Information on the thesis

The thesis is devoted to the study of the interaction of genetic and functional as-
pects of poetics of a literary work as exemplified by the prose collection «Narratives
and Sketches from Ukrainian Life» by Ahatanhel Krymskyi (1895). The study is the
first in Ukrainian literary criticism to cover the intertextual relation of the internal or-
ganization of a work of art and its genesis and functioning. On this conceptual basis, a
theoretical model of the poetics of a literary work as a dynamic structure is developed,
in which creatively transformed genetic pretexts have a prospective potential of being
capable of generating heterogeneous post-texts and functioning in harmony with a the-
matic, genre and stylistic architext. According to this model, the artistic structure not
only retains traces of the origin of the constructed material but also transforms this ma-
terial into a whole, creating a network of codes for its reading and thus influencing its
future reception. It was found that creative innovation and aesthetic influence of the fig-
urative structure are ensured by the transformation of pretexts made in the artistic forms
of parody, irony, paradox, experimental placement of the pretext in a new context, styli-
zation of the work according to a certain traditional pretext and so on. The study of
A. Krymskyi’s debut collection, which appeared at the turn of two literary eras, made it
possible to trace how the heterogeneous genetic components of tradition interact in the
intertextual structure of a literary work, actualizing its ability to function aesthetically in
the literary process.
The topicality of the research is determined by the need to study such interrelated
aspects of the literary process as genesis and functioning, continuity and innovation,
creativity and reception, individual style and literary direction through the prism of the
poetics of a literary work, because the artistic structure not only preserves traces of the
origin of the constructed material but also transforms this material into a whole, creating
a network of codes for its reading and thus influencing its future reception. The problem
posed in the thesis is how poetics combines heterogeneous genetic components, realiz-
ing the ability of a work to function aesthetically in the literary process, engaging in
contact and typological relationships.
The scientific novelty of the thesis is the systematic analysis of the genetic and
functional aspects of the poetics of a literary work. The study investigates the relation-
ship of tradition and innovation, on the basis of which genre-stylistic codes and cultural
models of the new epoch are developed, the regularities of the historical changes of
thematic, genre and stylistic systems in times of anti-positivist change are determined,
the role and status of individual literary phenomenon and the literary process are out-
lined, as well as it was proved that by creatively transforming pretexts in a figurative
structure, the work renews the architext, activates viable artistic and cultural values of
the literary tradition, and transmits them to successors.
The actual text appears as a kind of «node» of intertextual lines that combine pre-
and post-texts on thematic, genre and stylistic features within a certain discourse. The
intertextual node arises in the places of discourse where the literary tradition meets with
innovations, the conflict of horizons of readers’ hopes and experiences, the destruction
of the artistic pattern, and in the following discursive links – the transformation of this
tradition. On the example of A. Krymskyi’s sketch «To the People!» such interaction is
considered at different levels of the structure of a literary work: thematic, plot-
compositional, stylistic.
In the light of Bakhtin’s concept of intertextual dialogue, the poetics of
A. Krymskyi’s collection is based on an ironic parody of tension between the word «for-
eign» (populist traditions, bourgeois stereotype) and «own» (the language of the modern
«I»). The series of works that preceded the («Narratives and Sketches…», as well as
those that appeared later (including literary-critical reviews), are not just a thematically
linked chronological sequence, but a communicative complex of texts between which
there is certain dialogics. The phenomenon of this dialogics is related to a methodologi-
cally important category of discourse. Discourse analysis makes it possible to find out
the cultural and psychological characteristics, intentions and interactions of the partici-
pants of communication around the problems of «parents and children», «psychopathol-
ogy», decadence, the discussion of which was introduced in Ukrainian modernism by
A. Krymskyi’s debut collection.
The chosen method of combining genetic and functional aspects shed light on the
poetics of literary work as an intertextual intersection of different traditions and as a
source of influence on contemporaries and successors, which allows to draw a conven-
tional dividing line between literary generations and to learn more about the dialectic of
changing literary eras.
Keywords: genetico-functional aspects of poetics, pretext, post-text, architext, lit-
erary communication, dialogics of text, horizon of expectations, modern intertextuality,
artistic experiment, parody, irony, stylization.