Valerii Herasymchuk’s biographical drama: culturological intertextuality

Abstract

The article is devoted to a voluminous biographical dramas Valerii Herasymchuk — the cycle «Piesy pro velykyh (Plays about the Great)». It is not yet fully formed, as the author is still adding works to this day, so it is required careful reading. A professional analysis of the writer’s biographical drama in the context of the intertextual methodology of modern literary studies seems appropriate.It is noted that Valerii Herasymchuk created his own system of relationships to the biographies and works of each of his protagonists, practicing new genre experiments and updating the already known forms of literary biography in relation to the cycle «Piesy pro velykyh (Plays about the Great)».Analysis of literary works devoted to contemporary biographical drama allows us to conclude that researchers of its various aspects often ignore the dramatic works of Valerii Herasymchuk as quite difficult for literary reception. At the center of each drama in the cycle «Piesy pro velykyh (Plays about the Great)» is a prominent historical or cultural figure: Metropolitan Andrii Sheptytsky, writer and film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, historian and fiction writer Dmytro Yavornytskyi, Hetman Ivan Mazepa, poet Olena Teliha, fighter for Ukraine Stepan Bandera, classics of Ukrainian modern literature Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka, singer Kvitka Cisyk, and outstanding Ukrainian director Les Kurbas.These plays can refer to different models and kinds of biographical drama, which is a distinctive feature of contemporary Ukrainian drama. As a playwright, Valerii Herasymchuk creates one of the directions of its development. His biographical drama organically combines dominant tendencies tied to the broadest cultural intertext. Valerii Herasymchuk’s innovation is the involvement of dramatic genres in the system of motifs and characters of plays, when the cultural intertext in the dramatic discourseworks at one of the deepest levels — the genre level.Herasymchuk’s biographical drama, represented by the cycle «Piesy pro velykyh (Plays about the Great)», is distinguished by «biographical trust», brave genre experimentation, and different strategies of prose, fiction, philosophical and literary reflections. Summarizing all of the above, Valerii Herasymchuk’s biographical drama is a promising material for literary analysis and generalization.