THE CONCEPTS OF DYING AND DEATH IN UKRAINIAN DRAMA ABOUT THE FULL-SCALE WAR OF 2022-2024: BASIC MODELS AND TEXTUAL STRATEGIES
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Date
2025
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Plovdiv University Press
Abstract
The article deals with interpretations of the largest war in the modern world, proposed by contemporary Ukrainian non-combatant playwrights after 24 February 2022. Three basic models of the conceptual field of dying and death have been identified: the eternal battle between Good and Evil, the totality of war as initiation, and new rites of passage. Within each model, three major textual strategies have been analysed based on examples of contemporary plays about the war, covering various general cultural aspects of the artistic interpretation of the war through the writers’ comprehension of dying and death: the opposition between Ukrainian vitality and Russian mortality as Good and Evil; metamorphosis of the body in the context of the war; the impossibility of observing burial rites under the conditions of war; cataloguing of Russian war crimes; transformation of the victim status; conscious and spontaneous resistance to aggression; design of new rituals of transition; transfer of ordeals from the postmortem to the zone of death's anticipation; opening of portals between worlds.
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Keywords
war drama, dying, death, cultural model, textual strategies