ARTISTIC DETAIL IN THE HISTORICAL NOVELS OF W. SCOTT AND M. STARYTSKY

Abstract

Purpose. To analyze the artistic details of W. Scott’s and M. Starytsky’s historical novels to identify the author’s position on the details depicted; to compare the artistic and functional features of their local color, landscape, and objects; to show the intersections and differences in the development of both Scottish and Ukrainian literature and the interaction of different mentalities in the process of reflecting the world around.

Methods. The research is carried out from the standpoint of complex literary-textological analysis, cultural-historical and comparative-typological methods.

Results. As a result of the research, analysis of the types of artistic details in the historical novels of W. Scott and M. Starytsky was carried out; different types of artistic details were discovered, collected and systematized and their functions were revealed in separate works of the Ukrainian and Scottish novelist; the peculiarities of use of portrait details and landscapes, their place and role in the creative process of the writers are determined.

Conclusions. Based on the analysis of the artistic detail in both writers’ historical novels, it can be argued that M. Starytsky, having mastered the experience of predecessors and contemporaries (and not only from domestic literature), developed his own system of images of the objective world and generally maintained it, albeit inconsistently, in all his multifaceted work. In this system, the writer’s scientific knowledge and his ideological and aesthetic principles were synthesized in a unique way, to which we include various factors – religious, historiosophical, national, stylistic, and so on. Scott’s experience became a kind of springboard for actively increasing the role of the authorial-subjective factor in literature and art, which is clearly defined in realistic novels of the second half of the nineteenth century, when attention was given to detailing the environment. Detailing, in the historical novels of W. Scott and M. Starytsky, serves as a historical background, conveys the spirit of the era, helps to reveal the temper and individuality of the character, his/her own artistic image, is a part of the landscape panorama as well as it is a means of emotional impact on the reader.