VOLODYMYR VINNICHENKO IN THE DISCOURSE OF FRENCH MODERNISM

The article explores the works of the famous Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko in the context of French literature of the first half of the twentieth century, and modernist trends in particular. The Ukrainian writer, philosopher, and public figure arrived in France in the mid-1920s to live there for almost three decades. He was interested in French literature, corresponded with A. France, A. Gide, co-translated with his wife his own works into French. His late-1940s translation of the novel Nova Zapovid (The New Commandment ) marked his engagement with the French literary process. The novel was awarded a prize by a literary clubs, and demonstrated resemblance to the major trends in French modernism. The article focuses on defining the typological correspondences in the interpretation by Vynnychenko and M. Proust of such components as subjective consciousness, mixed impressionism, memoir discourse. The author’s attention has been turned towards the specifics of the typological similarity of Vynnychenko and A. Gide’s aesthetic views, their assertion of the ideas of individualism, the quest for harmonization of the self, and symbolic “artistry.” Vynnychenko’s works are also analyzed in the context of French existentialism, including the study of such typological similarities of the aesthetic and philosophical views of the Ukrainian writer and A. Camus as undisguised moralizing, a claim to be perceived as teachers of life in solving practical ethical problems of the human condition. The author examines the methods and aesthetic constructions of such concepts of existentialism as freedom, choice, death, anxiety, relationships between the self and the Other in the works of Vynnychenko, J.P. Sartre, and S. de Beauvoir. The correlation between the works of Vynnychenko and A. de Saint-Exupéry is separately studied within the paradigm of existentialism, including “honesty with oneself” and honesty with others; the idea of community and the instinct of public responsibility. The critical optics of research combines the historical specificity of the development of French modernism, its philosophical foundations, the ethnic identity of the Ukrainian writer, and the inherent incorporation of his poetics into the paradigm of French modernism. For researchers, teachers, students of philology and those interested in V. Vynnychenko’s oeuvres and problems of literary modernism.