THE PROSE OF IHOR KOSTETSKYI

Abstract

The paper examines the literary technique of Ihor Kostetskyi and the innovative forms and content of his prose from the late 1940s. It focuses on the author’s attempts to update the genre nature of a short story. The analysis covers the principles of creating a figurative system, the structure of a prose narrative, the use of cinematic constructions, the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, the situation of a lacuna, ‘text within a text’, etc. The research involved the works included in the collection “Stories about the Winners”, as well as the short stories “You Own the Whole World”, “Before the Upcoming Day”, “Divine Lies”, and samples of their critical reception (in particular, the studies by Victor Petrov, Volodymyr Derzhavyn, Yurii Sherekh, and others). Kostetskyi’s collection of short prose “The Story of the Winners” is regarded as a kind of laboratory in which the writer explored the possibilities of language and literary techniques, experimenting with the concepts of genre and image. It is argued that the writer sought to create a technical picture of the world that has nothing to do with the physical world, and the images he created are signs and symbols that need to be deciphered. In the short story “You Own the Whole World”, which is perceived as a “telegraphic mini-version of a psychological novel” or a “mini-novel with a mini-prologue”, one can find the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique and the situation of a gap, that is, a gap between the story of traumatic event and reality when the reader does not receive an unambiguous answer to the question of where the event occurs and whether it occurs at all. The compositional technique of ‘text within a text’, tested by Kostetskyi in the short story “Before the Upcoming Day”, performs the function of a hidden ‘message’ and allows inserting ‘internal’ actions and dialogues into ‘external’ ones. In general, Kostetskyi’s works appeal to the subconscious, enhanced associativity and imagination, and the play factor is important in them as one of the elements of the author’s poetics.