ukraine.

Purpose of the work is to identify and study the leading components of the conceptosphere of the chronotope of war in the book of short prose by Kateryna Kalytko “Land of the Lost, or Little Scary Tales”.

Methods. The study is based on the methods of biographical, comparative, hermeneutic analysis.

Results. Short prose of a modern writer is characterized by a concentrated semantic and verbal content of chronotopic concepts, their tightness and at the same time external simplicity. The conceptual sphere of war presented through the concept of water (subconcepts of rain, river, sea), subconcepts of stone space (wall, stone block) and fortress) and subconcepts-symbols of national identity (mother tongue, cherry trees). Traditional national concepts in the author's artistic worldview are transformed and undergo unexpected ways of rethinking, which is a clear indicator of deep shifts in the social, spiritual, philosophical and creative thinking of the writer.

Conclusions. The conceptual dominants of the author's chronotope short prose by K. Kalytko are the space of the earth as a refuge in conditions of war not only as armed aggression, but also as contradictions and disharmony within man himself, caused by the realization of his otherness, loss, alienation and rejection. Modelling metaphorical and phantasmagoric time and space for the writer is almost the only adequate strategy for describing the absurdity of war as a phenomenon on a universal scale: through the multilayered meanings embedded in the stories, rethinking and constructing traditional and original, innovative, purely authorial concepts - some military conflict, which exacerbates the already complex existence of people convinced of their own otherness, incompatibility with the unelected geography in which for some reason they are forced to be.

Key words: war, concept, subconcept, artistic time/space, idiostyle.

КОНЦЕПТОСФЕРА ХРОНОТОПУ ВІЙНИ В КНИЗІ КАТЕРИНИ КАЛИТКО «ЗЕМЛЯ ЗАГУБЛЕНИХ, АБО МАЛЕНЬКІ СТРАШНІ КАЗКИ»

Гонюк Олександра Валеріївна, кандидат філологічних наук, доцент кафедри української літератури Дніпровського національного університету імені Олеся Гончара

Стаття є спробою дослідження провідних складників концептосфери хронотопу війни в книзі малої прози сучасної української письменниці та перекладачки Катерини Калитко «Земля Загублених, або Маленькі страшні казки» на прикладі циклу оповідань із середньовічно-лицарською темпоральністю та оповідання «Мартин», в якому художньо висвітлено сучасну війну на Сході України. Концептний аналіз оповідань дозволяє простежити, яким чином сучасна війна концептуалізується в хронотопі художніх творів покоління українських письменників, передусім Катерини Калитко, та як це позначається на особливостях творчої манери, індивідуального стилю авторки, а також способах взаємодії з читачем.

Мета роботи - виявити та дослідити провідні компоненти концептосфери хронотопу війни в книзі короткої прози Катерини Калитко «Земля Загублених, або Маленькі страшні казки».

Методи. В основі дослідження - методи біографічного, порівняльного, герменевтичного аналізу.

Результати. З'ясовано, що для творчості сучасної письменниці характерне концентроване смислове та вербальне наповнення хронотопічних концептів, їх герметичність і водночас зовнішня простота. Концептосфера війни в аналізованій збірці складається з концептів води (субконцепти дощу, зливи, річки, моря), субконцептів кам'яного простору (стіни, кам'яної брили та фортеці) та субконцептів-символів національної ідентичності (материнської мови, дерева черешні). Традиційні національні концепти в художньому світобаченні авторки трансформуються та зазнають несподіваних способів переосмислення, що є яскравим індикатором глибоких зсувів у соціальному, духовному, філософському та творчому мисленні письменниці.

Висновки. Концептуальними домінантами авторського хронотопу в збірці малої прози К. Калитко є простір землі як притулку в умовах війни не лише як збройної агресії, а і як протиріччя та дисгармонії всередині самої людини, що спричинені усвідомленням своєї інакшості, загубленості, відстороненості й відкинутості соціумом. Моделювання метафоричного та фантасмагорійного часу та простору для письменниці є чи не єдиною адекватною стратегією опису абсурдності війни, як явища у загальнолюдському масштабі: через закладені в оповіданнях багатошарові сенси, переосмислення та конструювання традиційних і самобутніх, новаторських, суто авторських концептів хронотопу авторка наголошує на антигуманності будь-якого воєнного конфлікту, що загострює й до того складну екзистенцію людей, переконаних у власній інакшості, несумісності з тією географією, в якій з певних причин вони змушені перебувати.

Ключові слова: війна, концепт, субконцепт, художній час/простір, ідіостиль.

Introduction

In an interview with Yevhinii Stasinevych, dated 2015, the modern Ukrainian writer Kateryna Kalytko expressed her prediction that exactly within “the next decade, when the outspoken conjuncture is going away, there are reasons to expect a very fresh, terrible and good prose'” (“Within the next decade.”, 2017). Her own collection of small prose “The Land of All Those Lost, or Little Scary Tales”, which came out in 2017 and won the prize Book of the Year, awarded by BBC Ukraine undoubtedly belongs to such a prose. The collection is a bold writer's attempt to write about the war (and not only in modern, but also in the common human dimension), resorted to a mythical and sometimes phantasmagorical conditionality of time-space-action.

The book “The Land of All Those Lost, or Little Scary Tales” has not yet been the subject and the material of a full- fledged scientific study, and has only been covered in a few literary reviews by professional critics (articles by Yevhinii Stasinevych, Hanna Ulyura, Oleh Kotsarev) and reader reviews. The article studies the leading and most striking components of the conceptosphere of the chronotope of the war in the book of the small prose of the modern Ukrainian writer and translator K. Kalytko “The Land of All Those Lost, or Little Scary Tales” on the example of the cycle of short stories with medieval and chivalrous temporality, and the short story “Martyn”, which artistically enlightens the current war in the East of Ukraine. A conceptual analysis of the short stories allows to trace how the current war is conceptualized in the chronotope of artistic works of the generation of Ukrainian writers, first of all, by K. Kalytko, and how this affects the peculiarities of the creative manner, the author's individual style, and ways of interaction with the reader. The aim of the work is to identify and study the leading and brightest components of the conceptosphere of the chronotope of war in the book of short prose by Kateryna Kalytko “Land of the Lost, or Little Scary Tales”. The study is based on the methods of biographical, comparative, hermeneutic analysis.

Kateryna Kalytko is a representative of the modern literary process, in which there is a tendency for the coexistence of postmodern, modern and traditional vectors of artistic creativity. This stage of the development of literature continues the traditions of the previous century with its appeal to the mythological chronotope, which is still considered as a kind of attempt to escape from certain undesirable phenomena of real actuality. In the book “Hybrid Topography. Places and Non-places in Modern Ukrainian Literature” the literary critic Yaroslav Polishchuk explains this escape from the pressure of postcolonial, or rather, post-totalitarian discourse: “Failures andfiaskos in the making ofpost-colonial states gave rise to a persistent disappointment that manifested itself in the reluctance of cultural development of reality and, instead, engagement in virtual worlds, in bizarre pictures of imagination, that one can oppose to depressed social reality”” (Polishchuk, 2018: 22). The literary critic calls such fictitious worlds created by the writer's imagination the opportune simulacra, which can help you escape from the pressing problems (Polishchuk, 2018: 23). Although Kateryna Kalytko designs in her book a kind of mythological and metaphorical shelter, she does so on the basis of not a concrete but phantasmagoric topos, which primarily mentions the Balkans, the Crimea, the territory of Eastern Ukraine.

From the abstract to the book, one can conclude that the leading theme of all nine stories in the collection is the tragedy of “lost” personalities, who “fall into typical situations of misunderstanding with people, but because of their differentness, like a non-standard psyche, these events unfoldfor them differently”” (“Tales are a territory of fear.”, 2017), so they are forced to seek a kind of shelter - the Land of All Those Lost, which is not marked on any of the world maps, because it is scattered on the parts of the land, which constantly expand and transform themselves into various kinds of landscape: “The Land of All Those Lost daily drifts in the seas of alternative geography and is strictly parallel with our daily, habitual geography. The Land of All Those Lost has arisen in order for too other people, displaced from the “normal” world, have the place where to go. It has grown out of necessity in shelter and support”” (“Tales are a territory of fear.”, 2017). For the writer herself, the conceptual dominant of the chronotope (actually the author's chronotope) is the space of the land as a shelter in the conditions of war not only as an armed aggression, but also as a contradiction and disharmony within the person themselves. More often, the disharmonious state is caused by the awareness of their differentness, neglect, and rejection by society.

It is equally important to trace how the author's chronotope correlates with the narrator's one and how it affects the perception of the general artistic purpose of the recipient. The artistic event-situational space and the space-time continuum are consequences of the process of conceptualizing the real world in the artistic text, which reflects the universal laws of the creation, intersects with the individual author's way of perceiving reality, the individually-authored picture of the world. Due to the content filling of the concepts, a reader builds a set of associations and a system of multiple connections. Accordingly, the chronotope of the narrator in each of the artistic stories of “The Land...” is represented by a separate conceptosphere, which consists of different subconcepts.

1. Peculiarities of the chronotope of short stories with medieval and chivalrous temporality

From the annotation to the book, it becomes clear that “The Land of All Those Lost” as a continuous metaphorical shelter for “rejected” people reborn and grows every time, when regular different one is experiencing their rejection, and therefore it is constantly surrounded by water, like an embryo; no wonder the first short story from the book is called “Water”. The concept of “water” in the writer's prose is inextricably linked with the chronos of wartime disorder and differs significantly from the traditional notion of it, because, according to folk beliefs, the water brings back to life and brings fertility, acts as a way of magical purification (Voitovych, 2002: 83). In the story, water (the lake) reveals the secret of the main character Lale, who was raised by adoptive parents as a boy, therefore, peers did not know that she was actually a girl: “Once I was tempted to show my lake to my comrades, and on that very day, "I-he” turned into “I-she” (Kalytko, 2017: 12). Awareness of the fact, how different the bodies of the guys are from her own, has caused a profound psychological trauma to the girl: “I am a field that was trampled by horses, although it was not the battlefield. Eunuch, who was not even born a man” (Kalytko, 2017: 12). That trauma was heightened by the eavesdropped conversation of parents: “In the evening, lying prone in the darkness of the room, I heard what they talked with father over their bowl of lentils and a full jug of water: how extraneous it grew. It. Extraneous. It grew. These are also words, like bread, take and eat” (Kalytko, 2017: 22). The favourite water element for the heroine became a painful reminder of her own differentness: “After that, I had several more bathes in that after-rain pond, alone those times, and the water seemed to me bitter and bitter and as if it tears my skin off with a green longue” (Kalytko, 2017: 13). chronotope war kalytko ukrainian

The physical weakness and tenderness of Lale determined the only possible role in her environment - to become a he-assistant (she-assistant) of a water carrier, who was forced due to lack of water in the town of Zmiieva Shyia (Serpent's Neck) to deliver liquid from a mountain lake - the Kamiane Oko (Stone Eye), because the local two wells were shallow, “and even at the best times, the water from these two wells was not at all as clean and tasty as from the Kamiane Oko" (Kalytko, 2017: 11). When in the middle of summer there was what the inhabitants were most afraid of: the sacred wells were salted; the war and assault by the invaders began for the town of Zmiieva Shyia, which walls were strong and inaccessible, all ages suffering from armed attacks: “There have always been fights for our town. It was the gateway and the key at the same time; it was needed by all who led their troops to conquer new lands. We have always been fighting” (Kalytko, 2017: 7). For the city, surrounded by invaders, the only salvation was the water itself, because “it was hope, a chance, a sign that the resistance will last” (Kalytko, 2017: 22). However, for the heroine, water “was more difficult in life and much more inevitable than death” (Kalytko, 2017: 22), therefore her conditional betrayals - the decision to hole the last barrels of water without which the town will not last long (“I holed the last barrels - the water seemed to have sighed with relief when it went into the ground... ”(Kalytko, 2017: 23) and ultimately escape - are perceived as a certain victory over her stone space, “(non)chosen geography”: “My green foreign-looking eyes were the eyes of their defeat. Perhaps even this cruel and such a human desire of my adoptive parents to make a boy from the girl was anxious to get something out of his defeat, not so burning. In the Zmiieva Shyia, I stuck in their craw, I needed either to be spit out or to be swallowed” (Kalytko, 2017: 23). “Green foreign-looking eyes”, as well as the fair colour of hair and skin, in the town where all people are dark-skinned, are the vivid markers of the differentness, which suggests that the girl was the victim of an endless war since her real mother was raped. Petrifaction of a peculiar reservation - the Zmiieva Shyia has generated “the fear of being in an open place” (Kalytko, 2017: 7) because of the lack of a living space (“scanty shreds of fertile land on artificially created terraces”) (Kalytko, 2017: 10) and the desire of the heroine at any cost to find her dream land: “I-she often dreamed - I-he dreamed - about the land, where there is a plenty of space to run freely, and real powerful trees that can be climbed up. Those which grew up on our stone barely kept on the branches even a cat” (Kalytko, 2017: 10).

The final awareness of herself as a woman comes to Lale with her first love - the enemy-invader Latif, who turned out to be the only person who recognized a woman in her, and immediately realized the essence of the girl's inner conflict: “ What a strange person you are, Lale. As if you ca not be who you are” (Kalytko, 2017: 29); he taught to be real: “I did not even imagine that I was so deep, deeper than our sacred wells, deep like the Kamiane Oko” (Kalytko, 2017: 25). Hope for the bright future of the lovers is associated with the space of the sea, about which tells Latif: “If someone tells you that the sea is a lot of water, do not believe it. The sea is actually a magic glass that magnifies everything you have. If you come to it with sorrow, the sorrow will grow in a whole grief until you float, and if you have joy in it - the joy will become enough to make an island in the sea” (Kalytko, 2017: 27). It appears to be an opposition to the Zmiieva Shyia Lake as a symbolic component of the topos of the former environment, which has caused the gender and ontological crisis of the heroine.

An intermediate subconcept between the lake and the sea is a rain, a downpour that does not quench the fourth day, “the water that flew from heaven”, and as if “trying to tie it to the ground, drown in the local stone” (Kalytko, 2017: 33). Water strives to bind to the stone space both Lale and Latif themselves, to crush them completely in themselves, but at the same time heroine grateful to water for the opportunity to divide with her beloved that found shelter, the Land of All Those Lost, and finally rushed out of the stone ridges of the Zmiieva Shyia: “She lived, being formed from the water, and - and contrary to it. If not that, earthly and local, is now poisonous and hateful, which brought me up, I would have nothing to offer Latif. I exchanged myself for it, bought me for water and disavowed it. Now, perhaps, only this alien celestial attracts, she spoke about those countries, where we would go in any case ... we will never stop until we reach the sea, and it is also a big water, and it will explain everything. " (Kalytko, 2017: 33-34).

A peculiar continuation of the story of Latif and Lale, but on behalf of another narrator Latif's military friend Erdal should be considered the story “Viter u porozhnii ochnytsi”. Both of them are orphans who grew up together, but the difference between Erdal and Latif is in the concept of expression of genetic memory: `I was always surprised that Latif, who had no one in the world, perfectly remembered his past, but I, who could find my relatives, did not remember anything (Kalytko, 2017: 54). The only echo of the long-forgotten life appears for the hero a sweet cherry tree: “... once I loved the tree - it had so much beauty and strength, silent sincerity and truthfulness that I spent in the garden for hours and hours, embracing his trunk and confiding child's lacerations to it much more openly than any of the people ... Sweet- cher-ry-tree. A strange word from an already unknown language has remained with me like an island as bitter smoke as a single memory and a testimony that no love passes without a trace. And it does not recognize any boundaries'” (Kalytko, 2017: 57). However, the fate of Erdal is to become a slave forever, a hostage of the stone space: “I obediently and diligently forgot what they ordered to forget, I remembered what I was commanded to remember”” (Kalytko, 2017: 55) in the prose of Kalytko, the stones (fortresses, walls) become a concept that represents the motive of lost memory. When the boy was taken away from mother and father, he realized that the smells of his home were washed away by the rain, and his native language was gradually superseded by the sounds of a language that he did not understand, and those sounds “they built their fortress there - a stone on a stone, a wall after the wall, and eventually drove away everything”” (Kalytko, 2017: 53).

In addition to the aforementioned short stories, the cycle of works, in which the alternative medieval and chivalrous temporality dominates, should also include the short story “Castellan” (Kashtelian), in which the artistic time of wartime disorder is most clearly represented through the concepts of water and stone space. The title lets us to conclude that the short story is about events in about XVIII century, because back then a person who had a position of manager of a castle, a fortress and the locality belonging to it, was called castellan. This is about a boy who was born and raised during the war, and during the defence of the fortress at his own will was immured in one of its walls in a place where there was a faint masonry. This short story is notable for the fact that, unlike Lale from the “Water” or Erdal, the narrator from “Wind in an Empty Orbit”, the castellan of the same name becomes a hostage to the stone space not only on the psychological, but even on the physical level. He repeatedly states that his own body, “adapting every day more to the landscape”” (Kalytko, 2017: 36), turns into a block of medieval stones: “Now I live in the rhythm of the wall, listen to its resonating, internal rustles and ripples, I am a part of it, even breathing is more shallow and rare” (Kalytko, 2017: 42). However, the sacrifice of a young man seems useless, because besides him, nobody remains alive. After the war, the youth victim comes to fanaticism, because he proclaims himself a castellan so that other people do not become hostages of the wall: “At times, I think that I remain here, not to let others go on this rock. They will come, take this slope, get up even higher, settle in the coronated hollow on the crest of the spine, and their fates will be so lost, scratched and doomed that it is better for me to just stay here and not let them come here, not allow them to settle”” (Kalytko, 2017: 48). All the further existence of the boy is reduced to the creation of the illusion that the fortress is alive, for this purpose he rings the bell in time that does not allow him to leave the stone walls and go to the people with who the hero is separated by a river: “Hour is the distance between one ring of bell and another. And I studied the world only between two tolls”” (Kalytko, 2017: 47). However, castellan knows the true cause of fear for others - the human world: “I was born by a wall, and I was afraid to go far from the mother's chest” (Kalytko, 2017: 47).

The “child of the wall”, the castellan, whose war turned into one of many, deprived of awareness of his own uniqueness (“I have a fear of my own voice” (Kalytko, 2017: 36), above all, is afraid to hear from people the terrible truth about who he is in fact: “a soldier from a defeated army, a fanatic, whose desperate madness did not save anyone and nothing - neither the walls nor the people behind them” (Kalytko, 2017: 45). The river separating the hero from people is a boundary separating the world in which people who survived the war have the opportunity to cope somehow with that knowledge and to live on. According to the cassette, every year, “there are more and more people from behind the river” (Kalytko, 2017: 40), therefore, perhaps that is precisely what affects his final decision to leave fortress forever: “And I went ahead. Passed on that shore. Got out of the water and then still went on the plain. For a long time”” (Kalytko, 2017: 49). And perhaps, in the conditions of constant “recurrences” of the war, he still decided, if he died, “as a man, not a part of the wall” (Kalytko, 2017: 42).

Thus, the leitmotif of the book “The Land of All Those Lost” is the concept of wartime disorders, that “do not end, but just crawl like serpents in their broods of war and lay there quietly, clinging to the tangle, warming each other, and then they are unraveling and returning to their own land” (Kalytko, 2017: 37). Hence, there are the significant toponyms, such as “Zmiieva Shyia”, “Kamiane Oko” in the cycle of analyzed short stories, and the motif of a lost genetic memory, a fanatical sacrifice, because, as the author herself notes, the effect of any war is breaking of these parallel connections, destruction of the tree of memory, because any war reduces the meaning and image of the land, the land that people keep in mind. Therefore, they have to form it somehow in a new way for themselves, giving, even their life for that. Chronotopic conceptosphere of this cycle of short stories, stylized like medieval epic, perfectly indicates the point of the translator Anna Vovchenko, that in the texts of Kateryna Kalytko “the war is an unnatural phenomenon in the direct sense of the word “nature”. Not the Russian-Ukrainian war, the First World War or the Second one - any war is unnatural. Earth and war mutually influence each other” (“There is a place for everyone...”, 2017).

In an interview with Kateryna Kalytko, one can conclude, that the most tense situation associated with the armed conflict that threatens the sovereignty of Ukraine has become one of the impetus to the writing of “The Land...'': “My subjective feeling is that the world has stirred up. The air has become sharp as a glass, it is difficult for us to breathe. And it was very painful feeling in 2014. There was a general human “ dewatering' in terms of mental resources, there was no strength in all senses” (“Tales are a territory of fear.”, 2017/ This gave grounds to the literary critic Oleh Kotsarev in the article “The pain and myth of the stories of Kateryna Kalytko” to conclude that the collection of short stories “is one more expressive evidence of the strengthening of metaphysical, “vertical”, and, at the same time, psychological tendencies in the Ukrainian literature in 2010s” (Kotsarev, 20І7).

2. Chronotopic concepts of the current war in the East of Ukraine in the short story “Martyn”

The short story “Martyn”, which refers to the fate of the military interpreter Martyn, who lost his legs in the war on the eastern border and remained disabled, should be considered as the most realistic psychological reflection of modern life. The work is indicative, in our opinion, in the aspect of the violation of the problem of “own” and “alien” war. Hardened with all the seen while doing his military duty the hot spots of Eritrea, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia, Martyn, only witnessing the war in his own state, is fully aware of the devastating nature of any armed conflict that parasitizes in the blossom of the Earth and sooner or later releases its own metastases on the most vulnerable place for any person - the territory of their Motherland. “Nobody likes when an alien war is approaching so close” (Kalytko, 2017: 93), states Martin. The metastases of “alien” warfare in the story are the concept of the border, the frontier. “Borders, borders, everywhere the borders only!” (Kalytko, 2017: 77) - says Kateryna Kalytko this terrible truth through a local crazy. For Martin himself, there are two conceptions of the border: as the limits of their own, the personal space of each person and as a purely territorial division. In the first case, the lack of reciprocity from the beloved girl Lika leads to the deepening into himself, the psychological petrification of the man, that, as in previous stories of the collection, is realized through the subconcept of water - the image of the sea shell: “.he kept standing right there, feeling how his legs are wrapped by cold waters of the Mariana. He is a deep shell, his valves now must be exceptionally tough and always closed” (Kalytko, 2017: 83). In the future, only a sincere and mutual love for a woman can weaken Martyn's internal self-defence and finally give an opportunity to reveal another person: “... the maps of their dreams were encountered with borders" (Kalytko, 2017: 83); “... their evening conversations with Halka were a real touch of internal borders" (Kalytko, 2017: 93).

The second understanding of the border is connected with the provoked war by the aggravation of the ontological crisis of the hero: the philological profession, albeit with a militaristic inclination, directly affects the perception of the hero of the surrounding reality, therefore, he thinks and appreciates reality by the categories of “transposition” and “non-transposition”, that is, the possibility of speaking and reporting to other people seen and heard with faith that the warring parties will finally be able to make it up. Before Martyn found himself in the zone of ATO, all attempts to transpose the interrogations of the war prisoners, ultimatums, the communique on the peaceful adjustment of the conflict, the drafting of protocols, etc. seemed to him to be useful and worthy for the crumbs, and “having found himself on the front in the Donbass, he realized that he could explain to nobody what was happening here. And he couldn't explain even to himself. The only way is to witness and tell it in their own language" (Kalytko, 2017: 92). Life on the border with the war he calls the “gorge of non-transposition" (Kalytko, 2017: 92), and all the spatial content of such a life with typical “dirty-white puffballs of multistory buildings" manifests to him “the principled non-transposition of the landscape” (Kalytko, 2017: 77). “Actually, the non-transposition is precisely this - the winding scar of the border, which runs even along the water” (Kalytko, 2017: 78) - in these words, Martin gives a hint of separation of the Crimea, and the merciless, but perhaps the most accurate comparison of forcibly created borders with scars, which will reach its climax by specifying that these ugly scars are on the face of a woman: “But if we consider that the earth is a woman, what kind offate awaits a woman with such a scarred face? Is she the lover available to everyone? Member of the drug cartel? Vagina dentata chewing male generation after generation and conceiving dead? Or is the earth a man, though he is endowed with expressive feminine traits?” (Kalytko, 2017: 78). Life in such circumstances, also with the rejection of his own physical inferiority, leads Martyn to attempt to commit suicide, who, like the character of Jack London's book, seeks to “open the lungs to sea water” on the coast of Odesa (Kalytko, 2017: 95). The chance to save the man, as in the case of the heroine of the short story “Water”, is associated with the possibility of sharing the suffering with his beloved person - a woman Halia, who is physically defective too. The remarkable thing of the wartime is that she saves Martin covering him with her body, saving from an internal explosion, and pleased “Martyn is hissing because of the pain in his shrugged shoulder and looking at the white puffballs of the multistory buildings near the sea - everything is waiting for them to be exploded and splash half the sky with black human seeds” (Kalytko, 2017: 97).

Conclusions

Thus, the conceptual dominant of the author's chronotope is the space of the land as a shelter in the conditions of war not only as an armed aggression, but also as a contradiction and disharmony within the person themselves, caused by the awareness of their differentness, loss, neglect, and rejection by society. The chronotope of wartime disorders that never end, but only hide for a certain period like serpents, is realized through the significant toponyms, as well as the motif of a lost genetic memory, a fanatical sacrifice, represented through the concept of water (subconcepts of rain, downpour, river, sea), subconcepts of stone space (walls, stone blocks and fortresses) and subconcepts-symbols of national identity (mother tongue, cherry tree). Traditional national concepts in the artistic world of the author are transformed and sometimes rethought in unexpected ways; that is a vivid indicator of profound shifts in the writer's social, spiritual, philosophical and creative thinking. Chronotopic conceptosphere of the cycle of short stories, stylized like medieval epic, perfectly indicates the point that, in the texts of Kateryna Kalytko, any war (and not only the one, which covers nearby territories) is essentially unnatural and inhumane, and also demonstrates that the filigree of the artistic transformation of the real topos and time is not so important for the author as the semantic and verbal filling of chronotopic concepts, their lapidary and, at the same time, simplicity.

Chronotop of the current war on the territory of the native state in the short story “Martyn” is represented by the concept of the border, the frontier, that is artistically transformed and represented through the landscape as a symbol of the ugly metastases of “alien” warfare. In contrast to male writers, who enlightened that theme, Kalytko does not aim at comparing and trying to compare a person in peace and war time. She neither creates a national hero nor gives direct assessments of the current socio-political situation. Conceptosphere and subtext layer of the chronotopic structure of the work once again confirm the idea that: it is important for the author in her own small prose to emphasize that any war is inhumane in its nature, it exacerbates, even apart from this, the complex existence of people who are convinced in their own differentness, incompatibility with the non-chosen geography, in which they are forced to be because of certain reasons.

All the characters of the collection of short stories by Kalytko are hostage to “not their”, alien spaces, they are acutely experiencing a constant approach of war, which is a part of the normal existence of man and inevitably rooted in it, and, as a consequence, accelerates the process of “becoming different”, exacerbating the protracted ontological and existential crisis. However, at the same time, due to the multilayer senses put in the short stories, through the rethinking and designing of traditional and original, innovative, purely author's concepts of the chronotope, the writer seeks to emphasize that it is never too late for any person to find their alternative geography for their own salvation.

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