Одеса на перехресті міфів: «Танжер» Івана Козленка

Abstract

The creation of a myth of the city as a place that claims to play special and particularized, individual role becomes a particular case of the cultural mythologizing expansion. But if it used to be focused on the creation of sacred and mystical vector, now it is essentially antropomorfizovaniy. The modern myth of the modern city is close to human history, imitating it; it seeks to provide cultural awareness of the things which lack in the reality - the lightness and optimism. This trend is quite clearly represented in the mythology of Odessa, the image of which essentially overlaps the boundaries of the image of topos, increasing its sense to cultural dominants which organize the system. The mythology of Odessa is an interesting system, the components of which are the myths of different cultural orientation: it saves the imperial myth that resonates today with the Soviet myth, with the Jewish-Russian-speaking myth (quite complex in nature and internal functional setting) and, of course, with the Ukrainian one. Among the existing diversity of cultural paradigms of the Ukrainian Odessa myth the attention is attracted by the novel "Tangier" by Ivan Kozlenko. The work was written in 2006, published in 2007, in the magazine "Kievan Rus". Ivan Kozlenko’s “Tangier” is the novel about a young Ukrainian living in the Russianspeaking Odessa; this is the national problem, despite the author’s desire to remove it at the bottom of today's conflicts in the text, which gives us the possibility to understand the deep nature of the character’s drama. The Ukrainian version of the Ukrainian history of the period of the armed battles on the ruins of the empire and the Ukrainian Renaissance of the 20s are strangely intersected in his vision world. The character is substantially immersed in the Ukrainian myth, localized in the mentioned time, trying to adjust the optics to the present time. At first glance, we may talk about the commonly accepted antropomorfizatsiya of the urban space, but the fact is that the city has not only a body but also a soul, and then the meeting of the two beings – a man and a city becomes inevitable. Therefore no coincidence is that the traditional text of the conflict between the characters in the subtext causes resistance between a character and a city. "Tangier" refers to the type of works in which setting of the creativity of myths turns out to be stronger, the less it is declared, but it is actualized by the artistic structure of the work, which expresses opposition to "top" and "bottom" with an urgent desire to harmonize them, to establish a dialogue between them. The myth of the modern times – especially the Ukrainian one - in producing of which the significant role is played by aesthetically biased mind, inclined to "blow out" physicality, winning not only by the physical vitality but also by the spiritual continuity, energetic transcendent impulse.