The Artistic Potential of Bohdan Lepky’s “The Fairytale of My Life”: Fiction Versus Non-Fiction

The article analyzes Bohdan Lepky’s “The Fairytale of My Life” as a complex phenomenon of autobiographical prose, which scholars and publishers often classify as fiction. First of all, the main attention is paid to its genre specificity. Based on the research of B. Lepky’s contemporaries, diaspora critics, and contemporary researches (M. Yevshan, V. Lev, M. Cherminska, I. Konstankevych, and others), the authors argue that the problem of a clear genre definition arises due to the vividly expressed artistry of the text, which is associated with the specific poetic style of the writer, who also showed features of artistry in non-fiction prose (publicistic writing, essay writing, etc.). Among the main features of B. Lepky’s autobiographical style are mentioned poeticization, folklorization, mythologization, and sacralization, which are partly caused by the significant (over 50 years) time distance between the time of writing the memoirs and the time when these events occurred in the writer’s life. Therefore, the poetics of memories is interpreted in the paradigm of memory / oblivion, historical truth / authorial fiction. It is argued that the text of “The Fairytale...” can be viewed in the context of the philosophical concept of the author, who was raised within the traditional values in a Galician priestly family, which he, being in exile, tried to record and pass on to future generations as a memory of the authentic Ukrainian universe destroyed by the Russian invasion. The authors conclude that despite the powerful artistic flow of Bohdan Lepky’s memoirs, “The Fairytale of My Life” should not be considered as artistic prose, but should be interpreted in the context and framework of memoir and autobiographical writing, taking into account the originality of the author’s style, which is characterized by features of artistry that partially “blur” clear genre boundaries and add new sense-making facets (philosophy, aesthetics, pedagogy, psychology, cultural studies, etc.), encouraging deep rethinking not only of artistic, but also of existential phenomena. Based on the analysis, it is suggested that the breadth and scope of the already existing intertextual dialogue of the analyzed text gives reason to believe that it will continue to draw into its force field the literary intentions of other authors, each time expanding and acquiring new previously hidden meanings. The fact that such a dialogue continues is the most obvious proof of the power of its semantic and artistic potential.