MEMORY STUDY AND COMMEMORATION EFFECT OF MODERN UKRAINIAN FICTIONAL TEXTS

INTRODUCTION In the past fifty of so years, the society has demonstrated an increasing interest in studying memory that has opened a certain epoch in this field of knowledge. Some researchers even dare to refer to this phenomenon as a “memory boom”. The boom started in late 1970s in sociology and has only begun to wind down at the turn on millennium 1 . But the decrease of the interest to the topic among the sociologist has transformed into the “boom” of “memory study” in other humanitarian fields such as philosophy, psychology, culture studies, politics, public relation and even theory and history of literature. The raise of interest to understanding the mechanisms of collective memory could be understood easily when taking into consideration “the decline of postwar modernist narratives of progressive improvement through an ever-expanding welfare state, nation-states turned to the past as a basis for shoring up their legitimacy. The decline of utopian visions supposedly redirected our gaze to collective pasts, which served as a repository of inspiration for repressed identities and unfulfilled claims. Without unifying collective aspirations, identity politics proliferated” 2 . “Memory studies” are one of the most pressing fields of interdisciplinary research today, the main purpose of which is supposed to study the collective and cultural memory of any society. One of the most urging reason for studying it is to single out the unifying elements for the society as a group of individuals. Collective memory, that is manifested and fulfilled in traditions, beliefs and myths cultivated in society, occupied the minds of mainly historians, sociologists and psychologists until recently. The results of this kind of researching is broadly used in public relation, politics, sociology and so on. At the present day, when the relationship between different fields of knowledge becomes vaguer, this phenomenon has also interested the literary scholars. They tend to use fictional texts as a source to collect the information