Time Mirroring as a Character Creation Model of I. Nechuy-Levytsky’s novel “An Impudent Fellow” (“Prychepa”)

Abstract

The paper defines the time phenomena of I. Nechuy-Levytsky's novel “An Impudent Fellow” (Prychepa) as character creation one. The fact that our predecessors did not specifically consider the topic determines the purpose, objectives and relevance of the work proposed. We have identified and analyzed time paradoxes as gradational chain from chrono-discreteness to timelessness, defining their folklore-ethnographic (cultural), psychogenetic (biological), actually artistic (poetic) genesis. It is proved that the main means of embodiment of processuality is retrospectiveness, by means of which the author substantiates the stages of formation of the characters’ behavioural model in the conditions of social deadaptation, undermining of mental signs. The semantic correlates of the novel are analysed, which allowed the conclusion about the rupture of time planes, expressed by oxymoron: negative family deformations in the past turned into character creation amorphousness in the present and, accordingly, zero future due to spiritual and physical death of degraded descendants. A separate aspect of our interests is a contextual one, as the main problematic components of the studied work – depersonalization, denationalization, family deformations are central in the work of I. Nechuy-Levytsky and in the works of his contemporaries, in particular O. Kobylyanska, M. Kropyvnytsky, Panas Myrny and I. Bilyk, I. Tobilevych, I. Franko. The fate – the folklore equivalent of life way, which objectifies the certainty, the given; the mental personality of a human – was called the cause of the problems that is actually an individual, subjective determinant of the nature, which is formed by biogenetic and psychosomatic qualities. Such motivation for the emergence of internal and external conflicts made the characters full and the development of events convincing, because the writers synthesized the individual and the general, the personal and the collective, justifying the fatal dependence on the material things. The conclusion is clear: man is doomed to live in suffering as long as they serve the material things, thereby killing the Divine in themselves. Thus, both the actual psychological equivalents of these processes, primarily oneiric, and philosophical, related to biblical symbolism, were highlighted. The conclusion about the importance of studying time phenomena for the analysis of character modifications is made.