“THE DOG” AS AN ANIMAL MARKER OF WAR IN NOVEL “THE ORPHANAGE” BY SERHIY ZHADAN

Abstract

Today, on the third year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, books about the war gain new relevance and are read in the mirror of modern realities. One of such books is a novel “The Orphanage” by Serhiy Zhadan, a writer who joined the National Guard in the spring of 2024 to defend Ukraine from the russians. The purpose of the article is the mythosemiotic reconstruction of the artistic image of a dog as one of the components of the concept of war and its projection onto the plane of national, civil and personal identities. Research methodology. The novel was studied using a complex analysis: the method of mythosemiotic reconstruction of the image, textual, linguistic and hermeneutic methods of analysis, elements of postcolonial criticism, theories of memory and trauma were combined. Research results. The artistic image of the dog is reconstructed on mythosemiotic slices of chronotopes, symbols, loci, harbingers, signs. As a component of the “dead” chronotope, “the dog” explains the mythological scenario of the end, in which the topos of the apocalyptic city is formed by synergistic images of war, and as an element of the whimsical, oneiric chronotope, “the dog” relays the semantics of trauma through the images of an unreal world – shadows and delusions. “The dog” marks homelessness as symbolic states of war, reveals both the semantics of life and death, as well as the semantics of “transit to nowhere” and shaky hiding in the mutilated time-spaces of the station, home, school, where a pretend identity is formed. Due to the motives of damage, brokenness, vulnerability, defenselessness, which are reinforced by the semantics of harassment, redundancy, otherness, as well as “wrong” behavioral models, the images of people and dogs in the text of the novel are identified. Traumatized, pseudo- and pathos self-identification is caused by inauthenticity, indifference, uncertainty, and conscious identity – through initiation by traps, circles, losses – is marked by memory. “The dog” denotes one’s own and others’, demarcates one’s own and others’ spaces, dehumanizes and humanizes the world of people. Conclusions. The animalistic marker of war is reconstructed in the coordinates of mythosemiotics, postcolonial criticism, studies of memory and trauma with the expansion of the symbolic spectrum of the image and its projection onto the plane of identities.