Playful-epatage "Blah-blah-prophesying" in almost the same extract by Oles Ulianenko

The literary works of Oles Ulianenko, whose 10th death anniversary was on 10 September 2020, provoked ambiguous critical reflections even during his lifetime. The aim of the article is to find the answer to a very simple but at the same time quite important question about the esthetic content of the last unfinished novel by Oles Ulianenko «The prophet», which according to its title and traditional approaches was analyzed by critics in rigorist-moralizing context. In contrast to such approaches, the suggested research is built on the designed and approved by doctoral and postdoctoral studies corporal-mimetic method to analyze fiction, the essence of which is justified by the notion «corporal mimetism» meaning that, in the first place, any literary text is interpreted considering its corporal determination. Consequently, for the first time in the Ukrainian study of literature, the interpretation of extremely contradictory works of the writer has allowed to make the conclusions that the seemingly apocalyptic problematics of the novel is controverted by applying the strategy of irony and epatage; therefore the image of the woman hanged on the tree, with her eyes and mouth sewn with the skin that was cut off her buttocks, does not only symbolize a depersonalized or even deantropologized personality but also suggests a discourse attempt to overcome that unspeakable horror by depicting the epatage situation in an ironical way; the horror which cannot be overcome in any other way. Contrariwise, the content of the analyzed extract of the literary work in general is that, despite the dreadful discourse represented in the novel the writer’s strategy changes completely and instead of gloomy artistic observing the frightful world and playing with horrors of the surrounding society, the recipient is offered neither indignation nor anger or even denying the latter, but an ironic playful-epatage «blah-blah-prophesying» on the matter