THE POLYPHONIC NATURE OF THE NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT-STORY ‘A GIFT ON THE POSITION’ RYHOR BAKHTA (1928)

Abstract

The article is devoted to a complex analysis of the short-story ‘Gift on the Position’ by R. Bakhta. The work is defined by a non-linear narrative structure characterized by the presence of several polyphonic plot lines. They branch out thanks to the narrator’s reflections on the essence of the First World War, the inclusion of correspondence between characters or retrospective episodes. Much attention is paid to the lexical component of the work, where R. Bakhta experiments with the word in order to highlight the most effective speech practices that preserve the thinking of an individual character and, at the same time, allow us to consider the phenomenon of war from a suprapersonal philosophical standpoint. The question of preserving the memory of the 1914 – 1918 events is raised. It worried the writer, whose observations of contemporaries indicated the possibility of losing the memory of the experience, because that experience was canceled by new manifestations of the continuous war.