Intermedia Poetics of the Biographical Film Story of I. Drach and I. Mykolaichuk “Kyiv Fantasy on the Theme of a Wild Rose-Hip”

Abstract

The trend of syncretization of arts in the modern world is spreading and this causes interest in the method of intermedia analysis in literary studies. Today we can observe a kind of “intermedia boom” (H. Levchenko); studies on the problems of synthesis and interaction of arts have become relevant, an intermedia code is actively offered for understanding problems, architecture, artistic means, narrative strategies, images of a literary work. Intermediality is relevant to the methodology of modern literary studies and also offers a new perspective on those artistic texts that are on the periphery of theoretical interests due to the uncertainty regarding their inter-artistic identification. A film story about a composer is an interesting phenomenon of intermedial synthesis, since different channels of intermedial communication, such as literature, cinema and music, are simultaneously involved. The intermedial poetics of Ivan Drach and Ivan Mykolaichuk’s film story “Kyiv Fantasy on the Theme of a Wild Rose-hip” (1984), which is about the founder of Ukrainian classical music, public figure, musician-virtuoso and outstanding scientist-ethnographer Mykola Lysenko, is analyzed. Perfectly combining the private and creative beginnings, the successful tandem of I. Drach and I. Mikolaichuk is managed to present a rich and difficult life of a talented person and a brilliant composer from early childhood to his death. Using a two-level composition of the unfolding of events, the reader/spectator is presented with the journey of Mykola Lysenko in adulthood, where memories are retrospectively used: first childhood, then youth, and then student years, etc. The artists also tried to find out the complicated relationship of the composer with his wife Olga O’Connor and the mother of his children – Olha Lypska. In addition to this, the film story presents the image of the artist in the discourse of contemporary historical events, social processes, in the discourse of events that had significant cultural value, thus presenting the composer as a citizen-patriot, and as a public figure, and as an important cultural figure. The image of a rose-hip stands out as a symbol and a metaphor that combines saturated biographical material into a single whole – a symbol of the “people’s soul, song”.