“THE CONQUERORS” BY YURII YANOVSKYI: THE AUTHOR IN SEARCH OF THE TITLE FOR THE WORK

Abstract

The titles of Yurii Yanovskyi’s plays have not been studied yet. There are research works dealing with different issues of his plays and focusing on the titles of his novels but not plays. The present paper analyzes different variants of the title that Yanovskyi had for his play finally called “Zavoiovnyky” (“The Conquerors”). The writer’s purpose was to find a name that would most accurately reflect the idea and emphasize the main theme of his work. The author was focused on two topics while writing the play. The first one was war and fight, and the second was international consciousness and unification of the working class. The writer had considered more than thirty optional titles before he chose the final one. It is important to note that Yanovskyi had started creating variants of the title before the text of the play was finished. Therefore, some options had been related to the themes that finally were not manifested in the play, or at least were not presented in scale sufficient for giving ground to the correspondent names. Some of the variants were not only related to the themes of the play but also directly referred to some episodes, sometimes omitted in the final version and kept only in the drafts. Some optional titles implied a wider metaphorical sense. The last approach is relevant for the final title “Zavojovnyky” as well. With this word Yanovskyi didn’t name a physical conquest of some land by some people, but the expansion of the idea of uniting the working class around the globe. The author directly expressed this idea in the final monologue of his play, with the statement that the working class aims to conquer all the world.