Dramaturgical Corps of texts "2: Anthology of the 9th DRAMA.UA Plays Competition": plural respectives of War

Abstract

The article analyses the corpus of texts “2: Anthology of the 9th Drama.UA Plays Competition” as  a  holistic dramatic anthology, with the metatextual potential of the book as a whole and the internal dialogism of its components as the subject of the study. At the same time, the problem of the study turns out to be somewhat broader, since the consideration of contemporary anthology projects of  drama in  historical retrospect also allows us to record a general change in priorities within the national dramatic discourse on the way to a conscious choice of authors and compilers to be involved in the modern Ukrainian political nation. The main methods used in the article are genre and problematic and aesthetic analysis with elements of conceptology and comparative studies. On the one hand, the analysed drama anthology differs qualitatively from the first collection of the Drama.UA competition published in 2013, as it is organically integrated into the system of other anthologies of contemporary Ukrainian war drama about war, and in this sense it joins the collective voice of many playwrights from different creative centers and different generations (Anthology 24, Unnamed War, Drama Panorama 2023, Without Them, 7 Plays Created within the  IV  Laboratory of Drama of the National Theatre of Ukraine, etc) On the other hand, this corpus of texts by Kateryna Penkova (“Russian Roulette Marathon”), Andriy Bondarenko (“Atomic Mermaid”), Lena Kudaieva (“One Day”), Oksana Savchenko (“My Hell”), and Oleg Mikhailov (“The Sea Will Remain”) can be seen as a self-sufficient metatext endowed with its own internal plots and aesthetic patterns, since the works included in it were written almost at the same time, enter into numerous internal dialogues, and are framed by a kind of  hyper-catastrophic “Mariupol” framework, within which any other catastrophe of  war is perceived as connected local stories that change people and transform our consciousness. The relevance of the study is due to the obvious need for Ukrainian literary criticism to  respond promptly to new literary texts and textual corpora (collections, anthologies, virtual resources, etc) that comprehend the war almost live and therefore record the movement of aesthetic priorities in  its interpretation, which will be much more difficult to catch later. The consonance and dialogism of  the  anthology’s texts are considered at  the levels of genres, leading discourses, metaphorical language, and intensive searches for updated resources for the dramaturgical framing of war, which does not exhaust the problem of analysing this corpus, but only actualises it for further research at the levels of the conceptual sphere, poetics, and artistic anthropology of war.