SELF-ALIENATION AS MANIFESTATION OF NARRATIVE STRATEGY IN THE STORY "THE PAINTER" BY TARAS SHEVCHENKO

Abstract

The article focuses on the narrative analysis of the novel "The Painter" by T. Shevchenko in order to trace how the narrative strategy of the text contributes to the actualization of the writer's self-alienation phenomenon from his own colonized "I". The analysis is based on the system proposed by Gerard Genette: the types of narration (mimesis and diegesis) are defined, how the narration is focalized, who tells the story (types of narrators), how time is expressed in the story, how words and thoughts (discourses) are represented. The phenomenon of self-alienation is considered from the point of view of Hegel as one of the forms of alienation, as the ability of the individual in some sense to be free from their desires. As a result, they reach a higher degree of self-awareness. In the story the self-alienation expresses Taras Shevchenko's desire to distance himself from the traumatic colonial experience and isolate himself from the part of the hostile and unacceptable things in himself. He transforms his own biography unfolding before the reader a new story of redemption from serfdom: an intelligent, knowledgeable Ukrainian helps a talented young Russian artist to gain freedom. But he does not have enough strength to develop his own talent and eventually dies. In the madness and death of the Russian Shevchenko's will metaphorically appears from his colonized "I", self-alienation. The writer's use of self-irony can be traced in the written work in the humiliation and physical destruction of the former serf image. The narrative strategy of the work such as: the story on behalf of the intradiegetic homodiegetic narrator being present in the artistic world, the internal focalization of the story, the introduction of additional narrators (letters – the principle of "a text in the text"), intellectual narrative distance between the main narrator and the young artist serves as an instrument creating the phenomenon of self-alienation in the story.