THE APOCRYPHICITY OF STANISLAV TSETLYAK'S COLLECTION “SOLITUDE”

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the figure of Stanislav Tsetlyak, a writer from the sixties from Donetsk region. This writer is absent from the history of Ukrainian literature, despite the fact that he debuted with a thin collection of short stories back in 1965. The following year, he was preparing for publication the next collection of short prose, which was no longer destined to become a book. Censorship intensified in the literary process A philologist by education, a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature by profession, a writer and scientist by vocation, S. Tsetlyak defended his PhD thesis and taught in pedagogical institutions in Kryvyi Rih and Sloviansk, remaining the author of a single book. But the typescript of his second collection «Loneliness» was still lucky enough to be preserved, and sixty years after it was written, it still reached the reader. The article contains the first receptive proposal for S. Tsetlyak's collection «Loneliness», which only this summer came into circulation. The aspect considered in the article is related to the concepts of autobiography and apocrypha. Unfortunately, this writer and teacher remains a blank spot in the history of Ukrainian culture to this day. The Wikipedia article does not even record the exact dates of birth and death of this person, who died relatively recently, in 1993. Tsetlyak's short fiction literally breaks out of the contexts of Soviet short stories of the 1960s and is interesting in literally every aspect, from a rich and diverse genre palette to stylistic dominants. Also of great interest are a number of poetic characteristics, such as the narrative complex of this prose, the image of the narrator, the obsessive chronotope (it is always Donetsk or Lviv), the overall image of insurmountable loneliness (in the «prickly» expressionistic dimension: loneliness) etc. A man born in a village in the Donetsk region and educated in Lviv grew up to be a not-quite-Soviet writer