Shtanyuk O. Ch. Achebe's creative work: postcolonial idea of artistic self-determination in the format of the foreign language.

Object - creative works of Ch. Achebe. Objective - interpretation of Ch. Achebe's English prose in the context of Nigerian postcolonial situation and specifying of an African's mentality peculiarities. Methods - structural-semantical, hermeneutically-receptive. The verbal and figurative peculiarities of the Anglophone African novels by the Nigerian writer Ch. Achebe are analyzed. Artist's literary heritage is traced within the postcolonial literary practice. It is stressed that the writer's consciousness was formed on the border of two cultures - colonial Christian and ethnic culture of Igbo that defined the ideological themes of his texts. All the authors novels: "Things Fall Apart" (1958), "No Longer at Ease" (1960), "Arrow of God" (1964), "A Man of the People" (1966), "Anthills of the Savannah" (1987) are analyzed in the paper. It is shown that the first four of them should be attributed to the specific practices of African realism that contains mental culture syncretism at its core, while the last one, the final novel is a kind of post-modern version of African dystopia. It is shown that Ch. Achebe portrays the Igbo society with double implicitness, as he is not alien to this environment, but at the same time the writer is an African artist modernized by the new reality. It is confirmed that this author adequately portrayed the formation of the African postcolonial situation and offered a new vision of authentic African culture to his readers. It is accented that having accepted the English language, the Nigerians have changed only "external" form of communication, without changing its inner content. Thus, African culture expresses itself in its only conditionally new form without losing its inherent ontological essence. It is established that in case of Ch. Achebe it obviously demonstrates itself: while the external language of his texts is English, the internal language that generated his creative work is the native language of contemporary African culture in its major paradigms. Application - academic field.