The metaphorical potential of a documentary drama about Russian crimes in Mariupol

By the drama “Marathon 'Russian Roulette'” by Kateryna Penkova

Abstract

The article examines Kateryna Penkova’s play “Marathon ‘Russian Roulette’” as a vivid artistic and documentary testimony to the Russian genocide in Mariupol, Ukraine in the spring of 2022. It highlights the unique resources of the dramatic text, which is capable of reaching a wide audience, including those outside Ukraine. 

The subject of the study is both the documentary and metaphorical potential of the text under investigation, for which interactive messages were collected in various formats for its public presentation. Since this text, in the author’s opinion, is one of the most artistically powerful works about the tragedy of Mariupol and does not require special resources for presentation to audiences outside Ukraine (the monodrama is designed for only one female role), the purpose of the article is primarily to draw attention to it and reveal the multi-level nature of its metaphorical potential. 

Methodologically, the author draws on cultural anthropology, gender, trauma and memory studies, as well as traditional literary analysis of the poetics of dramatic works. The scientific novelty lies in the first literary reading of this text and the identification of its system of metaphorical levels, which correspond to confession, the initiation scheme of folk tales, theater of cruelty, horror films, stories about superhumans, and many other formats of cultural prototexts.

The result of the study is a presentation of the metaphorical system of the work, which is realized through the dynamics of color and sound sequences, through the comprehension of the accumulation of dismembered / fragmented human bodies, the murder of children, and syndromes of hunger and emotional exhaustion.  Such non-fictional testimonies must be heard outside Ukraine as the Ukrainian version of the events of spring 2022 and create Ukrainian contexts for the Mariupol text of war.