WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY: IRONIC CONTEXT OF HIS “KYIV TEXT”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the parody ballad by W. M. Thackeray "The Legend of St. Sophia of Kioff" (1839). An attempt was made to indicate the source of information about Kyiv, which could be found in Jane Porter’s historical novel "Thaddeus of Warsaw", written according to the testimonies of Polish emigrants. The ballad is interpreted as a traditional for English oral and written literature genre, which has acquired formal signs of printed text. All these signs are present in Thackeray's ballad, including the division into chapters, a functionally significant paratext, topical historical and cultural allusiveness, satirical-defamatory pathos, polemics. "Kyiv text" in Thackeray’s poem is modeled according to the genre conventions of the ballads about St. George, stating an informative narrative with a programmed and incessant general message. Thackeray creates the image of Kyiv in the traditions of utopian literature, calling it a real paradise. Kyiv happy residents became victims of envious neighbors, whose ethnographic and religious affiliation is absurdly mottled. Thackeray does not hold on to the historical truth, forming a fictional space, markers of which are stereotypes of romantic literature topos, comparisons, the allusion to the works and the style of Byron, Hoffman and other romantics. Irony becomes the defining ideological and aesthetic dominant of Thackeray’s ballad about the confrontation between the Kyivans and Cossack invaders, which, marked by intertext, forms the distance of the narrator from the text, inducing the reader to form his own ironic perception of both the artistic world of the work and of the reality.

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References

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