The Genre of Ukrainian Classical Novel as a Problem

Abstract

The article is devoted to the novel genre in Ukrainian literature. The authors offer an answer to the question of why the genre of the novel appeared so late in Ukrainian literature and what genre features the Ukrainian classic novel has. The article examines the historical background of the genre development in 19th-century Ukrainian literature, which developed in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. In these empires, there were different conditions for the development of Ukrainian literature: quite liberal in Austria-Hungary and very limited in Russia due to the ban on the Ukrainian language. The article examines and analyzes in more detail three reasons explaining the late emergence and establishment of the Ukrainian novel: 1) language, 2) subject matter, and 3) literary terminology. The novel as a “non-canonical genre” (Bakhtin) requires a direct dialogue with contemporariness, and such a dialogue was impossible in the case of the 19th-century Ukrainian novel because the language of Ukrainian intellectuals at that time was not Ukrainian. In the Russian Empire, it was French or Russian, and in Austria-Hungary, it was German or Polish. Similarly, the subject of both the new Ukrainian literature in general (Ivan Kotlyarevskyi) and the first Ukrainian novels was connected not with contemporariness, but with the heroic past, that is, with the Cossack era of the 17th century (Panteleimon Kulish, Vasyl Doroshenko). The issue of literary terminology is also problematic because Ukrainian authors defined their large prose works not novels, but “opowidannia” or “powist’”, using in this case the meaning of these terms in the German tradition (Erzählung) or Polish (powieść), respectively.