Respectus Philologicus eISSN 2335-2388
2023, no. 44 (49), pp. 80–92 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/RESPECTUS.2023.44.49.110

“An Artist With Trauma” in Search of Identity: The Postmodernist Options in Ukrainian and Turkish Literatures

Oksana Halchuk
Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, Department of World Literature
Marshal Tymoshenko St. 13/b, Kyiv 04212, Ukraine
Email: o.halchuk@kubg.edu.ua
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3676-7356
Research interests: Comparative literary studies, Literature of modernism and postmodernism

Abstract. The article examines the typological features of the image of an artist with trauma and its correlation with the issue of identity. The subject matter for the analysis are the novels My Name is Red by O. Pamuk and The City with Chimeras by O. Ilchenko. The article utilises historical-literary, comparative, and mythopoetic research methods and studies of traumatic writing and identity problems.

The article defines the characteristic features of the image of a traumatised artist, such as the artist’s stay in a traumatic situation of creative and personal crisis, fanatical worship of the idea of serving Beauty with a dominance of the aesthetic over the moral, willingness to justify death as a form of convincing opponents; the presence of a physical injury. The article also substantiates the expediency of Medusa Gorgona’s image as a mythos-archetypal counterpart of this image.

The results of the comparative analysis prove that an artist with trauma is relevant primarily for the artistic understanding of the post-colonial experience as a type of trauma. Their heroes are in search of identity. It becomes their successful or unsuccessful attempt to overcome the trauma through creativity.

Keywords: traumatised artist; identity; Medusa Gorgona; archetype; postmodernism; postcolonial studies.

Submitted 22 November 2022 / Accepted 31 March 2023
Įteikta 2022 11 12 / Priimta 2023 03 31
Copyright © 2023 Oksana Halchuk. Published by Vilnius University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the original author and source are credited.

Introduction

Raising questions of national, religious, cultural, and other types of belonging is relevant in various discourses amidst ongoing globalisation. The literary discourse is no exception. The precedential and cult works play an important role in shaping and perpetuating identities. We consider that the topos of a traumatised artist or an artist with trauma in postmodernist texts make it possible to clarify the position regarding identity as a “complex sociocultural phenomenon with personal, social, and cultural aspects” (Sociocultural identities and practises, 2002, p. 121).

Simultaneously, we acknowledge that the nature of the creative process by default implies trauma in the sense of a specific view of the world and lifestyle. In postmodern texts, a traumatised artist is a special type of character with important plot-creating and conceptual roles and a specific characteristic. We perceive it as a modification of the modernist ambivalent artist. The main trends of its further development are, on the one hand, deepened tragedisation and, on the other hand, a travesty. And trauma turns into his essence in both literal and figurative senses.

The study aims to determine the typological features of the image of a traumatised artist and the correlation of this image with the problem of identity as a marker of postmodern writing.

The novels My name is Red (1998) by Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and The City with Chimeras (first edition 2009; second edition 2019) by Ukrainian novelist Oles Ilchenko serve as the primary objects of analysis.

To achieve the research aim, we have identified the following objectives: 1) outline the origins of the image of a traumatised artist and its connection with the issues present of postmodern texts; 2) define the characteristic features of an artist with trauma; 3) to substantiate the expediency of Medusa Gorgona image as a mythological-archetypal counterpart of an artist with trauma; 4) to conduct a comparative analysis of the authors’ models of representation of a traumatised artist in the novels by Pamuk and Ilchenko through the prism of identity.

The research methodology involves utilizing the historical-literary method to determining whether the analysed works as postmodern. We rely on the works of Turkish researchers of Pamuk (works by R. Çeçen, 2011; Ü. Daglier, 2012; T. Yaprak, 2012) and Ukrainian researchers of Ilchenko. The comparative method is essential for comparing the national and authorial versions of the traumatised artist. Additionally, the mythopoetic method helps to clarify the correlation of this type of character with mythological structures and archetypes (Campbell, 1999; Quignard, 2011). Important for solving the tasks of this research are the basic provisions of trauma studies. We are impressed by the thesis of Kali Tal about the mechanisms of narrativization of traumatic experience, which have a metaphorical nature: “traumatic experience is rewritten as a metaphor” (Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma, 1996, p. 16). For studies that are shifting to the sphere of humanities and social sciences, Wertheimer and Casper offer a separate title, critical trauma studies (Within Trauma, 2016).

Granofsky believes that literary studies use the potential of metaphoricity and figurativeness of trauma studies discourse meanings as a genre characteristic (Granofsky, 1995, p. 5). We project his definition of a trauma novel onto a traumatised character. His story viewed as an individual experience of collective trauma thanks to literary symbolism. The conclusions of researchers about the connection between trauma and the problem of identity are also interesting to us. War, the holocaust, and decolonization view as historical events-traumas. In The Act of Cultural Identification, Stocks emphasizes that through the traumatised narrator, the author speaks to the reader to share his traumas experiences (Stocks, 2007). Therefore, a traumatised artist is also perceived as the voice of a generation that is experiencing radical changes in social life and worldview.

The novelty of this study is its subject – the semantics and artistic functions of the image of a traumatised artist – and the applied methodological strategy of analysing the works of Turkish and Ukrainian authors through the prism of this image. There are no similar comparative studies in the works of Pamuk and Ilchenko. Therefore, the proposed article is an attempt to analyse their novels as meta-novels with a special type of a traumatised artist in search of an identity.

The traumatised artist: formation of concept, mythology counterpart, and characteristic features

In addition to the central research concept of traumatised artist or the synonymous artist with trauma, we use such concepts as an artist – prisoner of Beauty and artist – prisoner of the system. As for the prisoner of Beauty, we can hardly talk about his cabinet origin. The idea of an artist, who turns into a prisoner of Beauty, dates back to ancient mythology. In particular, in the myth of Pygmalion, his obsession with the idea of animating the statue he created can be perceived as a form of voluntary unfreedom. This image becomes quite common in the days of the Renaissance, for example, in Petrarch’s Sonnet 61 or Dunbar’s poem Beauty and her Prisoner. Poets emphasise Beauty in the ancient sense as kalokagathos, where physical Beauty is combined with ethics.

However, towards the end of the 19th century, an ambivalent aspect of Beauty emerged. The aestheticisation of evil and ugliness became a theme of the works of Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. The concept of a prisoner of Beauty is interpreted in decadent terms and acquires a painful connotation. Baudelaire’s Icarus (The Complaints of Icarus) embodies this philosophical and aesthetic perspective: the adoration of Beauty and the pursuit of the Absolute, aestheticisation of death, societal alienation, and intertextual references to world literature. This is exactly the type of artist – the prisoner of Beauty – in the postmodern novel transformed into the image of a traumatised artist. This image becomes especially relevant in the literature that developed under totalitarianism.

The modernist artist, embodied both constructive (Eros) and destructive (Thanatos) aspects, metaphorically captured only by Beauty. However, the traumatised artist in 20th-century works is often a prisoner of both the state system and his illusions. In Ukrainian literature, this notion has become prevalent in numerous studies on the Soviet period known as The Executed Renaissance. Yu. Lavrynenko’s book, The Framework and Sprouts, offers a typology of artists who lived and worked during brutal repressions (Lavrynenko, 1971). Therefore, the situation of traumas is interpreted on two levels. Trauma is the lack of freedom to create and the lack of physical freedom. On one hand, there is the artist whose work challenges the ideological confines of the system, deliberately debunking it as an expression of artistic and civil liberty. Consequently, in various ways, they become victims of a totalitarian-repressive machinery. On the other hand, there are two other models of an artist. The first model presents an artist whose fatal illusion is perceiving totalitarianism as a manifestation of a newform of serving, not to Beauty, but to the state. They create art as a tool of ideology. The second model comprises artists who consciously creates Pseudo- or Anti-Beauty. In both cases, their creativity reflects deep trauma. These types are believed to have been developed and parodied or destructed by postmodernists in their works, aligning with the thesis of Sh. Felman about the 20th century as post-traumatic (Felman, 1992, p. 5).

Thus, the artist with trauma has been portrayed in Ukrainian and Turkish literature,particularly towards the end of the 20th century. During this period, there was heightened awarenessof the ”empire – colony” theme and the intricate issues surrounding national, personal, and artistic identities

In our view, an antic topos of Medusa is a mythology counterpart of a traumatised artist. We interpret it as a mythologeme with codes of double identity – with the problem of defining self-identity and the function of a quest in the search for identity by others. Perseus must kill Medusa Gorgo to receive “the sacred title of the lord of fear” (Quignard, 2011, p. 53). Here, Medusa serves as an initiation test for Perseus, as described by J. Campbell (Campbell, 1999). After passing, he will be able to establish himself in the personal (“Who am I?” to prove that he is a legitimate claimant to the throne) and social status (to become a king). The culmination of the myth involves the rescue of Andromeda from imminent death. While Medusa was previously a bringer of death to warriors, her gaze at the sea monster saves the life of beauty. This version of Meduza’s story lies between two aspects of her biography: one as an Executioner turning heroes to stone, and the other as a victim of envious gods who grant salvation. Therefore, Medusa simultaneously preserves the beauty of life in death and carries the beauty that the gods were distorted.

This an image we interpret as the personification of duality: human vs. a monster, victim vs executioner, and the embodiment of the cosmic confrontation of man vs woman (because Medusa’s gaze kills only men), and the version of a damned artist with an idea of aestheticizing death. The expediency of this mythologeme is due to the trend of perception of ancient content in postmodern literature, to open unexpected perspectives in it and polemics aspects? In particular, an interpretation of Medusa’s image as a damned artist enables a discussion with the modernist “blind” worship of beauty. Thus, since the dichotomies subject-object (according to Foucault) and man as an empirical being – man as a being capable of cognition removed in postmodern consciousness, writers resort to mythologizing. In this way, the place of a subject occupied by artistic language is a unique environment for modelling the authors’ concepts.

Similar to characters of the artistic sphere typical in modernist literature, an artist with trauma professes the cult of Beauty, experiences a profound sense of otherness and alienation within society, and leads a tragic existence. Nevertheless, unlike the prisoner of Beauty, he is characterised by his actions rather than his contemplative stance. His work often acquires a destructive meaning as moral priorities are subordinated to aesthetic and ideological ones. Doubt serving as a recurring theme in postmodern works, becomes a characteristic feature of a traumatised artist. Being traumatised internally, he usually is depicted with some mutilation or disease. The challenge of self-determination in the personal, aesthetic, and national realms constitute a specific form of trauma that is just as agonizing as public non-recognition.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco serves as an exemplary postmodern novel that portrays a traumatised artist. The novel establishes a genre matrix for such a character, combining elements of detective, artistic, and philosophical storylines against a historical background, and the use of mystification, the theme of searching for an identity, an intertextual game, a perspective of multiple interpretations.

The blind monk Jorge can be regarded as an artist with trauma in The Name of the Rose. However, he primarily assumes the role of an archivist safeguarding intellectual and artistic treasures. Jorge was convinced that knowledge of Aristotle’s Poetics, in particular, that the origin of comedy, and therefore laughter, can sow doubts about the moral and spiritual canons of the Church. He goes to great lengths to hide and destroy the manuscript, even resorting to murder. Anyone who touches the poisoned pages of Poetics perishes, including Jorge himself, who meets his demise in the labyrinthine library. In this way, the metaphor of Borge’s library as a labyrinth is actualized in Eco’s novel (Murray, 2022). Thus, Jorge represents a symbol of a figure who wanders through the labyrinth as being in the captivity of dogma and scholasticism. His physical blindness becomes a symbol of his moral and spiritual trauma. These motives serve as defining characters of the traumatised artist type.

We consider P. Süskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of the Murderer (1985) can be seen as a reimagining of Eco’s model. His protagonist, Grenouille, is gifted with the genius ability to distinguish smells and is deeply mentally traumatised at the same time. Morality holds no significance to him as it lacks an olfactory essence. In his quest to create the perfect fragrance, he becomes a ruthless murderer. As such, the allegory subtext of the work correlates with the story of a traumatised artist.

Therefore, we have chosen Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red as the focus of our research. We firmly believe that comprehending Pamuk’s works necessitates the reading of this particular novel (Yaprak, 2012). This novel reflects the author’s perception of the experience of Eco. Pamuk spoke about him: “He is a great novelist. <...> I learned a lot from him” (Daily News, 2013). Eco’s program work Notes in the Margins of the Name of the Rose, and Pamuk’s book of essays Others Colours, are a lot in common. Especially in matters of aesthetic tastes, the specifics of the creative process, and the forms of one’s literary realisation.

However, more than special studies of the typological affinity of the works of Eco and Pamuk are required. Nishevita J. Murty’s study Historicizing Fiction / Fictionalizing History: Representation in Select Novels of Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk (2014), offers a fresh perspective on the examination of representation in literature. The author offers a new perspective on the study of representation in literature by using contemporary historical novels to examine fictional representations of reality. However, Todd in the review gives a general comparative description of the two writers’ styles. She believes that both writers like to solve puzzles; both love museums, the random or schematic collection of objects, and the excursion cabinetsthat are always behind the modern aesthetic museum. There novels are essentially visual literary fictions; both downplay the importance of the characters as the centre of the novel while embracing the joy readers feel in identifying with them and seeing their feelings (Todd, 2011).

On the other hand, there is a dearth of studies dedicated to the comparative analysis of the works of Umberto Eco and Ilchenko. Scholars mainly analyse his novel The City of Chimeras as an urbanistic text focusing on the representations of the concepts of divine and demonic in it. In this article, we aim to situate Ilchenko’s novel into the paradigm of works that are close in terms of plot construction principles and the theme for Eco’s and Pamuk’s novels. Despite Ilchenko himself not explicitly claiming influence from these writers, “The City of Chimeras” provides compelling evidence in this regard.

Authors’ models of representing a traumatised artist in the novels My name is Red by O. Pamuk and The City with Chimeras by O. Ilchenko

Further development of the content potential of a traumatised artist was proposed by Pamuk and Ilchenko. In Pamuk’s novel  My name is Red, these images are Zeytin, Osman, and, in a certain sense, the main character Kara. In Ilchenko’s The City with Chimeras, architect Vladyslav Horodetskyi fulfills a similar role. However, unlike Jorge in Eco’s novel , the question of self-determination for these artists with trauma is acutely urgent. After all, this issue holds significance for Turkish literature due to its artistic understanding of its past as an empire. Conversely, Ukrainian literature delves into the disclosure of traumatic colonial experiences. Therefore, their works are not only about identity at the level of empire – colony, and centre – periphery but also about national, religious, social, aesthetic-cultural, and even civilisational identities. Images with explicit or implicit traits of Medusa Gorgona help to clarify the authors’ positions.

Similar to Eco’s work, Pamuk’s novel, My name is Red, revolves around a series of deaths among traditional school artists of oriental miniatures in the 16th century. Among the victims is Master Enishte. Kara, an artist in love with his daughter, starts looking for the killer. At the same time, he is defined both by his feelings for his beloved and by artistic guidelines. Kara bodily declares, “Щастя й живопис – вони є точкою відліку в моєму єстві”1 (Pamuk, 2012, p. 50), Thus, medieval Istanbul and the investigation of murders serves as a historical-detective background for the protagonist’s search for his own artistic identity.

A similar exploration of artistic identity is found in Ilchenko’s novel. Here, two modern young men seek documents that would shed light on the secrets of the work of Horodetskyi, a famous architect at the beginning of the 20th century in Kyiv. The novel unfolds throughtwo parallel storylines each representing a different temporal dimensions. While one storyline focuses on solving an intellectual puzzle, theother pays considerable attention to the history of creation by the architect Horodetskyi of his most famous buildings, including the famous House with chimeras. Therefore, in both works, there is a combination of various genre models, which is characteristic of a postmodern text.

The fates of the architect Horodetskyi in Ilchenko’s and the artists Osman, Zeytin, and partly Kara in Pamuk’s novel can be considered as stories of living in traumatic situations, and the stages of their perception (overcoming or failing to overcome), which accompany the process of transformation of a prisoner of Beauty artist into an artist with trauma. Thus, Kara has forced separation from his beloved and his hometown, which is a change from the usual social environment and social status, and becomes what psychologists define as consequences of a traumatic situation or event. Kara’s reaction to the native space of Istanbul, which he saw after a long absence, is indicative: the young man’s gaze focuses exclusively on empty streets, destroyed buildings, and garbage dumps. Such markers of decomposition and decay, which belong to the semantic field of death, signal that Kara is in a traumatic situation. While the traumatic event for him is the death of master Enishte while investigating, Kara goes through the stage of actively living with the loss of a close person.

For artists Osman and Zeytin, the situation of trauma is an encounter with the European painting techniques. As students of master Enishte’s school, they are tasked with masteringthis new style to illustrate a mysterious book commissioned by the Sultan. This demand goes beyond mere artistic revision; it necessitates a rejection of their existing worldview and artistic beliefs, essentially leading to a loss of their self. Therefore, defending their position, the artists are ready to cross the boundaries of moral and law. On a symbolic level, the situation of trauma in the novel My name is Red is the socio-historical and cultural atmosphere of medieval Turkey of the 16th century, which encounters the experience of the European Renaissance in its way through the prism of art. This forms the hidden plot of Pamuk’s novel as the story of the struggle for the old-new Turkish identity on the West-East axis.

On the other hand, Ilchenko’s novel The City with Chimeras presents the traumatic situation shaped by the historical and cultural circumstances of early 20th-century Ukraine. They also reflect the general markers of the European culture of that period – a time of searching for worldview, moral and aesthetic orientations in crisis conditions. The fate of Horodetskyi, as one of the architects shaping the new modern architectural landscape of Kyiv, mirrors this traumatic situation. It is complicated by the crisis in the architect’s family life (“…наше кохання давно зменшилось настільки, що й не помітиш його”2) (Ilchenko, 2019, p. 220), Horodetskyi’s wife notes) and by his work crisis. Struggling to comprehend the interplay betweenthe demonic and divine in the creation of his architectural masterpieces, Horodetskyi seeks to understand which force his art serves. Similar to Pamuk’s heroes Osman and Zeytin, even in his native artistic environment, Horodetskyi feels alien because of his fanatical service to Beauty and his uncompromisingness. He is ready for real self-sacrifice in defense of his convictions. Moreover, Osman and Zeitin in Pamuk’s novel even commit a crime. Their trauma degenerates into fanaticism, which, like Aschenbach in Death in Venice by T. Mann, subordinates their morality to another God. These characteristics compel us to broaden our exploration of archetypal counterparts of a traumatised artist by considering the image of Medusa Gorgona within the context of the modernist traditionAs previously mentionedthe traumatised artists in postmodern novels initially find themselves as prisoners of Beauty. However, as they come to recognize their exceptional talent and chosenness (just like Medusa is the only mortal among other gorgons, i.e. exceptional), they become drawn towards a creativity that is self-destructive. In Pamuk’s novel, Zeytin and Osman perceive the tradition of oriental miniatures as an art form that allows one to seethe world as “бачив Аллах”3, while the Western style of painting is seen as a way to see the world“бачить людина крізь відчинене вікно”4 (Pamuk, 2012, p. 111). They associate memory and dogma with the former tradition and money with the latter. The artists are ready to physically destroy opponents to defend their position or even self-mutilate, like Osman, who deprives himself of his sight. We can regard this as one of the characteristics of an artist with trauma, which correlates with the myth of Medusa’s gaze. In this way, Osman, as a fanatical supporter of the Eastern tradition conserves his vision so as not to betray the principles of blind imitation of classical models.

In Pamuk’s novel, there is an allusion to the properties of the mythical snake-woman in the motif of Osman’s blindness and the inserted short stories Three stories about blindness and memory. In City with Chimeras, the Snake is a character from the mystical plot line. It is an antagonist and the protagonist’s symbolic counterpart. In addition, to the biblical semantics of Evil, for Horodetskyi, it is also the embodiment of doubts about his artistic vocation. It is with the Snake the architect conducts a dialogue regarding whom his genius should serve. Thus, the confrontation between Horodetskyi and the Snake reflects a painful process of self-identification, the final result of which should be the here acquiring artistic certainty.

The typological similarity between the Snake in Ilchenko’s novel and the mythical Medusa can be observed in the context of its Ukrainian interpretation, specifically within Kyiv. After all, according to the legend, it was in the struggle with the Snake, that the unique face of Kyiv was formed, reflected in its relief – in the so-called Snake’s Walls. Thus, the motive of overcoming the Snake in this context is the fight against evil, and the act of creating the city’s individuality/identity. Therefore, we are dealing with one of the “cultural-symbolic codes based on which identity formation takes place” (Sociocultural identities and practises, 2002, p. 92–93). Horodetskyi, too, contributes to the architectural identity of Kyiv while simultaneously battling his inner snakes, which he materialisesin sculptures of amazing creatures on the pediment of his designed house. These sculptures are are flection of the very real experience of Horodetskyi as a hunter. Scenes of hunting exotic animals are an important part of memories and specific triggers in the architect’s perception. Therefore, when witnessing a prominent political assassination at the theater, Horodetskyi’s mind conjures images of African hunts:

‘Ні, це вже не театр, а полювання в Африці, й убитий ним жираф сумними очима, у яких згасає життя, дивиться на свого вбивцю’ […] вигляд беззахисної красивої тварини, забитої як ще один трофей, щось надломлює в серці Городецького5 (Ilchenko, 2019, p. 219).

They reveal the inner conflict of Horodetskyi, who paradoxically combines a passion for hunting – the pursuit and killing of living creatures – with the creation of life-affirming Beauty. Similar to Medusa, the architect pours his inner turmoil into stone chimeras. Like the mythical serpent woman, he struggles to determine his identity – whether he is the hunter or the prey, the Snake Slayer or the Serpent’s prey. It is characteristic in the novel My name is Red artist Zeitin also calls those who do not share his views prey and hunts them. But, unlike the traumatised artists of Pamuk, architect Horodetskyi attempts to free himself from the trauma. After building an Orthodox church in Cherkasy, a Roman Catholic Church, and a Karaite kenasa in Kyiv, he plans to build a grand mosque in Persia. By creating “світлий містичний чотирикутник”6 (Ilchenko, 2019, p. 255) encompassing structures representing world religions, Horodetskyi strives to reach a new level of creative and personal realisation. While Zeytin and Osman by Pamuk are afraid to go beyond traditional art, thus turning trauma into their key biographem (Barthes, 1971, p. 14), which according to Barthes is the content-dominant of one’s intellectual and artistic biography.

In our opinion, the serpent-like composition of both works points to the important role of Medusa image as a concept in the subtexts of the analysed works. Thus, the outlines of the ouroboros – a mythical snake that devours its tail – can be recognised in Ilchenko’s composition of The City with Chimeras. It is characteristic that the title of each of the seven chapters of the novel contains seven deaths or mysteries. The first one (Death in the Church) and the final one (The Last Journey) frame the story of the Kyiv architect with a symbolic circle of death. Thus, in the first chapter, the episode of a worker’s death during the construction of the Mykolaiv Church, designed by Horodetskyi triggers a traumatic situation in the life and work of the architect. The final part of the novel is the story of the end of his earthly journey due to a heart attack in chapter VII The Last Journey. And ironically, this happens when Horodetskyi sets out to create an architectural structure, which, he believes, should end his duel with the Snake victoriously. This is how the external content of the architect’s existence was outlined. Meanwhile, amid this circle of death, a picture of his inner world is reproduced, where the detective (The Papers of Mrs. Irena, The Hiding Place on the Old Bridge) and the mystical (The Devil’s Smile, The Shaman’s Prophecy, The Sacred Heart of the City), are intertwined. They form a mysterious field of the artist’s split soul whose creative crisis coincides with the problem of identity.

In a similar vein, Pamuk’s novel My name is Red exhibits a labyrinthine composition. Each section is voiced by different narrators, including animals, trees, and even colours. The novel contains a large number of inserted short stories devoted to literary and pictorial subjects. This resembles the symbolic wandering of the hero Kara in time and space: along the trails of memories and his feelings, along the streets of Istanbul in search of the murderer of master Enishte, along cultural and historical space of Eastern painting and literature, which also resemble the rings of a reptile, with numerous repetitions and returns to those points, where the hero wants to get answers to the questions “Who am I?”, “Who are we?”. Note that the role of cultural heritage as an intertext in general in Pamuk’s work is extremely important. Because of this, Daglier even calls him a postmodernist sceptic: “Pamuk constantly plays with conventions, uses traditions, and the formal and substantive richness of Turkish art and reinterprets them” (Daglier, 2012, p. 148).

Both Pamuk and Ilchenko resort to double writing or rewriting the works of the classics in different ways. As a result, we have clear and allusive intertextuality. The high index of the intertextuality of the novels is already manifested in their titles, where, in our opinion, the concept of trauma is also encoded. With the Ukrainian writer, it is on the surface, manifested explicitly in the chimera topos. Thus, the author projects the name of the building built by Horodetskyi, which was decorated with figures of whimsical creatures, onto the entire city. This complicates the interpretation of Kyiv, which is transformed from a traditional sacred topos according to the Lacanian principle of a mirror reflection of the conflict in the protagonist’s soul into a space of struggle between the sacred and the demonic that is, a city with trauma. Instead, in Pamuk’s novel, My name is Red, the correlation of the name with the semantics of the trauma is implicit and requires a reference to one of the intertexts of the novel – the poetic story about the love of Khosrov and Shirin, which is very popular in the Eastern literary tradition. According to legend, Shirin fell in love with Khosrov after seeing his portrait on a tree. Medieval artists always depicted Khosrov with a red spot. We believe that this is how the title of the novel not only transformed this traditional motif but also connected the theme of art and the problem of identity. After all, the colour replaces or hides the personality of the hero. Therefore, Kara’s goal is to find herself in the patterns and colours of the surrounding world, primarily Istanbul. Therefore, it can be considered that another common point of intersection of the novels of Ukrainian and Turkish writers is the deployment of spatial (in Ilchenko of Kyiv, and Pamuk – of Istanbul) and cultural (architecture, literature, painting) concepts identical to national images into the mythic space of their works. Therefore, in both novels, we have a conscious actualisation of intertextual and interartistic connections typical of a postmodern text. They may have been recognised by the recipient and contribute to the discovery of an additional level of meaning-making – “zusätzliche Ebene der Sinnkonstitution” (“additional level of the semantic constitution”) (Broich, Pfister, Schulte-Middelich, 1985). At this level, the motive of searching for identities becomes quite obvious as the implementation of the receptive programme laid down by the authors.

Upon analysing both works, we observethat an artist with trauma becomes part of the author’s unique style. In the novel My name is Red Pamuk, there is a clear emphasis on the issue of national and artistic self-determination amidst the dichotomy of East and West. bringing a travesty-parody interpretation of the motives of classical literature; the chosen narrative strategy is polyphonic. Accordingly, the traumatised artist in Pamuk’s reading also acquires a travestied appearance, becoming an element of the author’s rhizomatic textual world, where anything and anyone exists only in the form of a narrative. Instead, in Ilchenko’s novel, both chronotypes – Kyiv at the beginning of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century – are specified by cultural and architectural topos. Along with mystical and biographical motifs, they mark fateful facts from Horodetskyi’s life, the mystery of whose creative portrait is being unravelled by contemporaries. Unlike Pamuk, Ilchenko, in the second edition of the novel in 2019, draws parallels with modernity in visions of the events of the Revolution of Dignity as a continuation of the struggle with the Snake and therefore attempts to overcome trauma.

Conclusion

The image of an artist with trauma emerges as a result of the transformation of the prisoner of Beauty archetype specific to modernist literature, which, itself was formed in the semantic field of a complex Apollonian – Dionysian interaction-opposition. In the postmodern interpretation, the traumatised artist is the destruction of an artist – society model of relations that is common for the culture of totalitarianism. The artist-prisoner with a new understanding of the function of Beauty (art) and his role as a state functionary. Or an artist-clown who consciously creates Anti-Beauty to escape in such a way into the game dimension of creativity. The artist relates the trauma to the mythologeme of Medusa Gorgona. She actualises such components as the conservation of Beauty and the problem of identification.

The analysis of the novels The City with Chimeras by Ilchenko and My name is Red by Pamuk demonstrates that the narrative of an artist with trauma provides a platform to address complex aesthetic, philosophical, moral-ethical, and socio-political questions. This dualitygives it both an artistic universality and due to the game strategy characteristic of postmodern texts and going beyond the limits of the actual issues, turns it into a simulacrum.

The theme of identity is central in the works of Ilchenko and Pamuk as their protagonists navigate the search for cultural, artistic, and spiritual landmarks during pivotal moments in their countries’ histories. For an artist with trauma, this situation becomes a test of their worldview and aesthetic principles for commensurability with humanistic, universal ones. By depicting the confrontation between two art schools, Pamuk reflected on the painful experience of Turkish artists learning about the other European traditions. They perceive the very prospect of letting other people into their world as trauma that cannot be overcome by creativity. Instead, in Ilchenko’s novel, the battlefield is the soul of the architect of the Kyiv House with Chimeras’ Horodetskyi. He tries to overcome his trauma in a duel with doubts and the attack of dark forces (in the novel – with the Snake). To protect the sacred space of his native Kyiv and his soul, he dreams of creating an architectural talisman of cult buildings of world religions.

The image of an artist with trauma in Ilchenko’s The City with Chimeras and Pamuk’s My name is Red is a result of a synthesis of national and world artistic traditions, interpreted through the prism of individual authorship. Therefore, it is subject to postmodern poetic, where its genre-creating function is the transformation of texts into meta-novels. The perspective is the study of relationships between the concept of corporeality inherent in postmodern culture and a new understanding of the role of art and its creator.

Sources

Ilchenko, O., 2019. Misto z khymeramy [The City with Chimeras]. Kyiv: KOMORA. [In Ukrainian].

Pamuk, O., 2012. Mene nazyvaiut Сhervonyi [My name is Red]. Kharkiv: Folio. [In Ukrainian].

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