SYMBOL AND NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN THE SHORT FICTION OF MYKHAILO YATSKIV AND EDGAR POE: A TYPOLOGICAL APPROACH

Abstract

The article examines the typological correspondences of motifs, narrative techniques, and the use of symbols in the short stories of M. Yatskiv and E. Poe. One of Edgar Poe’s key narrative strategies is the repetition of a crucial word at the opening of a story, which recalls M. Yatskiv’s principle of structuring a work around a pervasive symbol, as exemplified in «White Sheep». In both authors, the narrator plays a central role, mediating events through self-reflection. Spatial and temporal parameters in their works remain unspecified, while an uncanny setting often symbolizes the human head or mind. M. Yatskiv, like E. Poe, frequently employs the figure of the flaneur – a detached urban observer wandering through the city (e.g., «The Paganism of the Crowd»). The narrative in M. Yatskiv’s stories, similarly to Poe’s, operates as a structured dream, shifting into dreamlike or fantastic dimensions. Female images (such as the former beloved in «The Paganism of the Crowd» or the dying woman in «The Girl on the Black Horse») may be interpreted as embodiments of the narrator’s Shadow or as characters personifying repressed desires. In «The Girl on the Black Horse», the aestheticization of a young woman’s death is combined with the proclamation of the principle of «art for art’s sake»: the artist-hero must lose his heart in order to behold «eternal truth». A significant distinction of M. Yatskiv’s narrative manner is the conciseness of description, in contrast to Poe’s extensive descriptive layering. M. Yatskiv’s laconic style, influenced by Baudelaire’s prose poetry, relies on the immediacy of impression. The endings of his works are often «explosive», resembling an awakening or an entry into a state of «death within life». Thus, drawing on Edgar Poe’s narrative strategies, M. Yatskiv constructs his own system of imagery focused on the protagonist’s psychological condition and symbolic detail. He reinterprets established motifs within the context of modernist art and its interaction with an absurd reality, demonstrating the formation of an original modernist poetics.