THE AMBIGUITY OF INTERTEXT: TEXTUALITY OF HISTORY IN PAVLO ZAHREBELNYI’S NOVEL “I, BOHDAN (CONFESSION IN GLORY)”. PART TWO

Abstract

In the novel “I, Bogdan” ‘historical authenticity’ is achieved through intuitive, romantic penetration of the author/narrator into the ‘nation’s spirit’ — and through the citatory narrative on the verge of cento, which the narrator emphasizes time and again. The fictional, subjective image of the hetman is presented as the only true one. The author of the novel follows two historiographical traditions, within which the fiction is not just authentic but real and true — of course, if consistent with existing narratives. These are premodern and romantic traditions. Unsurprisingly, Zahrebelnyi is happy to use the texts created both in the premodern framework (fragments of “Cossack chronicles”) and in the framework of (pre)romanticism (“History of Ruthenians”; “Zaporozhian Antiquities” by Izmail Sreznevskyi). These texts are ‘created’ and not ‘falsified’, because for their authors the reconstruction of the possible was not falsification but only filling gaps. For the author of the novel “I, Bogdan”, as well as for the romantics, the criterion of truth is compliance with the national spirit. Researchers have repeatedly noted that the novel creates the combined voice of the ‘hero-author’: it is the voice of the people themselves, on whose behalf his representative can speak.
 Zahrebelnyi, when using historical sources, often turns to the palimpsest technique, rewriting or simply quoting without reference studies on Ukrainian history, especially by Mykola Kostomarov and Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, making certain ideological changes, and sometimes radically inverting the meaning of the quoted passages. Hidden intertext, therefore, may deny the explicit ideology of the text. It is obvious that the ‘encyclopedia of the model reader’ of the novel was much larger than the ‘encyclopedia’ of the empirical Soviet reader. So, in fact, the only possible ‘model reader’ was the author himself. This is a very modernist notion, and at the same time, the illusion of complete clarity on a superficial level moves Zahrebelnyi’s book closer to the poetics of postmodernism.