“SEARCHING FOR STYLE AND GENRES”: TOWARDS THE ISSUE OF ESTABLISHMENT AND DEVELOPMENT OF FICTIONALISED BIOGRAPHIES OF ARTISTS

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the history of the development of fictionalised biographies of artists within Ukrainian literature. A significant number of fictionalised biographies of painters, sculptors, graphic artists and other creators, written and published over almost a century, when the genre developed in Ukrainian literature, stipulates the need to collect and systematise these works in view of the trends of specific historical periods or the evolution of genres. A multidisciplinary methodology relying on literary studies, comparative studies, book studies, and bibliographic activities has been used to conduct a historical and typological overview of this type of literature. This was made possible due to a prior bibliographic search of publications; thus, working with library collections and specific texts helped systematise the texts of the genre and identify the specific genre, as well as thematic and poetical peculiarities.The article analyses the inception era of fictionalised biographies of artists, investigates the development of the genre in the diaspora and Soviet Ukraine and explores the actualisation of the genre at present as well as its diversity and receptive potential. The research aims to present a broad overview of the development of fiction about artists from the first texts by V. Domontovych and Yu. Kosach, I. Holubovskyi’s short stories created in the first half of the 20th century as well as texts published during the Soviet period as part of biographical collections, to full-fledged biographical fiction about artists created in the late 20th and early decades of the 21st century, i.e. texts by V. Yavorivskyi, M. Slaboshpytskyi, L. Kostenko, B. Stelmakh, I. Drach, O. Denysenko, O. Dumanska, B. Horyn, O. Balabko, V. Yeshkiliev, Ye. Kononenko, K. Lebedieva, O. Ilchenko, S. Stetsenko, S. Rosovetskyi, R. Horak, L. Lysenko, O. Volynska and others.