Film Aesthetics in the Ukrainian Novel of the 1920s: The Novel as Experiment

The primary goal of Ukrainian modernist and avant-garde writers was the construction of a new Ukrainian novel. In search of revolutionary models of representation and storytelling, these writers turned to cinema for themes, compositional principles, and narrative devices. This study focuses on the aesthetics of cinema as a vehicle for modernizing narrative modes, structure, and characterization in Ukrainian experimental novels of the 1920s. The adoption of the dispassionate camera-eye narration reconfigured the traditional role of the novelistic narrator and contributed to vivid, lively narration. The literary emulation of film techniques such as montage revolutionized narrative structure and composition through rejection of linear storytelling and adoption of a fragmented, discontinuous style of narration. Cinematic aesthetics also affected character development, contributing to external, predominantly visual, characterization. Chapter 1 examines the fascination with cinema among Ukrainian writers during the 1920s artistic revolution, focusing on film aesthetics and early application of cinematic devices in Ukrainian prose and poetry. Following chapters analyze the two most representative novels to absorb aesthetics of cinema. Chapter 2 analyzes the memoir-novel Maister korablia (Master of the ship; 1928) by Iurii Ianovs’kyi. The novel chronicles the history of film production in a 1920s Ukrainian film studio, the specifics of which are reflected in the novel’s collage composition, creating an effect of collective production. The incorporation of camera-eye narration produces a sense of immediacy and narrative authenticity, while montage construction shapes the sequence of the narrator’s fragmented memories. Chapter 3 explores the dramatically different effect of the application of cinematic devices in Leonid Skrypnyk’s Intelihent (The intellectual; 1927–28), presenting the “screened novel” as a new, utilitarian literary form. At once an exaggerated Bildungsroman and a study of the life of a specimen of the bourgeois intelligentsia, this novel incorporates fiction, cinema and non-fiction. The employment of camera-eye narration emphasizes the mechanical, puppet-like qualities of the bourgeois characters, while the montage construction and juxtaposition of cinematic narration with the narrator’s commentary directed to the audience generate irony and satire. Conclusions assess the legacy of these innovative yet understudied intermedial experiments both in Ukraine and in the broader European context.Ph.D.2018-11-30 00:00:0