Tovt O. Historical drama of M. Kostomarov: range of problems and poetics.

The ideas and artistic innovations of historical drama of M. Kostomarov is analysed in the dissertation. The theoretical and methodological aspects of studying historical drama are outlined and the ways of scientific comprehension are clarified in the dissertation. The features of the historical drama in the old and new Ukrainian writing are determined. The reasons of authors appealing to the historical topics, which are newly interpreted in the time of romanticism are described here. It is focused on clear definition of concept «historical drama», which is characterized by immersions in past epochs, reconstraction of ancient events through the prism of the author’s worldviews, creation of images – characters of historical figures, artistic reception of their figures in the texts, reflection of history by the selection of actual topic layers that are consonant to the time when the writer lived and also concentration of people’s problems, which are closely connected with the questions of national life.In the first part of the dissertation the genesis and peculiarities of drama development in ancient and new Ukrainian literature are also examined. It was emphasized that in essence M. Kostomarov became the first author who clearly understood the nature of this genre, had a thorough knowledge of history and as a fiction writer was able to present dry facts and descriptions of the past in a highly artistic form. It was found that the artistic thinking of the playwrite, and in the situation with M. Kostomarov also a scientist historian, was based on the ability to fill historical material with universal human content to flesh out the history to create it as a set of life stories of each character, thus to model the darma of human like an entirety. It is proved that in their efforts to present existentially sharpened human characters to shift the accents from the historical to the human, writeris ahead of his time and approaches the best examples of the genre of historical drama that was developed in the time of modernism. The second part deals with the peculiarities of the development of the Ukrainian romantic drama through the contextual definition of the «dramatic background» of «preromanticism» and «romantic break» periods, and the existence of romanticism as an ideological and aesthetic consciousness of Ukrainian dramatists.