Corporality as the experiment and performance in the Oleh Poliakov’s novel “Slaves and friends of lady Vekla”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the topical problem of modern literary studies — the artistic representation of human corporeality in the novels of the early XXI century. The aim of the article is to identify the artistic peculiarity of imaginative embodiment of the most representative sociocultural tendencies connected with the experience of “being-in-the-body” in the novel “Slaves and friends of lady Vekla” by Oleh Poliakov. The aim and the main tasks of the article are to identify the use of the following methods: comparative, comparative-historical, and some of the elements of mythological method. The novel is investigated from the positions of genre and stylistic analysis, considering the deep transformations of artistic consciousness on the turn of centuries, in particular the rethinking of a worldview and the aesthetic paradigm of postmodernism. At the same time special attention in the investigation is paid to the extra-literary factors of the formation of Oleh Poliakov`s artistic world — first of all, to the concept of human body as a sociocultural construct which is widespread in modern Humanities. The perception of the category of corporeality in art correlates with two main directions of the development of post-postmodernism. One of them represents a human body as the space for game and performance. This direction connects with the general tendencies of virtualization and game strategies in modern art. Another direction represents body in its mythological wholeness as a microcosm and correlates with the rethinking of literary tradition in modern novels. Oleh Poliakov creates his artistic world at the intersection of different literary genres: social dystopia, detective story, psychological and mystical novels. It is proved that by using complex genre form the author displays in his work the tendencies which are characteristic of modern perception of human corporeality — the attitude to a body as a product of social construction and awareness of the risks connected with such an approach. The results of the investigation open up new perspectives in scientific comprehension of patterns of the literary process on the turn of XX–XXI centuries in a wide artistic and philosophical context.