Polemical Literature and Carnival Culture: Aspects of (not) an Intersection

Abstract

Elements of culture of popular laughter (Mikhail Bakhtin) in the “Knyzhka” of the Ukrainian polemicist were the object of study in the works of Ivan Franko and Mykhailo Hrushevsky. Researchers have not yet distinguished between the concepts of humorous, ironic, and satirical. The third chapter of the “Knyzhka” is called by the Ukrainian historian the forerunner of Ukrainian comedy due to its humorous elements and simple language. However, Hrushevsky calls the descriptions of the image of a layman either ridicule or humor.Carnival elements are closely related to the nature of the genre. Polemical literature is mainly a synthesis of genres. Vyshensky’s texts were called syncretism (Igor Eremin) and the synthesis of genres (Petro Bilous). Bilous attributed most of the chapters of the “Knyzhka” to the genre of invective due to the dialogism and excessive expressiveness. According to Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition, a genre is representative of creative memory. Serio-comic genres, elements of which we explore in the “Knyzhka”, contain elements of carnival culture.In our opinion, such traces of carnival culture in the polemist’s texts include heterogeneous dialogic structures – “Socratic dialogue” and dialogue constructed on the type of catechism. And also these are methods of familiar everyday speech and vulgar common parlance (swearing, quarreling), active word-formation, considerable attention to the body, “grotesque realism” (according to Bakhtin’s definition). We trace in the “Knyzhka” the features of the ancient genres of diatribe (the genre of moral preaching) and mennipea. Similar techniques were used in medieval literature, for example in the works of Francois Rabelais.However, it is worth noting the complete difference between the goals set by the French writer and the Ukrainian polemicist. In Rabelais, artistic methods were aimed at restructuring the picture of the world, the liberation of the body. Instead, Vyshensky’s image of the body is no longer ambivalent, it belongs to a new canon, where the body has an individual character and is subject to church dogmas, and the connection with the universe is lost.Laughter’s elements in Vyshensky’s texts also lose its ambivalent character and become aspects of condemnation. Therefore, the archaic of seriously funny genres is preserved at the formal level, not at the semantic level.