DRAWERS AND STRINGS(chimeric-heretical essay)

Volume 64-1 (2023)

Anatoliі Tkachenko, DSc (Philol.), Prof.
Educational and Scientific Institute of Philology Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv

Summary

With this essay, I continue the long-standing heretical polemic with the practice of literary generalizations, which drive the artistic achievements of unique creative people into the drawers of “-isms”, uniting them with one or another precedent name, such as “fancy prose” or “fancy novel”. Vasyl Zemliak’s diverse work does not fit only in these drawers, because he wrote not only epic or lyrical prose, but also prose poetry (it is denoted by as many as four incorrect terms: “prose poems”, “prose poems”, “prose poetry”, ” prose poetry”), and also worked in the field of related arts, participating in the creation of film scripts, and some of them (such as “Conscience”) do not at all fit into the “quaint” commune.
For example, the work “Dialogue with the city” is traditionally classified as “small stories”, while in fact it is a prose-lyrical monologue-message in the form of a dialogue, with elements of an ode, meditation, memory, urban landscape and with a rhythmic melody, tropes, rhetorical figures, etc. corresponding to this genre.
The essay also includes a comic strip by V. Zemliak’s, which was preserved in the archive of the film director and writer M. Mashchenko and was published in his memoirs, posthumously. Written in 1960, this comic belongs to the period of the socalled Khrushchev thaw, but even then it was dangerous for the author, who worked as the chief editor of the film studio named after O. Dovzhenko (1963−1968).
However, after the events of the “Prague Spring” in 1968, Vaclav Vacek, a Czech by origin, who took the pseudonym Vasyl Zemlіak, no longer worked at a film studio.
I also support my long-standing statement about the need to finally introduce film dramaturgy, just as dramaturgy was introduced, to artistic literature, and its analysis to literary studies as a branch of art studies. And therefore − about the need to explore the creativity of artists in view of their diverse interests, in particular in the genre of film scripts. The world has long been moving towards a new syncretism of the arts, in which the art of the word and its visualization should occupy a prominent place. Not seeing all this is, at best, narrow-minded myopia.

Keywords: drawers of “-isms”, creative person, artistic diversity, literary studies, art studies, film dramaturgy, prose lyrics.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/2520-6346.1(64).102-114

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