CHAOS OF WAR AND IDENTITY CRISIS: TYPOLOGICAL DOMINANTS OF NARRATIVES ABOUT TRAUMA IN MODERN UKRAINIAN LITERATURE

Abstract

The article presents a study of the phenomenon of narratives about trauma in modern Ukrainian literature - based on works devoted to the Russian-Ukrainian war. The focus of the study is on two examples: the media project "Another Day: War Diaries" and Oleksandr Mykhed's fairy tale "Cat, Rooster, Cupboard". The purpose of the article is to analyze the attributive features of a story about traumatic events, to clarify the definition of a "trauma novel", and to analyze the genre features of a story about traumatic events that appear in modern Ukrainian literature. Research results and conclusions. Artistic practices of understanding the Russian-Ukrainian war are formed in the context of two trends. The first tendency is neorealism as a special way to reproduce the truth of trauma, the chaos of war, documentary, and impressive facts. The second tendency is to depict fundamental changes in the identity of the characters. This actualizes the trauma novel genre in modern Ukrainian literature. The genre of the trauma novel can be described as a story about the events before, during, or after traumatic events (war, migration, family destruction, violence, genocide, etc.). In such works, the story of the character as a witness or victim of traumatic events is told, and the existential conflict between life and death is described thanks to the principles of self-narrative, family history, fragmentary narrative, etc. This is a special type of understanding of a traumatic event - at the moment of the Catastrophe when the identity crisis of the characters is shown as overcoming silence and creating an individual story inscribed in the collective history. The emergence of such projects as "One more day: war diaries", and the therapeutic story-tale "Cat, Rooster, Cupboard" was influenced by extra-literary factors, in particular mass media, and this determines their typological originality: they combine the collective experience of trauma with individual stories about changing identity and overcoming the consequences of traumatic experiences, forming the language of victory.