POETICS OF THE “BALADS ABOUT SOUR TOMATOES” BY S. OSOKA

Abstract

Serhiy Osoka is one of the most talented modern writers, author of poetry collections, prose collections, translator, editor and critic. This year, his collection “Three Ropes for Maria” was included in the “long list” of nominees for the Shevchenko Prize. The article is about one of the best short stories by S. Osoka “The Ballad of pickled tomatoes”, included in the collection of short stories “Night swimming in August”, for which the author was awarded the F. Rogovyi Prize (2018) of the Poltava Regional Council. The collection consists of more than thirty short stories, which are united by existential problems of life and death, the search for the meaning of life, attitude to the past, its connection with the present. “The Ballad of pickled tomatoes” is a kind of tuning fork of collection. It is established that there are two narrators in the novel – the events are presented from the point of view of a child and then an adult. Thus an intertwining and layering of different temporal and spatial spaces is ranspired, which deepens the semantic structure of the work. Memories of household items in childhood thus become a kind of mythological ritual in which man is inextricably linked with the earth, with the annual cycle, as well as with his family. It is proved that a special place in the short story “The Ballad of pickled tomatoes” is played by female characters – grandmother and great-grandmother. Great-grandmother is represented as the guardian of the family, as an archetypal image of the Great Mother – the native land. The deaths of grandmother and great-grandmother symbolize the severance of eternal ties, so they cause longing for the protagonist. But the image of tomatoes grown by women every year (cyclical motif) becomes a symbol of childhood memory (paradise motif). The article considers the features of the poetics of the short story and the functional load of the elements: rethought the genre of ballads, analyzed artistic time and space, mythological elements in the text, the content of the title, methods of characterization.