STRATEGY OF THE NEW DRAMA IN LESYA UKRAINKA’S LITERARYAND- CRITICAL ARTICLES

Abstract

The article examines the features of a new drama promoted by Lesya Ukrainka in her literary-and-critical articles, and further in her artistic work. In the new drama, Lesya Ukrainka focuses on the nature of the dramatic work, specifically, the text as a link connecting the addresser and the addressee. She sees H. Hauptman’s dramaturgy as an example of such text creation, namely, motives and types of characters in his plays. The word becomes the lead character in such texts and turns into a communicative strategy. The word becomes a structurally and figuratively robust means of developing the play’s plot and composition. Lesya Ukrainka associates new drama’s purpose not with modernism or with the programs of “art-for-art’s-sake” and aestheticism, but with the social drama development. The author believes that the concept of a new drama determines the nature of structural and compositional transformations, the drama’s figurative originality. Lesya Ukrainka considers the dramaturgy by H. Ibsen, H. Hauptman, and S. Przybyshevsky, whose works she analyses in her literary-and-critical articles, to be examples of the new drama. The factors providing for the emergence of the new drama in Ukrainian literature include the drama lyrisation as a communicative strategy, which is a manifestation of the play’s “literaturisation”. Lyrisation as the dramatic text’s feature contributes to the action subjectivisation, leads to a chronotope displacement, enables the combination of events happening in different times within one dramatic text, the polysemy of expression through a metaphor or symbol. The philosophy of the author’s strategy of transforming verbal subject of poetic existence correlates with the ability of a statement to create new multiple meanings and interpretations of the text that convey the emotionality of the author’s words. Drama lyrisation drives the creation of conventional images, while the character appears in the text not in one guise, but in several. The author distances themselves from the character, which enables the subject’s uncertainty and potential multiplicity. Dramatic text’s lyrisation becomes an incentive for the text’s generic and genre transformations, contributes to the creation of conventional images that establish explicit communication between the addresser and the addressee. The author as the text’s addresser is presented in the characters’ statements, which provides a plurality of interpretations and meanings of the dramatic text, allows for playing with words, that manifests “literaturisation”. “Literaturisation” as a communicative strategy integrates the texts of Ukrainian playwrights into the context of the world literary and theatrical tradition, expands their themes, genre diversity, and figurative system.