Peculiarities of using phraseological units in V. Shkliar’s historical novel “Troshcha”

Abstract

The paper studies the phrasemics in the works of V. Shkliar, a renowned contemporary author, represented in his historical novel “Troshcha”, featuring the national liberation struggle of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army against the communist totalitarian regime in Western Ukraine in the postwar period. The novel contains important culture-oriented information and is an important source of studying phraseological units in respect of their structural and semantic, as well as functional and semantic role in the work of fiction as figurative and expressive-evaluative components of the author’s individual style. The selection of phraseologisms is contingent to the conceptual message of the novel, the specificities of its plot and composition, the imagery of the novel, its narrative structure and author’s original linguistic world image. Phraseological units perform a significant role in the stylization of the historical epoch. Having employed set expressions, typical exclusively of the period of the national liberation struggle of Ukrainian Insurgent Army, in their nominative function, the author has painted an artistic historical image of reality. Some of the phrasemes, implemented in specific contexts, have acquired negative or positive evaluative connotation. V. Shkliar resorts to Soviet clichés, narratives – expressive markers of the totalitarian period, which by shifting their intense pompous evaluation into a negative one occasionally create ironic and satirical effect. By depicting the images of insurgents, villagers from Western Ukraine, the author has delineated the most essential features of the Ukrainian national character, historical conditions of its formation. While depicting the personalities of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army warriors, V. Shkliar employs the phraseological units representing their disposition, features of character, intellectual abilities, moral and psychological, emotional state, etc. The author also makes use of the dialectal phraseological units of Halychyna in order to convey the original live speech of the characters, reproduce the local flavor. The author uses phraseological units both in their usual and transformed form. By acquiring additional semantic shades, these phrasemes carry out a new contextual meaning, and make the author’s speech more expressive. The author has fixed his own life observations, ideas concerning freedom, betrayal, happiness in maxims, aphorisms which can enrich the phraseological inventory of the national language.