Cascade of stylistic figures in the episode of "The Enchanted Desna": poetic tradition

Abstract

Analyzing key terms in modern definitions ofpoetics and style, the author of this paper concludes that they are virtually identical. This observation serves as a basis for merging poetics and style into a binary opposition, grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Oleksandr Potebnia, and Ferdinand de Saussure. Poetics is defined as an ever-expanding repository of artistic techniques that can be analyzed through its elements, while style represents the dynamic process of adherence/deviation (process) from this repository. This process occurs on deductive and inductive levels, encompassing both general (epochal or period style) and individual (idiolect) dimensions. Thus, the specific factors of style are the same as the elements of poetics but in an active state, in the author's creative synthesis. Systematizing these poetic elements and stylistic factors, the author highlights stylistic figures, analyzing various classifications and proposing a simplified and more accessible framework.

Among the forgotten and now oversimplified figures is imprecation. In the renowned episode of curses from Oleksandr Dovzhenko's film-novella, the author identifies a cascade of stylistic figures, including rhetorical exclamations, addresses, polysyndeton, anadiplosis, cumulation, gradation, synonymic variations, similicadence, retardation, synoeciosis, traductio, ellipsis, inversion, homeoteleuton, homoiarkton, cataphora, aposiopesis etc.

The analysis concludes that this richness reflects the influence of folkloric poetics, transmitted across generations but currently, unfortunately, lost. This film story is interpreted as both an expression of the so-called return-to-the-womb complex and resistance to the regime's sadistic injustice.

The paper addresses some aspects of the resonance between the poetics and style of the artist in diachronic and synchronic dimensions, as well as in intermedial achievements and losses. Further research of this topic is encouraged.