THE ARTISTIC WORLD OF VALERY SHEVCHUK IN THE CONTEXT OF BAROQUE AESTHETICS

Abstract

The article reveals the artistic originality of Valeriy Shevchuk’s works in the context of Baroque aesthetics (based on the novels “House on the Hill” and “On the Humble Field”). Considerable attention is paid to the study of the great prose of the artist, who, continuing the traditions of Ukrainian Baroque literature, creates an original concept of the world and man, the author’s strategy of interpreting Baroque texts. The article traces Valeriy Shevchuk’s scientific comprehension of Ukrainian baroque literature (based on the thorough scientific work “Muse of Roksolana. Ukrainian Literature of the XVI–XVIII Centuries”) as an important factor in the spiritual and cultural life of the Ukrainian nation. It is noted that the works of Baroque literature are characterized by a synthesis of rhetoric and metaphor, contrast and picturesqueness, grotesqueness and allegory, a play with complex emblems and allegories, complicated imagery, and deep symbolism. Thus, Valeriy Shevchuk draws ideological and formal connections between Baroque primary sources and their corresponding poetic and rhetorical schemes and folklore, which reveals the significance of his cultural concept.The writer, in accordance with his own original worldview, builds multidimensional pictures of Ukrainian reality in his works, forming the author’s national spiritual and aesthetic model. Expanding reality with the help of dreams, delusions, phantasmagoric visions, the author creates a unique new unreal, illusory reality, destroying the boundaries between the real and the fantastic, the real and the mythical. Such an artistic world is subject to whimsical and baroque situations that involve unexpected collisions, baroque metaphors, symbolic ciphers, and subconscious contexts. Valeriy Shevchuk tries to penetrate and reveal the mystery of life, the incomprehensibility of fateful vicissitudes, resorting to the complicated textual architecture typical of Baroque literature – “text within text”. It is the use of fragments of other texts, borrowings, allusions, reminiscences, as well as the perception of the world as a game and theater, where everyone has a certain role, that the artist masterfully realized in the novels “The House on the Hill” and “On the Humble Field”. This testifies to the dominance of Baroque aesthetics in Valeriy Shevchuk’s novels, which determine a double or even triple reading of the author’s text.