Ekphrastic Elements of Modern Scenario Text (“The Portrait” by V. Mytsko)

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to study ekphrasis, a phenomenon actual in recent years, (N. Braginska, A. Voievodina, V. Bychkov, L. Geller, G. Kosikov, V. Lepahin), on the example of a modern scenario text (“The Portrait” by V. Mytsko). The topicality of the issue is stipulated by the need to analyze ekphrasis as a literary device that performs the function of a specific tool in the “translation” of painting, music, sculpture or architecture into the language of literature. The research methodology is based on the complex tool offered by the modern approaches utilized to single out and analyze new literary forms generated by the intermedial contextuality state (provisions of structural and semantic approach, genre-study discourse, receptive poetics practice.)

Other arts texts furnish scenario, a historically determined twentieth-century literary form, with their own illustrative examples. At the heart of the author’s address to ekphrasis is the intention to verbalize a non-verbal image. In addition, ekphrasis presents the script writer’s own aesthetic modus, her/his own receptive needs and impressions from other artists’ works, comprising specific hermeneutic resource of the text that cannot be ignored.

Ekphrastic elements of the modern scenario “The Portrait” by V. Mytsko (ekphrasis-fiction, ekphrasis of the famous works of art, ekphrasis-interpretation, ekphrasis-psyhologization, ekphrasis-impression or “infection”) suggest organicity of this device for the practice of creating scenario texts in general. Due to this device, a literary text is getting extremely rich, thus engaging in active dialogue with other art forms. Furthermore, these descriptions in V. Mytsko’s scenario are applied to arouse reader’s/viewer’s creative and associative thinking and, at the same time, encourage him/her to appropriate creative reflections.