Yushchenko L. Problematics and Artistic Features of Vitaliy Kulakovsky’s Historical Prose

The thesis gives an outline of such theoretic aspects of historical prose as the problem of genre differentiation of the past–describing writings, the origin and typological aspects of the Ukrainian historical adventure prose. The thesis determines the key factors for creation of the mindset, the scientific and aesthetic waymarks and the historical and philosophical ideas of V. Kulakovsky, reveals and characterizes the research trends, in which these ideas are intensively realized (history, creative writing, local studies, critical literary practice and pedagogics). The thesis gives an outline of genre and style features of the writer’s historical prose within the framework of the national and European traditions (due to the genre classification of the historical novel (novelet) being designed by the researcher). The author proves the artistic and sense bearing role of the adventure attributes (journey chronotope, motives of imprisonment, rapture, recovery, disguise, prophesy or sorcery, pursuit, eavesdropping, ignobility, deception, dream pattern, classical love collisions and romance triangles, etc.) in the narrative system of the artist’s historical adventure works. The dissertator distinguishes and analyses national, social and moral aspects of the problems, touched upon in the novels and novelets of V. Kulakovsky, (people and power, personality and state, life and death, conscience and duty, love and hate, loyalty and treason, good and evil, creation and destruction, etc.), which are concentrated around one main issue – the heroic fight of the Ukrainians for freedom and rights. The candidate for the degree reveals the artistic nature of the images of Old Russian princes, their retainers, Cossacks and haidamaks through implementation of heroic concept in those images. Considering this the artistic construal matrix for the heroic characters (playing basically the role of protagonists) in the works of V. Kulakovsky was designed.