THE AUTHOR'S ANTIMYTH ABOUT STAKHANOV AND THE STAKHANOVIST MOVEMENT IN CONTEMPORARY PROSE

Abstract

The study is devoted to an original phenomenon in contemporary literature – the author's anti-myth, which debunks the propaganda (Soviet) myth. It is found that the author's antimyth is created according to the laws of mythology and is also endowed with specific features. The basis for the analysis were literary texts about the Ukrainian East published during the Russian-Ukrainian war. These are the book of short stories “Grandma Didn't Like to Die” by Pavlo Belyansky and the novel “Stakhanov's Movement” by Roman Budanov. Both writers are from the Luhansk region. Their works accurately represent the life of miners, in particular, rethinking the official Stakhanov myth.The article reveals and analyzes the authors' antimyths about Stakhanov and the Stakhanov movement, namely: “Stakhanov without a halo” and “Stakhanov's movement is a gloom” by P. Belyansky; “Stakhanov and magic” and “Stakhanov's movement is ’not what you think” by R. Budanov.P. Belyansky's antimyth is characterized by a combination of the comic and the tragic, the use of irony, caricatures, and oppositional dialogues. The texts in which the “Stakhanovite hero” (different from the Soviet myth) acts are satirical stories that to some extent resemble anecdotes and jokes about the Soviet past-mocking, witty, and with hidden sadness.R. Budanov's antimythos contains a lot of artistic fiction and speculation, a combination of the real and the unreal, pictures of the past and the future. The writer used the genre possibilities of detective, fantasy, and alternative history.The antimyths about Stakhanov and the Stakhanov movement in the books of both authors have a clear structure, the semantic components of which oppose the semantic components of the Soviet myth. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the deconstruction of the Soviet labour myth, like other ideological myths, is caused by worldview changes in the modern Ukrainian society, which is fighting the Russian aggressor.