ON THE SEARCH OF NEW AESTHETICS IN CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN LITERATURE (BASED ON THE NOVELS OF MAKSYM DUPESHKO)

Abstract

Modern Ukrainian literature reacts to the collapse of the postmodern project and the emergence of a new cultural logic - metamodernism. This article is an attempt to prove it on the example of an analysis of the work of a modern Ukrainian writer. Maksym Dupeshko’s novels «The Story Worth an Entire Apple Orchard» [Istoriia varta tsiloho yablunevoho sadu] (2017) and «Near the Carriage under a Dead Fox» [Bilia karety pid mertvym lysom] (2021) served as the artistic material for the study. A scrupulous analysis of the novels testifies to the writer’s sensitivity to tectonic shifts in modern aesthetics. Both novels work with the phenomenon of the influence of historical memory on the present. And the strategies used by the author fully illustrate the theses of metamodernism theorists: oscillation between pre-modern, modern, and post-modern practices; fragmented «I» and attempts to integrate it into newmeaningful configurations; finding the multiplicity of human subjectivity; transition from parataxis to metaxy; a movement from melancholy to hope. Maksym Dupeshko’s texts testify listening to a new sensuality. The writer is not afraid to search for the truth, to be simple (both at the level of language and at the level of transmitted ideas), he consciously uses banality, he is deliberately pathetic, oscillates from irony to seriousness, from naivety to sincerity, always, however, without approaching cynicism. «The Story Worth an Entire Apple Orchard» is a novel-reflex on the modern Russian-Ukrainian war. The credit of the novel is that in its area there is a very important for our literature a change of modes in the artistic interpretation of reality — a transition from the obvious to the significant, after that we will no longer be ashamed to be heroes, to be from the provinces, to seek God and places of strength, we willstop confusing naivety and sincerity. «Near the Carriage under the Dead Fox» is a novel-anamorphosis - a construction that seems absurd to us if we look at it directly, but when we change the angle of view, it acquires clear and recognizable outlines. This novel engages the reader in the quest, it demonstrates a way to look into our modern existence - an endless chaos of things, events, ideas, aesthetics, fragments of sleeps, fragments of destinies, parts of dreams, hallucinations and fantasies.