Combatant Prose in Modern Ukrainian Literature: Genre and Stylistic Features

Abstract

During the last few years a signifi cant number of texts covering a huge range of genres appeared within the Ukrainian literary community with a purpose to depict the recent events of the war taking place in the East of the country. The most complete list of such literary texts created by Anna Skorina has more than 400 positions. It includes poetry, fiction, essays, diaries, non-fi ction (documentaries and political researches), photo albums and, surprisingly, comic books and a graphic novel. Moreover, the list is permanently updated. There are both civilians (writers, journalists, volunteers) and combatants among the authors of the texts. The prose written by the latter group of authors is an important and interesting phenomenon of the modern Ukrainian literary process. The group includes professional writers conscripted into Ukrainian Armed Forces or enlisted in the Volunteer Batallions as well as authors without pre-war experience of being related to the literary beau monde. To a certain extent their texts belong to documentaries or to the literature of fact. Most authors resort to self-descriptive writing for comprehending their recent experience and psychological changes it caused. These works can be classifi ed as ego-documents (diaries, memoires) and ego-texts (autobiographical fiction and essays). Genre diffusion is a characteristic feature of memoires and autobiographical prose, the combatant prose being no exception. Such popular fi ction genres as comic books and graphic novels must be considered a rather interesting practice within modern military literature. The paper emphasizes the incorrectness of identifying modern combatant prose with so-called lieutenant prose, the Soviet literary phenomenon, as these groups of texts have essential differences that exceed by far their common features.