The Passionatrity of Flash Fiction: The Story of Siegfried Lenz “Das serbische Mädchen”

Abstract

It is underlined thatUkrainehas just started mastering the heritage of the great German writer S. Lens (1926–2014). In this article is analyzed his story “The Serbian Girl” („Das serbische Mädchen“, 1987) from the same-named collection stories from the period of European recognition of his skills and literary authority. Here is the reception of the stylistic author’s manner, peculiar to his novels and stories. The writer admired the Hemingway’s style of writing, which gave an immanent passionarity to the small genres through “the principle of iceberg”. However we mark high creativity of Lenz’s creative imitation in forming of a new stylistic – first of all, it is observed on a subjects level (love-affair), on images system (the heroine Dobricya in the context of people from crowd), narrative (contrasting of unindifferent narrator to deprived of speech Akhim), artistic detail (symbolism of the spoon broken in half), elements of intermediality (revision of Bergman’s film). The first incitement to the reception is the date of writing, related to formation of a new time of European history of XX century, which led to the fall of theBerlinwall, to collapse ofYugoslavia, to appearance of breaks, in the Iron Curtain between the communist camp and countries of the West.