Zombies in the story of the Holodomor: Brynykh’s outrage and the nation’s trauma

Abstract

The gradual de-Sovietization of Eastern Europe caused the emergence of a “new historical wave” in literature, which combines various ways of covering historical material: from the traditional aesthetics of realism to playing with genres and stylistics on the border of socially acceptable techniques. The new Russian-Ukrainian war has actualized the issue of covering trauma in fiction. The question is whether a playful way of dealing with topics, sacralized by society, has the right to exist. The subject of the study is the poetics of Mykhailo Brynykh’s scandal and how it manifests itself in the author's text and personal branding. The purpose of the study is to outline the scandalous approach to highlighting the nation's trauma in Mykhailo Brynykh’s novel “Bread with cartilage” and to establish the correlation between the poetics of the scandal and the personality of the writer. The poetological and biographical methods were used to solve the tasks. As a result of the study, the following conclusions were made. The reaction of readers to new texts, where the topic of war appears, shows that they are more careful with authors who did not witness historical events but seek to use them for commercialization. An acceptable way, which will not cause public outrage, to use real stories to non-witness authors is a “bracketed representation” based on post-memory, which can be embodied by means of scandalous techniques that manifest themselves at various levels of the text. The main task of outrage is to expose the commonplace by rude means. The most obvious outrage in “Bread with cartilage” stands out precisely at the plot level, because the author combines the pop image of zombies with the topic of the Holodomor, which is sacralized in Ukrainian society. The trauma of the Holodomor is also manifested on different levels. According to the plot, the cannibalism gene is activated by alcohol, the abuse of which is a sign of social depression. The loss of identity is realized due to the stylistic play with the speech of one of the characters, which reveals the split of his personality. The correlation between the author's brand and his works with elements of outrage is important. Readers expect a prank from the writer, and therefore intuitively do not reject atypical representations. In his zombie novel, Mykhailo Brynykh used provocative means not only for the sake of playing with the reader, but also covered in a provocative way an event sacred to Ukrainians and achieved one of the main goals of the outrage — he exposed the problems of alcoholism or ignoring one's own history by rude means.