SEXUALITY UNDER «THE SIGN OF SABAOTH» IN THE NOVEL OF THE SAME NAME BY OLES ULIANENKO

Abstract

The literary works of Oles Ulianenko, whose death anniversary was on September 17, 2010, got a frosty reception from the critics, being few in number and inconvincible in quality because they were mainly interpreted in the plane of the moral-ethical approach. Hence the aim of this article is to suggest an alternative interpretation in comparison to the traditional moral-ethical ones, which, in the first place, could explain the aesthetic sense of one of the most disputed novel by Oles Ulianenko «The sign of Sabaoth», the writer being anathematized by the Moscow patriarchate for it. So, having changed the research approach, the received results prove that, foremost, the novel under analysis, despite its theological name, tells neither about punishment nor about any purification or renovation – it depicts how people live, how they pray and how they make love. The latter turns out to be the most essential existence-discourse factor and due to the fact that sexuality is connected «not with some peripheral automatism but with intentionality which is second to the general movement of existence» (M. Merleau-Ponty), «the sign of Sabaoth» can be considered artistic, namely aestheticized, the sign of being doomed to be a man and therefore to lead a miserable life on this land (for example, in Sosnivka) under the hidden sky, craving your neighbor or just craving and receiving a bullet between your eyes from the other neighbor; or if you are lucky, then, despite everything, to experience «precious days that are lost in the black cesspool of routine» «as if the world fell at your feet with complete unconcern» (O. Ulianenko) – but only in the fiction, namely artistic world which is not characterized by the relation to the mystic Creator but by the relation to the creating process, caused by sexual desire, and creating the novel aiming to aestheticize dreadful and boring existence.