The dissertation is devoted to Ukrainian prose of the first half of the 19th century in an anthropological dimension. Its interpretation from the point of view of the "cultural" explosion, the variability of the canon, the transience of the artistic system prompted the author to go beyond the literary methodology itself. Historical-mythological projections, international analogies, language-ethnic excursions need to be based on a synergistic concept of culture. The application of the theory of cultural transfer and the thesaurus approach contributes to the liberation of Ukrainian literature from the narrow framework of ethnographic reading, from the shackles of old-fashionedness, locality, excessive sociologization, and populist pathos.
Modern approaches make it possible to avoid worn-out ideas about its remoteness, rurality, and backwardness, to remove from it the robes of provincialism and marginality and turn them into creatively productive properties of modern writing. The progress of modern literature from its birth, dawn to the establishment of a canon based on the multilevel of the word, the palimpsest of its historical meanings, openness to the dialogue of traditions is reproduced. A fundamentally new look at the origins of Ukrainian writing in the context of the cultural history of literature sheds light on its modernity, the connection with the processes of nation-building in the conditions of hybridization, split identity and "blocked culture".
It is proven that the anthropological factors of the national space contribute to the understanding of the text as a kind of experiment, a dialogue with the world within the limits of the author's concepts of reality, a modern reinterpretation of the cultural archaic, the translation of the tradition in a new literary and artistic consciousness. The analysis of the works of Ukrainian novelists of the first half of the 19th century proves that most often the exchange of human experience and the meeting of worldviews takes place in a ritual, in the field of intersection, borderland, the embodiment of the "psychology of nations" and initiation, the birth of a new identity. The texts selected for analysis demonstrate this topic in a concentrated manner, at the level of story-creating, genre factors, the special substance of the word, the texture of artistic writing. These characteristics shed light on the inherent works of H. Kvitky-Osnovyanenko's encyclopedic lapidary and complete immersion in the element of custom and ethnography as indispensable components of the recreated ritual of Ukrainian hospitality. The text is included in the mechanism of coding by tradition, which is manifested in the relevant norms and rules, precedents and canons. They illustrate the clash of old-world and modern culture, Cossack autonomy and imperial assimilation, fusion, false Europeanization, etc. Comparing the distorted models of cultural behavior in H. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko and M. Gogol allows us to see in the ritual also an inversion, the destruction of the horizon of the reader's expectations with the help of the poetics of the absurd, the successive debunking and nullification of the previous events. From the point of view of transfer, the fair is indicative as the embodiment of the intersection of folk archaism and cultural innovations.
The prospects of applying the methodology of cultural transfer are related to the development of an anthropological history of Ukrainian literature of the first half of the 19th century in the range of intercultural and interdisciplinary relations. The study of anthropology of space, literary urbanism will contribute to the creation of a complex history of ethological genres, their reading in a cultural and civilizational context. Meanwhile, the analysis of sensitivity in the future can become the basis for a complete psychohistory of Ukrainian classics, and the category of national narrative will allow deepening the mutual influences of language and nation in the study of the history of speech genres of a specific literary period.
