‘THUNDERING OVER HALYCH’ BY SVIATOMYR-MYKHAILO FOSTUN: A NARRATIVE OF THE UKRAINIAN PRESENCE IN MEDIEVAL HISTORY

Abstract

The article deals with the historical novel by Svyatomyr-Mykhailo Fostun "It Thundered Over Halych" from the perspective of postcolonial discourse, using the possibilities of interdisciplinary methods of analysis. The studies of Yu. Badzio, I. Lesiak-Rudnytsky, and E.D. Smith, which were used in the course of the research, made it possible to analyse the narrative of the presence of Ukrainians as a Slavic people in the early Middle Ages, which refutes the ideas of a metropolis. The synthesis of the methods of philological textual analysis and identity theory contributed to the identification of identifiers of Ukrainian identity, which appears in the depiction of the organisation of social relations on the basis of the Rus' Truth, the supremacy of princely power, the rights of the assembly, the absence of a hierarchy of aristocratic titles, cultural and religious traditions, geographical attachment of the inhabitants, Ukrainian cuisine, etc. The analysis of the plot of the work, which is based on real historical events, made it possible to study the modes of polarity of Western and Eastern civilisations, their influence on the formation of value orientations of the princes of Kievan Rus. Thus, despite the close ties between Kievan Rus and Tsargrad, the writer justifies the Western primacy in the formation of social and political relations, and denies any imperialism. We have studied not only the toponymic and anthropological characteristics of the city before the boyar rebellion, but also its visual, sound, and olfactory images, which enhance the emotional impact on the reader and reflect the destructive power of the crowd. The realistic type of narrative, created with the help of historicism, plot architecture, and the influence of the chronicle tradition, provides mediation between the artistic world of the work and the reader. At the plot level of the historical story, we traced the formation of Ukrainian identity; territorial and ethnic mental difference with Russia as the centre of the metropolis.