NEOMYTHOLOGY AND THE MYSTICISM OF WAR IN PLAYS ABOUT THE OCCUPATION OF KHERSON AND KHERSON REGION (BASED ON THE ANTHOLOGY “DRAMA PANORAMA 2023”)

Abstract

With this article, I continue the reflections I began in the previous issue of Pivdennyi Arkhiv on how contemporary Ukrainian war drama sees Kherson and the Kherson region, how it interprets the resistance of Kherson residents to Russian aggression, what new metaphors it produces or what cultural themes it reinterprets: earlier I tried to recreate a relatively coherent panorama of playwrights’ work with Kherson topos and show the representativeness of dissimilar authorial concepts. However, the plays by Nina Zakhozhenko, Oksana Hrytsenko, and Ihor Nosovsky included in the anthology “Drama Panorama 2023”, which are dedicated to Kherson and the Kherson region, can be interpreted from the standpoint of a completely different research logic – as a modern elaboration of archetypal and mythological experience manifested in the situation of the ultimate border under Russian occupation. In this context, the protagonists of the plays are perceived as carriers of experience that is much deeper than the individual, and the mythological core is formed by both traditional archetypal characters (Charon) and heroes mythologized by modern culture (Zorro), as well as categories that are completely new to contemporary drama and that allow us to comprehend the absurdity of the occupation and the altered consciousness of a person within it (Alzheimer’s disease). Purpose: a mythopoetic interpretation of several Ukrainian plays of 2022–2025 dedicated to Kherson and the Kherson region against the backdrop of full-scale Russian aggression. Methods: work with sources, mythopoetic interpretation, and intertextual analysis. Results. The article examines three plays about the occupation of Kherson and the Kherson region, whose authors treat the occupation as a modified topos that is not always subject to rational interpretation in documentary or psychological coordinates, and therefore requires the activation of mythological and mystical codes. The texts of only one anthology of contemporary dramatic works about the war, Drama Panorama 2023, were taken into account. The article identifies and illustrates the cultural, mythological, and neo-mythological codes that playwrights Nina Zakhozhenko, Oksana Hrytsenko, and Ihor Nosovsky work with in their plays about Kherson and the Kherson region under occupation. Conclusions. The playwrights “The Carrier” by Nina Zakhozhenko, “The Milkman” by Oksana Hrytsenko, and “Stickers” by Ihor Nosovsky, presented in the playwright’s anthology Drama Panorama 2023 and dedicated to the occupation of Kherson and Kherson region in 2022, demonstrate how different the authors’ pictures of the occupation are for those who wrote it from the outside, based on communication with its witnesses, and for those who lived through it as a personal traumatic experience. In the first case, we are dealing with a coherent picture of the world and its clear identification and ethical poles, organized around relatively established mythological concepts; in the second case, we are dealing with the chaotic picture of the world, the breakdown of ethical boundaries, and the search for new metaphors or mythologies that can center such breaks.