"Gray zone" as a marker of a citizenship (based on S. Zhadan’s novel "Boarding School" and A. Kurkov’s "Gray Bees")

Abstract

The number of published books about the war in the Donbass can not be counted. Well-known writers and beginners, soldiers, volunteers, journalists, eyewitnesses and just willing write. At first, this niche was mainly represented by collections of Facebook notes, memoirs of direct participants, reportage publications, so-called samples of “non-fiction prose”. Then came the print and the artwork. This testified to the fact that modern Ukrainian society needs such literature. Therefore, all these texts require careful reading and analysis not only of ordinary Ukrainians, but also of specialists. In the stream of conversation about military literature it is also about functional aspects: communicative, informational, aesthetic.

Zhadan’s novels “Boarding School” and A. Kurkov’s “Gray Bees” immediately differed from other works by their value system, artistic value of the work, and, finally, the author’s degree of truthfulness. The researcher analyzed them in the context of other books on relevant topics, highlighted the literary-critical discourse around the texts. The author carefully researched the genre and style features of the texts, identified the features on the walkie-talkie, highlighted the features of modern military prose. Particular attention is paid to the images of local residents of the “gray zone”, their perception of the war, the formation of civic position and national identity and more. The binary opposition of worldviews, which still greatly influence the cultural and historical self-identification of the people of Ukraine, is analyzed. This is the national-democratic model against the ideological legacy of communism, which underlies the identity of the “Soviet person”. This position is largely retrograde for most contemporaries, especially the young, and for the older generation such an ephemeral “return” to Soviet identity is a form of psychological asylum.