THE CONSTRUCT OF PRAYER IN MODELING THE IDENTITY OF THE CHARACTER (MODIFICATIONS IN THE PROSE OF O. ZABUZHKO, Y. IZDRYK, S. ZHADAN)

Prayer as a literary genre is of some interest in the context of analyzing the work of Ukrainian writers, because as a text of religious discourse, it contains elements of the sacred, so its construction often hides key values, aspirations, and transcendental hopes of the character, which allow exploring its identity. In this article we analyze the place of prayer in the text and constructing the identity of the character in the works of Oksana Zabuzhko («Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex», «The Museum of Abandoned Secrets»), Yuri Izdryk («Wozzeck», «Double Leon»), Serhiy Zhadan («Depeche Mode», «Voroshilovgrad»), because each of them during addressing to the same genre offers formally different ways of presenting prayer in the text, and fills it with different semantic meanings and functions. The prayers presented in O. Zabuzhko’s texts are reflections-reflections of rhetorical upward direction, which demonstrate the values ​​and moral attitudes of one or another character. Izdryk refers to prayer primarily as an intertextual game, but due to the peculiarities of the text of the work and the image of the identity of the character, prayer here at the same time acquires certain ideological and philosophical meanings. S. Zhadan uses prayers as a means of deconstructing existing texts (biblical or Soviet), changing their original meaning to demonstrate the current state or process of reformatting the identity of a character (or group of characters). The novelty of the article is due to the issue, because prayer is mostly analyzed as a poetic genre in the works of poets, while the article addresses prayer as part of a large structure (novel or story), its place and role in constructing character identities. Practical significance lies in the idea of the study of identity, including religious, through the analysis of religious concepts, which are also independent literary genres.