Ukrainian philosophical prose: objectum fictum or literary reality?

Abstract

Some critics consider a certain amount of works by Ukrainian writers to be philosophical. However, there are no systematic and general works or monographs about Ukrainian philosophical fiction as a defined phenomenon with its sources, historical dynamics, and genre differentiation. So the question arises: is this type of prose something sporadic and accidental, or is it fully represented in Ukrainian literature but still unidentified due to the inconsistency of the approaches applied? One can ask a more radical question: is philosophical prose the reality of Ukrainian literature or just critical fiction? The raised problem is relevant because its solution can shed light on such an obscured sector as philosophical prose and clarify its place in Ukrainian literature. So, the subject of the study is the genre boundaries of Ukrainian philosophical prose. We used analytical, generalization, biographical, and hermeneutical methods to establish these boundaries. The article aims to substantiate the view of Ukrainian philosophical prose as a defined, integral phenomenon. Achieving the goal required the following tasks: to consider the reasons for the absence of a detailed literary discourse on Ukrainian philosophical prose; to analyze the essential nature of philosophic prose, in particular, the dispersion of its components in the structure of the work and text; and to use the example of a short period at the beginning of the 20th century and several writers’ names to outline the approximate typology of Ukrainian philosophical prose. The article focuses on literary factors (the dominance of positivist and aesthetic optics) and general scientific ones (the long-term narrowing of the field of philosophy), which cause the confusing identification of philosophical prose. An attempt to eliminate these factors has been made. Also, we propose a terminological clarification regarding the essential characteristic of philosophical prose: not “typologization” but rather “prototyping”. In the article, we use the example of a short period at the beginning of the 20th century and the works of several famous writers (Olexiy Plyushch, Mykhailo Mohylyansky, Valerian Pidmohylyny) to demonstrate that Ukrainian prose contains the essentials of artistic philosophizing (prototyping). The conclusions of this article regarding the reasons for the absence of generalizing works on Ukrainian philosophical prose and its essential nature, as well as specific examples of artistic philosophizing, can be used in further studies of Ukrainian philosophical prose.