The image of Borys Grinchenko and its contexts in Maryana Angelova’s play “The Grinchenko Syndrome”

Abstract

The article examines Maryana Angelova’s play “The Grinchenko Syndrome”, which modelled the author’s artistic version of the dystopian transition of the Ukrainian language to the status of “dead” when it is not used all the time, as well as the situation of its recollection and “revival”. The guides of this “reincarnation” of the language are the unique 4-volume Dictionary and its compiler, Borys Grinchenko. It is not by chance that the author labels the genre of the work as “vocabulary drama”. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that the problem of a radical revision of the catalogue of personalities, key to Ukrainianism today, is directly related to the development of the decolonial Ukrainian identity, memory studies, and revision of the Ukrainian cultural pantheon, which is difficult to imagine without the figure of Borys Grinchenko, who fits into this pantheon quite sporadically. The subject of the article is the analysis of artistic strategies of non-biographical writing involved in the creation of a biographical image in modern drama, the object of which is the text of Maryana Angelova’s play “The Grinchenko Syndrome”. The goal is primarily to present and interpret an interesting dramatic work. This text, created in 2013, is interpreted from positions relevant for literary studies in 2023, against the background of the war for Ukrainian identity in the face of Russian aggression. The research methodology is based on identity theory, modern Ukrainian memory studies, ecocritical writing theory. The study's novelty can be seen in the fact that the play's text was analyzed for the first time, and ways of studying it were created for philological researchers and modern theatre practitioners. As a result of the research, it was concluded that Maryana Angelova appeals to the ancestral collective linguistic memory of many generations of Ukrainians, creating the polysemantic and polyvariate image of the Dictionary as its meaningful and verbalized territory. She offers many artistic anti-colonial manifestations, centred around repressed Ukrainian letters, forgotten meanings, dead words, dictionary pages forever destroyed by censorship, backward language, linguicide, and xenoglossy coma. The 4-volume dictionary is mentioned more frequently in the play than its biographical compiler. Instead, the image of Borys Grinchenko himself, while retaining several biographical micro-plots, essentially loses its actual biographical character and acquires the mythological features of the “heavenly Grinchenko” — the “ancestor” of the modern Ukrainian linguistic personality.