Autobiographical narrative in Ukrainian and foreign modernist prose

Abstract

The article examines autobiographical narrative as one of the key strategies of modernist prose of the first half of the 20th century and as a form of authorial self-representation in fiction. The main theoretical approaches to the study of autobiographical writing are outlined, in particular the concepts of the autobiographical pact, narrative identity, and autofiction. Emphasis is placed on the combination of documentary and artistic elements as important features of autobiographical discourse. The article analyses the transformation of real events from the artist’s life experience into the artistic structure of the work, as well as the relationship between the author, narrator, and character in the prose of Ukrainian writers of the 1920s and 1930s — Valerian Pidmohylny, Mykola Khvylovy, and Yuriy Yanovskyi. Based on the works of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, the study outlines the specific features of the artistic interpretation of personal experience and of the problems of memory, time, and narrative identity. Attention is focused on the transformation of the artists’ biographies, as well as on the problems of self-representation, historical experience, and the traumatic interpretation of reality characteristic of modernism. The study identifies the common and distinctive features of the functioning of autobiographical narrative in Ukrainian and foreign modernist traditions and defines its role in shaping the image of the artist-intellectual in the context of sociocultural change. A shared feature is the orientation toward inner experience as the main object of narration, which attests to the modernist rethinking of autobiographical writing. It is demonstrated that autobiographical narrative in the works of Ukrainian and foreign writers performs not a documentary, but a constructive, aesthetic, and identificational function, becoming a form of artistic elaboration of personal and national experience and of the renewal of the novel as a genre.