"MY SHEVCHENKO ENCYCLOPEDIA" BY L. USHKALOV AS A FORMAT OF AN ESSAY COLLECTION

Abstract

Вackground. "My Shevchenko encyclopedia: from the experience of self-discovery" by L. Ushkalov is a special literary project that contains features of an encyclopedic work and a collection of essays. This book was practically not an object of scientific understanding, but it attracts literary critics from the point of view of format organization and genre features. The purpose of the article is to analyze L. Ushkalov's book from the point of view of the author's personalization method of T. Shevchenko, and from the point of view of the self-presentation of the author of this work in the format of new artistic practices.

Methods. A complex methodology was used in the scientific work: biographical, hermeneutic, and structural approaches were applied.

Results. It was found that "My Shevchenko Encyclopedia" is a vivid example of a collection of essays (author's lexicon) as a productive artistic practice in modern Ukrainian literature, notable for its creativity. According to many signs, this book is a collection of essays - mentative works compiled by the author into a whole. However, here the works are grouped alphabetically and dedicated to one figure. The single substance of all these articles-essays is the author himself. All texts in the collection are marked with an underlined author's presence. Whatever the artist writes about, he writes primarily about himself. In the texts about T. Shevchenko, objects, phenomena, concepts, events are described, which, of course, are important, but their place in the life and consciousness of the essayist himself is no less important. What is important here are not the stories and situations connected with the author's interpretation, but their mental presentation, not T. Shevchenko's actual work, but its individual authorial interpretation, not the image of the artist, but his artistic inlay, reified in the images and image-concepts by L. Ushkalov. Therefore, the value of such a work is twofold: both from the point of view of the author's method of personalization of T. Shevchenko, and from the point of view of the self-presentation of the author of this work in new artistic practices.

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