THE TRANSFORMATION OF EMOTIONS AS A FORM OF THEIR DESTRUCTION IN OLENA ASTASIEVA’S PLAY «A DICTIONARY OF EMOTIONS IN A TIME OF WAR»

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyse the emotional dynamics in Olena Astasieva’s play A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War through the prism of the transformation of emotions as a form of their destruction, as well as to clarify the genre specificity of the work and the linguistic means through which the inner experience of war is rendered. The focus is placed on fear, horror, hunger, betrayal, hatred, love, irritation, guilt, confusion, bitterness, derealization, tears, post-traumatic reactivity, disappointment, anger, desolation, despair, and faith. Methods. The article employs elements of the cultural-historical, hermeneutic, descriptive, and contextual methods. The cultural-historical approach made it possible to consider the play within the coordinates of fullscale war, occupation, evacuation, and collective trauma. The hermeneutic method ensured the interpretation of the emotional dynamics and the inner logic of the work. The descriptive method made it possible to systematize the genre and linguistic features of the text. Contextual analysis provided grounds for relating the play to the broader field of contemporary Ukrainian wartime drama, documentary theatre, and trauma studies. Results. The analysis demonstrates that Olena Astasieva’s play represents the experience of war as a consecutive process of emotional destruction in which primary reactions change their quality, lose their stability, and develop into more complex psychic states. Fear transforms into panic, horror, and hatred; pain comes to include the loss of loved ones, home, work, and the familiar order of life, and then turns into anger, tears, desolation, and despair; prolonged mental tension generates derealization, post-traumatic reactivity, and inner numbness. It has been established that the genre model of the work is hybrid in character and combines the dictionary principle of organizing the material, micro-fragmentation, monologic testimony, dialogic insertions, correspondence, messages, and documentary anchoring in a specific time and space. The linguistic forms of emotional destruction are realized through short sentences, interrogative constructions, repetition, enumeration, polyphony of voices, insertions of others’ speech, Internet instructions, colloquial vocabulary, and affectively intensified utterances. Conclusions. A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War models war as an experience of profound inner rupture encompassing the perception of space, time, the body, home, loved ones, the future, and the self. The integrity of the play is ensured by the consecutive passage through the named emotional states and through the linguistic forms by which they are articulated. Language in this work records traumatic experience and at the same time reproduces its inner dynamics. This provides grounds for considering Olena Astasieva’s play as a representative text of contemporary Ukrainian wartime drama in which emotional destruction becomes one of the central modes of the artistic comprehension of war.