The Maryna Grymych’s novel “Do you hear, Margo?..” as an artistic representation of author’s scientific discourse

Abstract

Autobiographism as a literary genre began to enter the cultural discourse from the middle of the 20th century. Its canons (form, content, etc.) have not yet been defined, and the flexibility of the term provides ample opportunities for applying individual approaches through the prism of the author’s own experience. In the context of the study of this phenomenon, attention is drawn to the novel by Maryna Grymych “Do you hear, Margo?..” (2000), which traces the projection of her everyday experience and the scientific knowledge received by her into the literary text, which is timely (readers’ interest in biographies of famous and prominent people) and relevant for the research of such representation. So, the purpose of the investigation is to analyze the facts from the biography of Maryna Grymych, to study one of her first novels in the projection of scientific knowledge and scientific experience into a literary text, and the subject of the research is the artistic representation of the writer’s scientific biography in the text of the novel. As a result of the study, a conclusion was made about the flexibility of the term autobiographism (its application, individual approaches, one’s own vision, life, and scientific experience). The analysis of the novel leads to the conclusion that autobiographism in it is not manifested in the reproduction of the events that took place in the writer’s life, but in the sequence of scientific knowledge gained, which is often superimposed on one’s own life experience and thus reflected in the literary text. Therefore, although the novel “Do you hear, Margo?..” is not postulated as autobiographical, we admit the presence of relevant elements in the embodiment of certain details which could testify about Grymych the researcher in the literary texts of Grymych the writer. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that autobiographism of the literary text is considered through the prism of the study of history, anthropology, ethnology, ethnography, folklore, and ethnology by Maryna Grymych, her wanderings in Ukraine and in the world, her field research skills, etc. The artistic representation of the writer’s scientific biography makes it possible to fully explore this writer’s biography, which without proper reading and research will have no integrity in its study. Therefore, the practical significance of the investigation is to use the knowledge gained about the writer for entering the data into her biography and for the popularization of scientific knowledge through literary text.