PSEUDOMORPHIC CHARACTERS IN V. HUGO’S NOVEL «THE MAN WHO LAUGHS» THROUGH THE CONTEXT OF LITERARY TRADITION

Abstract

INTRODUCTION It is not always that something we see and its real essence form a harmonic unity: the ugly can hide itself behind beauty, insignificant – behind important, complicated – behind plain... Artists always paid attention to numerous reflections of these contradictions and showed them in their own works according to the tendencies of the period of time: in keeping with the medieval worldview of opposition to physical and spiritual, «life is a dream» baroque conception, inconsistencies of romantic dualism, the idea of illusiveness of material and «masquerade» as the universal way of being, the postmodernist theory of «total simulation», etc. Among expressive means, used to represent a particular phenomenon in different national literature, more attention should be given to pseudomorphic characters (from Greek «pseudo» – «lie», «fiction», «mistake» 1 та «morpho» – «form» 2 ): their main common feature is the efficient contradiction between «the essence and its formal presentation/reception, which starts to correlate to the opposing categories» 3 . «Such characters gradually become such that resemble someone else, impersonate others, and are not taken adequately (as a result of metamorphoses, travesty, verbal positional pretence, situational inconformity)» 4 .