Information on the thesis

The thesis submitted for the award of the academic degree of Candidate of Philology, Specialty 10.01.01 – Ukrainian literature. – Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. – Lviv, 2016.

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of the problem of landscape semantics and poetics in the prose by Ivan Franko. For the first time the artistic features of psychological pleinair in Franko’s works are observed. The author’s original forms of psychological descriptions of nature – landscape-impression, expression and symbol – have been distinguished and considered. A special kind of psychological landscape (phantasmagoric «landscape of the soul») is interpreted as a negative space.

The author examines theoretical background of the term, its historiography. The first chapter presents a theoretical analysis of such notions as «literary landscape», «mental landscape», «topographic feeling», and «verbal painting». The paper stresses that psychological landscape is anthropocentric, subjective description relaying emotions, mood, feelings of the author and character. The author of the thesis proposes a branched classification of the verbal landscapes based on the various criteria, features, principles.

The second chapter is focused on the problem of psychologization of the landscape in Franko’s early artistic practice and in his heritage of the late 19th century. The basic types, forms and functions of psychological landscapes are distinguished; mechanisms and means of psychologization are revealed. Attention is paid to the dialogue of tradition and innovation in the descriptive poetics of Franko. His critical reception of «old» and «new» principles of landscape creation in the Ukrainian literature of the late 19th – early 20th centurу is also highlighted.

In the third chapter the researcher makes an attempt to present main creative achievements of Franko as а verbal landscapist in his late prose. The author emphasizes that in hutsulian novels, the concept «plein air» determines a new way of the artistic visualization of space and psychological characteristics of the character, a new (vitalistic, solar) type of outlook, a new, magical-mythical type of perception. In the stories about children special attention is paid on the landscape-nostalgia, based on the intuitive and sensual, magical and mythical model of macro world. The secessionist and symbolic type of «landscape portrait» («Driada», «Soichyne krylo», «Nenache son») is also investigated in Franko’s prose.

Common, distinctive and original trends of the landscape creation in the prose heritage by I. Franko and the members of the literary group «The Young Muse» (M. Yatskiv, B. Lepkyi, V. Birchak) and other writers of the «transition period» are interpreted. The paper stresses that Franko is closer to the subjective psychological mimesis of early impressionism, while artists of the young generation are very close to transcendental symbolic.

Key words: verbal landscape, art psychologism, psycho-semantics of description, landscape-expression, mimetyzm, realism, character, mythologism, impressionism, modernism.