VOLODYMYR VINNICHENKO’S NOVEL “THE NEW COMMANDMENT”: POETICS AND FORMS OF EXISTENTIAL SELF-REFLECTION

Abstract

The article considers the second edition of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s novel “The New Commandment” (1947), written for the first time in 1932. The author of the book translated it into French together with his wife after the end of World War II. The purpose of the work and the tasks dictated by it are to analyse the “French” novel “The New Commandment” by Volodymyr Vynnychenko in the paradigm of modernist aesthetics, to reveal the main philosophical ideas and aesthetic functions of the novel, to identify elements of intertextual memory, and to understand the influence of the book by Ukrainian dissident Viktor Kravchenko “I Chose Freedom” (1946). The set of goals determines the need to use hermeneutical (analysis of artistic text), comparative-typological (comparison of philosophical novel various functions), historical-literary (solution of a number of literary problems in the context of various national literatures) research methods. Vynnychenko’s work is analysed in the paradigm of the “Transcendent Homelessness” philosophical concept, introduced into scientific discourse by the Hungarian philosopher and literary theorist D. Lukach in his Hegelian-Weber essay “The Theory of the Novel” (1916), where he quotes the German romantic, a representative of the Jena school, Novalis: “Philosophy is homesickness – the desire to be at home everywhere”. In the study of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s contribution to European modernism in the interwar era, the author pays attention to the key thesis of the trans-cultural theory, which touches such disciplines as anthropology, sociology and political science. Particular attention is paid to the genesis and specificity of the philosophical and figurative system of one of the key “French” texts by Volodymyr Vynnychenko. The leading aesthetic components and means of forming philosophical and ideologicalpolitical paradigms of the work are also determined. The French aristocracy had a great debate on “The New Commandment”. In April 1949, the translation was published in one of the Paris publishing houses (Nouveau Commandemant. Paris: Editions des Presses du Temps Present). The French literary critics of the time responded favourably to the publication of the Ukrainian author’s book, and the literary and artistic society “Club de Faubourg” already on 10th May 1949, arranged a massive discussion of “The New Commandment”, which testified to the approving attitude towards the author. At the same time, another well-known French artist club “Arts-Sciences-Lettres”, awarded Volodymyr Vynnychenko with an honorary diploma and a silver medal. On 21st July 1949, the prestigious Parisian weekly bulletin “Le Nuvelle Litterere” responded to this fact where noticed that after Shevchenko and Marko Vovchok, Volodymyr Vynnychenko is the first Ukrainian writer whose novels have been responded to by French audience. In this regard, it is noted that the philosophical foundations of Vynnychenko’s novel organically fit into the “spiritual crisis” European discussions of those times. We have studied philosophical character manifestation peculiarities in the genre of novel-dialogue, novel-polemic, which are widely represented in the “French” prose of the Ukrainian artist and are closely connected with the French literary tradition. It is proved that, having spent almost the last thirty years of his life in France, the Ukrainian writer seems to aim at identifying common thematic, aesthetic, philosophical and ideological paradigms that go beyond mononational boundaries, and demonstrates that Ukrainian emigrant artists were participants in pan-European literary modernism, although for the most part it concerns Volodymyr Vynnychenko himself, as well as Yu. Kosach, I. Kostetskyi, A. Arkhipenko, A. Ekster, A. Manevich, I. Pune, A. Boguslavskaya, M. Glushchenko. Particular attention is paid to the genre experiment of Vynnychenko, in particular, the philosophical and political novel with such poetic features as the presentation and discussion of concordist theory, the use of such a modernist technique as “a novel within a novel”, the constant inclusion of various discursive forms of concordism discussion. The critical optics of the study combines the historical and philosophical specificity of the era of the interwar twenties, on which the novels of Volodymyr Vynnychenko are based, as well as the national identity of the Ukrainian writer and his biographical individuality.