"A Play at Your Threshold". Ihor Kostetsky's Dramatic Triptych of the Ukrainian Artistic Movement (MUR) Period

Background. This article examines Ihor Kostetsky's dramatic oeuvre of the late 1940s through the prism of genre deconstruction and polyvalent stylistic synthesis. Primary consideration is given to the mechanisms by which archaic generic models were transformed to articulate modernist preoccupations, as well as to the processes of recoding the ideological and aesthetic paradigm of Ukrainian drama during the MUR era. Methods. The study employs an interdisciplinary methodological framework: literary-historical (to reconstruct the artistic landscape and the genesis of the author's dramaturgy); comparative-typological (to verify generic innovations against the overarching paradigms of European theatre); structural-poetics (to explicate the architectonics of the texts and the playwright's stylistic dominants); and intertextual (to trace the author's multilevel dialogue with the national and European cultural heritage). Results. The research establishes that the author's genre subtitles ("a one-day morality play", "a play in masks", "a mystery play") function as markers of semantic rupture, where traditional forms clash with existential modality. Specifically, in "The Temptations of Unsaintly Anthony", the subversion of the morality-play canon is achieved through a radical profanation of the metaphysical conflict. Instead of a vertical ascent towards spiritual enlightenment, the author introduces a structure of regressive cyclicality, rendering catharsis impossible and supplanting the protagonist's spiritual struggle with an endless reproduction of quotidian absurdity. In the drama "The Twins Will Yet Meet", the generic matrix of the "play in masks" is modified via the rigorous depsychologisation of the characters; the mask itself ceases to be a device for comic transformation, functioning instead as a signifier for the disintegration of identity and the multiplicity of the human ego. Finally, in "A Play About a Great Man", the ironic reimagining of the mystery play's framework – specifically the "ascent of the hero" – substantiates the crisis of the sacred within an epoch defined by total simulation and depersonalisation. Conclusions. The study demonstrates that the author's approach to the category of genre is heuristic rather than normative: he subjects pre-modern dramatic forms to a rigorous resemanticisation, deploying their structural elements (allegorism, schematism, and the device of the mask) not in their original sacral-didactic capacity, but as instruments for the subversion of myth and the diagnosis of the twentieth-century anthropological crisis. The phenomenon of Kostetsky's idiostyle is predicated upon the synthesis of two typologically cognate yet historically disparate aesthetic systems. The first is the Baroque, which anchors the architectonic framework of his works (characterised by a bipartite verticality, allegorical figures, the use of masks, the concept of the theatrum mundi, and the intermedial fragmentation of dramatic action). The second is Modernism, which infuses this framework with an urgent existential sensibility and novel poetic registers (manifested in expressionist tension, the surrealist logic of the dream, absurdist alogism, and the desubstantialisation of time)

Comics · Drama · Existentialism · Ideology · National identity · Postmodernism · Subversion · Historical and Modern Theater Studies · Military, Security, and Education Studies · Theatre and Performance Studies