Paliy O. Novels by Milan Kundera: problems, poetic, narrative strategies.

The dissertation is the first in Ukrainian and foreign literary studies integrated research of the whole set of works by Milan Kundera (1929), the contemporary Czech emigrant writer. The project was worked out with the emphasis on the writer's aesthetic search including as well the study of existential problems in novels "The Joke", "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", "Immortality" etc. The thesis researches the genesis of Kundera's creative intentions, the directions of critical reception of his texts in connection with postmodernist tendencies in contemporary literature; illustrates the position of author's creation into modern European cultural context. The multicultural outlook of the writer is represented in the syncretic poetic features at various levels of the analysed novels. The work systematically explores the dominant poetic characteristics of Kundera's novels as an entire dynamic system within the context of the postmodernism. The polyvariant nature of Kundera's texts is reflected in the interlacing of realistic, modernistic and postmodernistic poetic features. The analysed novels possess a dynamic structure, permanent quest for original ways of artistic actualization, transformation of the existing methods of verbal representation. Postmodern tendencies are especially evident in the complicated narrative structure of the novels, considering the stressed subjectivity of the narrative mode and the metanarrative comments. There is combination of objective and subjective narratives, introspections, playing with the recipient's consciousness and productive intertexture.