The Secret Code of the Galician Land Between the Two Rivers: Spacetime Organization of Yuri Andrukhovych’s Essays

Abstract

The paper deals with the spacetime aspect of the essays by Yu. Andrukhovych(‘Disorientation in Locality’ in particular); it is both a feature and an efective strategy used by theauthor in order to structure his text and organize its imagery.Other distinctive features of Andrukhovych’s essays are inner dynamics of artistic images, acomplex associative network, paradox as a way of playing with a reader, constant switching fromsociohistorical time to private chronotope of personal world view. Looking at European culturefrom different spacetime perspectives and, at the same time, feeling its contemporary pulsation,marking his private narrative cardiogram with philosophical and historical ‘splash-ups’, the authormanages to communicate his idea of Central Europe as a tradition, in which Ukraine has its share.The text of ‘Disorientation in Locality’ is modelled in the dimensions of different spacetimecontinuums; due to this, the discussed locuses reveal themselves as palimpsests of cities andplaces – geological cuttings of different temporal layers, whose deep textual meanings shinethrough the surface of the author’s narrative. Into the fabric of sociohistorical time, Andrukhovychweaves idyllic chronotope of early times (‘an Austrian-Hungarian myth’ tinged with the author’shumour, the mystic locus of the Carpathians) complementing it with his private spacetimechronotope, generic memory. According to the author, the chronotope of apocalypse is destroyingthe Tradition; though the message of his essays is revealing the possibility of the two-waymovement along the sociohistorical temporal vector, which ensures continuity of tradition andhistorism.