Dissertation work offers, substantiates and experimentally actualizes such literary category as "cultural intertext" that helps to analyze difficult intertextualartistic structures. This is the system of in-textual elements and has intertextual attributes, certain form-contentual specifics, for example: allusive formats dominate textual borrowings (allusions are wider than the dialogical form of epochs / cultures / styles / genres / writers / texts); projections to contemporary cultural, rhetorical, and everyday codes are obligatory; cursive or precedent-driven, widely recognized "signs" and "codes" are forced; there is brief, compact "signals" of precedent texts; the image of the author is actualized, sometimes even hyperbolized; there is a mix of precedent texts; the main character acts as a mediator between cultures, texts, axiological models, respectively, endowed with transitional features; the rhetorical figures and rhetorical poetic syntax are emphasized; an autointertext of one's own biographical experience is created as a semiotic "re-reading" of reference cultural authorities; the way the motive complex is perceived tends to a particular genre matrix; a new genre develops as an intertextual rethinking of a retrospective genre projection.
For the experimental confirmation of the dissertation work of this category, the dramatic series "Plays about the Greats" by the contemporary Ukrainian playwright Valery Gerasymchuk was selected.
The motives of Gerasymchuk's biographical plays appeal to the "prepared" reader and demonstrate the enormous form-contentual potential of modern biographical drama, because they are culturally intertextual and program the perception of artist-creators in the broad context of the culture and archetype of “artist complex”. The issue of post-totalitarian reformatting of the Ukrainian biographical canon is fundamental for the contemporary Ukrainian author of biographical plays. In this context the biographical stories of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, writer and film director Alexander Dovzhenko, historian and fiction writer Dmitry Yavornikare actualized. The problematic nature of these figures for the Ukrainian cultural pantheon is that each of them exercised his talent in the imperial metropolises at a certain stage in their lives (Sheptytsky - in Poland, Dovzhenko, and Jawornicki - in Moscow). However, exactly these personalities made every effort to transform Ukrainian culture into "anti-colonial". Motivational codes of biographical plays about artists have some specifics, for example there is fully implemented the so-called autonomous "artist complex": all protagonists are non-standard, non-trivial, extraordinary bright personalities, capable of unpredictable acts and multi-layered play. After all, Gerasymchuk's innovation is the involvement of dramatic genres in the system of play motives and heroes, which proves that cultural intertext in the dramatic discourse works at one of the deepest and most conservative levels - the genre.
