DRAMATURGIC VISION OF THE DAMAGED IDENTITY IN SERGIY ZHADAN’S PLAY “BREAD ARMISTICE”

Abstract

In the article, Serhiy Zhadan’s play “Bread Armistice” is considered from the standpoint of postcolonial criticism as a metaphorical illustration of the blurred identity that manifested itself during the war in eastern Ukraine, which began in 2014.

Purpose: to analyze the text of the play to reflect the painful points of identity of modern Ukrainian society and the artistic resources of its future construction, to fit the analyzed text of Serhiy Zhadan into broader global and domestic humanitarian contexts.

Methods. The leading methodology is postcolonial critique, which in combination with the traditional analysis of artistic text and aesthetic practices allows us to talk about the artistic construction of a new postwar Ukrainian identity, taking into account the world humanitarian experience of the XXI century and its Ukrainian contexts.

Results. Contemporary Ukrainian artists, through their artistic practices, are actively involved in the process of reflecting the cracks and fissures of Ukrainian civic identity and are involved in the analysis of the causes and consequences of internal identification crises. Most of them successfully combine creativity and social activities aimed at building a real, not a fictitious civil dialogue about meanings and values, and not about money and propaganda, and Serhiy Zhadan belongs to this cohort. Being a native of the Ukrainian East, through his own work he resists active attempts to split Ukraine humanitarianly into West and East (or West, East and Center) and implements artistic attempts to switch the conversation of intellectuals from the discourse of division (they) to the discourse of selfidentification, – complex, heterogeneous, with different previous experience, which should not be shared if it is reflected and spoken). In various art projections, the artist analyzes various aspects of the crisis of Ukrainian identity, with which neither the official Ukrainian government nor the public and media spheres worked, as well as the specifics of its front lines: the result was a complete disorientation of many “little people” in geoculture, modern geopolitics identification of own affiliation / non-affiliation. Serhiy Zhadan contrasts the artificial East cultural concept of Donbass with the Ukrainian East marker in the play (with an emphasis on the Ukrainianness of this territory, not on its geographical coordinates), thus creating a futurological projection of the future national-civil dialogue. The artist deliberately offers in his register of protagonists decentralized “little people”, that is, mostly those in whom Ukrainians can recognize themselves and with whom Ukrainians can identify themselves – “non-heroes” who must gradually learn the values of liberal democracy and realize their own, subjective responsibility for their choice – that is, to learn to be involved in the fate of their country through the identification of belonging to it. The artist models a vision of how the scattered fragments of the old Ukrainian identity should be directed not to fictitious centers, but carefully collected and, taking into account the reflection of all our internal crises, involved in the positive construction of a new Ukrainian identity.

Conclusions. The author of the play “Bread Armistice” Serhiy Zhadan through artistic modelling of the mutilated Ukrainian identity in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine joins an important and promising intellectual discussion on the strategic priorities of Ukrainian society after deoccupation, formats of future social dialogue and avoidance of uncertainty and reciprocity. formation of post-war Ukrainian identity.