A BANDERITE AND A SOVIET CITY: THE BINARY OPPOSITION IN VASYL SHKLYAR’S NOVEL “TROSCHA”

Abstract

The article analyses the artistic reproduction of conflicts and characters in Vasyl Shklyar's novel "Troscha". The author focuses on one of the main, but little-studied time periods of the novel, which critically rethinks the period of Ukraine's past in the USSR, the "Brezhnev stagnation". The focus is on the depiction of the life in the city of Zaporizhzhia of a political prisoner, a former UPA soldier who was released from Soviet camps and could not return home. The analysis of this problem is based on the theory of binary oppositions. It is indicated that the characters, time phenomena, environmental objects and spaces of consciousness (freedom, bondage) are opposed to each other in the novel. The main object of the study is the image of a Banderite with the call sign Misiats, whose prototype is a real person – a UРA centurion, political prisoner, Hero of Ukraine Myroslav Symchych. Considering the specifics of depicting the contradictions between the Banderite hero and the Soviet city, the researcher describes a system of binary oppositions represented by the following artistic structures: the character of the hero - the character of the city; the language of the Bandera hero – the language of urban society; an underground man from a kryivka (hiding) – a citizen in a public catering establishment; moral resilience of a person – an open-hearth furnace as a punishment-hell; a former political prisoner – the working class; UPA soldier - red partisan; isolation of the individual – mass festive events; bugs for listening in the home – Soviet domestic comfort; the idea of freedom – the ideology of stagnation; holiness – hypocrisy; memory – oblivion. The author also analyses the role of artistic and stylistic means that create the oppositional world of the hero and the city, in particular, antithesis, contrast and contextual antonyms. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the opposition "Banderite – Soviet city" in Vasyl Shklyar's novel "Troscha" mbodies the problems of Ukraine's colonial past, which in the twenty-first century resulted in the modern war against Russian aggression.