UDC

Authors

Abstract

The paper analyzes the nature of the comic (“carnival”, “comic mask”, etc.) by studying the “Odessa text” of the twenty-first-century writer G. Golubenko. The author of the article investigates the elements of carnivalization, observing the categories of humour, irony, comic situations and mocking elements in Golubenko’s The Red City. The paper describes the style of this Odessa writer, whose work displays vivid traits of the carnival motif. Before the readers’ eyes, spiritual guides are being blurred and a sense of hopelessness and fragility of life appears, inducing one to change places and generating semantics of transition. The characters in his works are endowed with traits of the unique masked types of Italian commedia dell’arte. Human vices, ridiculed by the author, take on quintessential forms. The main characters are enterprising, inventive and adventurous. The paper makes a short excursus to the concept of creative freedom; society’s understanding of freedom has been changing with time, taking on weird shapes. Golubenko shows his own interpretation of this concept. The motif of freedom is closely linked with the motif of endless sea as a free element. To bring forward the nature of the ridiculous, Golubenko uses two classic types of parody based on a deliberate contradiction between the style and the theme of the art form.

Keywords

References

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