Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Cinematic Novels within the Dramatization of Prose in the 20th Century

The emergence of cinematic novel created by O. Dovzhenko has become one of the chief achievements of Ukrainian culture in the 20th century. The demand for such innovation has been conditioned with the particular place of cinema as an alternative to theatre where the past could be represented at screen in the manner of epic and not dramatic literature. The organic unity of the features of a script and a novel has demonstrated new peculiarities and opportunities of narration. First of all, cinematic novel belongs to the general literary trend of the stream of consciousness that comes back to theatrical soliloquy and builds up a parallel to monodrama. In particular, plot as the determination of events yields to imaginary forces of subjective nature. The comparative research of O. Dovzhenko’s heritage with that of V. Woolf is substantiated with this circumstance. Secondly, it is the so called telegraph style that marks both scripts and cinematic novels coming back still to rhetoric devices of parcellation. The autonomous existence of separate things within cinematic context is presupposed with the effect of alienation ensuing from the phantoms of imagination. Textual dissociation into a series of visions of separate things results in the transformation of linear temporal succession of events into spatial corporeal images marked with multidimensionality. Third, the composition of cinematic novels as well as of other specimens of the stream of consciousness is marked with the traits of spiral narration. The new motivational forces discovered in cinema procured new opportunities for the traditional dramatic problem of fatal predetermination. The formation of cinematic novel has elucidated new interrelation between screen and scene and outlined new perspectives in their interaction.