ETHNOCULTURAL CODES OF THE AGASPHERE MYTHOLOGEME IN OLEKSA STOROZHENKO’S NOVEL “MARKO THE DAMNED”

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to identify and describe the ethno-cultural codes of the Agasphere mythologeme that mark the Ukrainian identity of the dominant motif of immortality; to present literary tools adequate to the purpose and tasks of scientific research. Reactivating the meanings that have been dormant in a work of fiction requires an appropriate methodology. In our case, this is an interdisciplinary scientific paradigm based on a set of literary and linguistic methods, semiotic approaches to the study of cultural codes, namely methods of cross-cultural analysis (to compare universal and ethnospecific cultural codes of the Agasphere mythologeme); method of semiotic analysis (to clarify the sign nature of imagery and establish the mechanisms of interaction between different cultural codes); structural and semantic approach (to consider cultural codes in the structure of the verbal motif of immortality as such that perform a sign (symbolic) function in the process of communication); typological method (to distinguish similarities and differences in the cultural codes of the motif of immortality of the Agasfer mythologeme in the European and Ukrainian contexts). As a result of the scientific research, the approaches to the study of the cultural code as an interdisciplinary category and the identification of its typologies are generalized; the key strategies for deciphering the dominant ethno-cultural codes of the immortality motif that implement the Agasser mythologeme are identified. It is proved that the main ones in the structure of the immortality motif are the temporal and spiritual ethnocodes in “intercrossing” with zoomorphic, phytomorphic, anthropomorphic (anthropic), and object ethnocodes. The temporal and spatial cultural ethnocode is transversal to the novel and includes the chronotope of the road; the chronotope of the meeting; the chronotope of the threshold. It was found that the synthesis of cultural codes creates an ethnocentric picture of the world. It introduces the reader to the story of Mark the Damned’s sin against God and people, his wandering through time and space to atone for his guilt, the hero’s enlightenment on the way to establishing a dialogue with the Creator, and testifies to his accession to divine truth and order in the natural coordinates of life and death. The article analyzes the artistic realization of the conceptual foundations of ethnomentalism in the categories of good and evil, divine and devilish, sin and virtue, folk eschatology, identified in national semantics and topics, symbols, allusive and reminiscence layers of mythopoetics and Ukrainian folklore. The features of the literary Gothic idiom of O. Storozhenko’s idiostylistics are clarified in the categories of the eerie, macabre, irrational, supernatural, infernal, etc. The conclusions outline the specifics of cross-cultural communication between the Ukrainian wanderer and the image of Agasphere in Western European Romanticism, tracing typological similarities and differences. Observations on the mechanisms of reception and transformation of the immortality motif in the Agasfer mythologeme are generalized through the decoding of the novel’s ethnocodes, revealed in ethnomental axiology, semantics and poetics, which are significant for Ukrainian culture and the creative personality of Oleksa Storozhenko. The relevance of the methodology and tools aimed at highlighting the national identity of an artistic work through the actualization of ethnospecific cultural codes is confirmed.