“Creative Autobiography” as a Chronicle of the Formation of the Writer’s Personality

The author considers the tools available in the terminological discourse for tracing the development of the writer’s creative personality – the categories of author’s subjectivity and individuality, writer’s identity (H. Syvokin), autobiographical synergism (K. Dub), megatext (S. Mykhyda), intertextuality, individual style of the author, the need for a comprehensive study of the entire corpus of the writer’s autodocumentary works in its relationship with both literary creativity and the writer’s real life is emphasized. The term “creative autobiography” is proposed to denote the history or chronicle of the writer’s creative formation, which depends on his psychological traits, lecture, environment, but is provided for reading from diaries, letters, autobiographies, memoirs. On the example of O. Kobylianska’s work, the author analyzes that these tools can be used to study the relationship between autobiographical and fiction by the same author and reflect a change of views, ways of processing autobiographical material for introduction into a fiction text, work on improving the author’s language skills, etc. It is concluded that the peculiarities of the writer’s “creative autobiography” are the dependence of self-awareness and growth as an artist on life circumstances and feelings, but autobiographies show that O. Kobylianska overestimated this dependence in her adulthood; intertextual manifestations through direct and indirect quotation, endowing characters with her own habit of keeping a diary; switching and mixing of language codes due to polylingualism; attempts in autobiographies to emphasise the development of her own talent from a different perspective than it appeared in her diary. Personal themes and motifs, such as fascination with nature, reading, horseback riding, music and painting, peculiarities of everyday life, life experiences, which began in the diary, influenced the further development of the writer’s talent, determined the plot and figurative solutions of future works.