ПРОЛЕГОМЕНИ "ХИМЕРНОЇ ПРОЗИ"

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of “fanciful prose”, which is not sufficiently clarified in Ukrainian literary studies, and which has a number of contradictory definitions. Relying on the tradition of laughing culture, O. Storozhenko, P. Kulish, experimental prose of the 20s, started with the novel “There is no translation for the Cossack family, or Mamai and Stranger’s young lady” by O. Ilchenko, formed in the 70s during the “general pogrom”, she expressed a passive protest against the dominance of “social realism”. Its supporters, staying within the limits of the official direction, found in it, like the poets-natural philosophers, niches that were unattainable for the “party policy in the field of fiction”, wrote works with distinctive genre and style characteristics, combined with convention, folklore intertextuality, theatricality, lyrical-romantic tradition, characterized by a “mythological” dominant, mythic semantics. “Quirky prose” should be considered as a defensive reaction to “industrial”, “collective farm”, “war”, didactic imitation literature, an experimental site of the new epic. Its specificity is considered on the example of the dilogy “Flock of Swans” and “Green Mills” by V. Zemliak, which is also not subject to definition. Therefore, the previous ones about the subject of the literary study, the actual prolegomena, remain relevant.