The Poetics of Victor Ivaniv’s prose in the context of ornamental prose
of the XX–XXI century

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the specific characteristics
of the poetical prose of modern Russian writer Victor Iванiv (1977–2015).
By the developing of poetics of vanguard prose of the 20-30th years of the last
century, Ivaniv creates relevant model of the autoreflexive letter-type, erasing
conditional border between art fiction and the biographic fact. One of the constructive
principles of poetics of Victor Iванiv is the syncretism – the prosaic
and poetic texts connected at the different levels by a chain of equivalent elements
unite in the complete metagenre, created by all corpus of the author`s
texts.
The term poetic or ornamental prose denotes the result of an overdetermination
of the narrative text with specifically poetic devices such as rhythmmicizing
and sound repetition. Such overdetermination generally occurs with
the creation of thematic and formal equivalence, i.e. with the strengthening of
the paradigmatic order or even the dominance of non-temporal over temporal
linking (Schmid: Non-Temporal Linking in Narration). In ornamental prose it is
as though the author, behind the narrator’s back, so to speak, were to cast a net of formal and thematic linkages over the text, overruling the narrator and his
point of view and conferring on the text a poetic fabric with the effect of neutralizing
all individual linguistic points of view. Such poetization of narrative
takes place during epochs in which the poetic pole dominates, i.e. when the
equivalence principle, characteristic of poetry, tends to extend its reach into
the field of narrative prose. In Russian literature between 1890 and 1930,
ornamental prose took the lead among narrative genres. So stated Shklovskij
in 1924: “Contemporary Russian prose is to a large extent ornamental in
character.”
Ornamentalism is an artistic icon of myth whereby poetic experience and
mythical thought are assumed to be in close harmony. What makes poetic
and mythical thought analogous is their common tendency to abolish the nonmotivation
of signs adhered to in realism. The word, which in the realistic approach
to language is only an arbitrary symbol determined by convention, tends
to become, in ornamentalism as well as in mythical thought, an icon, an image
of its own meaning. The iconicity that poetry imparts to prose partakes of magical
speaking in myth.
Similar features of art language are also observed in prosaic works by modern
writers: Victor Iванiv, V. Bogomyakov, D. Osokin, S. Snytko and etc.