Зима і сни вартового» Юрія Андруховича: дезорієнтація і криза ідентичності

This research analyses one of Yuri Andrukhovych's “army short stories”, Winter and Watchman’s Dreams. The importance of the author's army experience is underlined. The problems of the character's identity crisis, disorientation, and weakening of empathy are explored. Second-person narrative and the motive of dreams are the tools that the narrator and the reader use to observe oneself, including all of the social identities and all steps of one’s personal history. The narrator is disoriented in a system of double (official and unofficial) hierarchy, which is prevalent in the soviet army, and he is going through a social identity crisis, which appears as a dissociation between existence as a civilian and a soldier. His specific experience separates him from people who don't have the same experience. His empathy is weakened. The structure he finds himself in negatively affects human individuality, breaking the person into a creature moved by basic biological requirements. This structure has a particular pathos – the soviet government system. The only possible way out of the character’s crisis situation is returning to civilian life.