Common features of the individual artistic worldviews by Elena Garro and Serhiy Osoka (based on the short stories "What time is it...?" and "Midnight guest")

Abstract

The modern world of communication between representatives of different ethnic groups often requires a deeper understanding of the realities and peculiarities of the cultural worldview by each of the subjects of communication. The linguistic conceptualization of the world of each ethnic group, in turn, is reflected in literature in the form of an individual artistic worldview realised by the author on the pages of his works. That is why the study of the common and distinctive features of different writers' worldview is of interest, especially if at first glance their linguistic, cultural and historical origins seem to be significantly different. The purpose of the article is to analyze the artistic worldview of representatives of Mexican and Ukrainian literature based on the material of two selected stories and to establish their common features. Elena Garro (1916-1998) was a Mexican writer, journalist, and screenwriter. She is considered to be a representative of magical realism in Latin American literature and a champion of feminism. Serhiy Osoka (b. 1980) is a contemporary of ours, a Ukrainian poet and writer from Poltava region, a member of the Ukraine’s National Union of Writers. His prose often refers to rural life or compares rural and urban lifestyles. Nevertheless, in the stories "¿Qué hora es...?" and "The Midnight Guest" by these completely different authors, as a result of the conducted research, the following common features of artistic worldviews were established: - the main characters in both stories are women whose axis of being is love for a man. It is a recurring motif that is closely intertwined with the concept of "waiting"; - distorted perception of time. For both protagonists, time is cyclical and limited to one day. For the other characters, time is linear, which is why the protagonists' behaviour is strange and is perceived by others as a sign of a mental disorder; - both stories are dominated by a sensory perception of reality: there are many descriptions of visual images, smells, and tactile sensations; - both characters are marked by oneiric states (dream and reality are closely intertwined); - both stories have an unexpected ending. The analysis of common features in the individual artistic pictures of the world of both authors indicates the presence of the characteristics inherent to the philosophy of magical realism. However, if magical realism is a widespread phenomenon in Mexican and other Spanish-language literature, it is not typical for Ukrainian literature. Hence the promising problem of further research into the root causes of such closeness of the author's worldview of representatives of Ukrainian-speaking and Spanish-speaking cultures arises.