Information on the thesis

The five chapters consider the theoretical and methodological foundations of
understanding literary phenomenon, firmly rooted in socio-historical time and the social
environment with attention to the concept of the group, and its varieties. They highlight
the relationship of literary products with the tasks of national liberation struggle and
ideology of generational riflemen link, ways of literary self-presentation and structuring
of riflemen within a separate historical segment with attention to the literary circles of
riflemen youth, created within the press forms, ways of manifesting its literary presence
and generational collective «we» in the information space, links of riflemen
personalities. The maximum possible completeness of its reconstruction was facilitated
by the focus on the peculiarities of self-organization, functioning, ties with the military
environment and the military idea of the generation.
The literary military phenomenon of military group is opened up considering its
boundary nature – among politics and nature and those liberation struggles, that
appeared before sich riflemen.
Interpretation of the riflemen world is based on the little known and unknown
material of riflemen publications and issues from the view of problematics and poetics,
especially of the intertextuality, genealogy and ideologically-aesthetic cooperation with
other generational links of predecessors and contemporaries.
The literary silhouette of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen is represented by an
ideologized creative community that grows out of the generational determinants of the
creative military community, set up to create its own force field, industry and expand its
own borders, that seeks its own place in the flow of history and determines it based on
the ideological and artistic values of predecessors.
The literary phenomenon is caused by the functioning of the Sich-Riflemen
community. Literary activity was a part of the national liberation strategy of the army
during the national liberation struggle and it was «act of historical solidarity». And in
the 1920s and 1930s, it was an expression of the patriotic duty and military identity of
veterans, who kept the existential mode of a soldier-rifleman in their minds until the end
of their own days.
The literary structure of riflemen during two periods with attention to the image of
the world as a continuation of the generational worldview is outlined with the help of an
interdisciplinary approach based on comparative-historical and its genetic, typological,
intertextual, intermediate types, philological, biographical, bibliographic, psychological,
semiotic, national-existential, problem-thematic and complex-system methods together
with the form of literary portrait.
During the Liberation War, which was the first stage of the literary structure of the
Sich Riflemen, the initial dynamic formation of its own literary environment as an
autonomy based on its own funds, personal resources and periodicals. The types of
riflemen literary communities were singled out – organization, literary publication,
creative union, literary circle within the news format literary and artistic.
During the interwar period, in the unfavorable political conditions of a foreign
state, the riflemen community applied the acquired experience of literary self-
organization in large-scale literary and press structures, systemic activities, as
wshosagell as a new experience of literary editioning with book publishing, came very
close to the idea of its own literary production, the riflemen literary industry in Lviv.
The image of the world is an artistic projection of the generational way of
understanding, organized polarly at the intersection of binary oppositions «own» –
«foreign», «life» – «death» in the border situation and chronotype of liberation
struggles, marked by images-concepts of march, battle, grave, coffin, storms, blizzards.
The hero of the riflemen world is first of all a rifleman, a military man, a bearer of
generational values and attitudes in a state of existential maximum, vital stability, which
will unfold into the worldview of tragic optimism, modified by figurative paradigms of
a brave good rifleman, «Those who had fallen», «The train of the dead» constructed on
the basis of real riflemen characterology. In the interwar period, the semantics of
«foreign» extends to those riflemen who betrayed the riflemen’s ideas and the values of
the military community.
Keywords: Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, literature, group, generation, identity, image
of the world, hero, riflemen literary criticism, T. Shevchenko, I. Franko.