Tkachenko O. The Development of The Elegy in Ukrainian literature of XVI-XIX Cent

The thesis is the first systematic analysis of the elegy in Ukrainian poetry from the ancient times up to the beginning of the XXth century. For the first time the sources of the elegy and its place in the old-time Ukrainian poetry have been explored as to the historical and typological aspect of the genre. The evolution of the elegy has been traced on the basis of the analysis of the best elegiac lyric examples of Ukrainian poets, especially G.Skovoroda, and the poets of the XIXth century L.Borovikovski, A.Metlinski, M.Petrenko, V.Zabila, T.Shevchenko, O.Konyski, L.Hlibov, S.Rudanski, U.Fedkovich, S.Vorobkevich, Y.Shchoholev, M.Staritski, V.Samiylenko, P.Grabovski, I.Franko, L.Ukrainka and others whose works helped to obtain the qualities of ekegy as an original poetic genre. The proposed scientific research treats the elegy as to the following aspects of its development: the elegy as a theoretical problem; the elegy as a historical and literary phenomenon; various genre modifications of the elegy inthe works of its best representatives. Such characteristics of the elegy as self-sufficiency of its artistic and poetic system, its emotional key, lyric narration form, imagery character, and the peculiarities of expressing the author's world outlook are considered as the most important ones. The work highlights the genre modification on various stages of the literary process in the context of development of aesthetic perception; reveals the national peculiarities of the genre with its poetic traditions and the mentality of Ukrainian people, defines the typological features of the gence as a stable aesthetic phenomenon, maintaining the best poetic constants throughout the centuries-old Ukrainian history.