The Genre Continuum of the Anonymous Burlesque-travesty Poem in Belarusian Literature of the 19th – 21st Centuries: Features of its Origin and Development

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the genre continuum of a burlesque-travesty poem (BTP) in the Belarusian poetry of the 19^th – early 21^st centuries. The main goal of the study is to determine the role of BTP in the process of shaping modern Belarusian literature, based on the hypothesis that the role of BTP in this process was fundamental: if the works of the 19^th century actually formed the foundation of the Belarusian literary process, then later texts contributed to its reformatting in the context of the new literary situation of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. The study is based on a comparative-typological analysis of five texts from different times, which the author of the article attributes to the BTP genre: Èneіda navyvarat (Aeneid Inside Out), Taras na Parnase (Taras on Parnassus), Skaz pra Lysuû Garu (The Tale of the Bald Mountain), Luka Mudzіščaǔ – Prezident (Luka Mudishchev the Prezident) and Zianon-Hop. The relevance of the research lies in the fact that the epic works mentioned above are considered comprehensively as elements of one genre system; the article introduces the definition of "genre continuum" – a sum of texts that are similar in form and content, united by a plot, which are often a free translation of a work of a neighbouring culture or an imitation of earlier works of national culture. Based on this analysis, the main features of BTP genre within national culture are identified, namely anonymity, virality, variability, grotesqueness, political involvement, ambivalence and meta-irony. In addition, a special table shows the dynamics of „high / old” and „low / new” codes of five texts, on this basis conclusions are drawn about the evolution of the picture of the world of intellectual elites of Belarus in the last two centuries. Under the influence of the cultural-historical method, it is noted that, despite the existence of this or that text in the worldview system of its time, BTP remained inert to literary influences, being on the one hand a product of the socio-cultural situation, and on the other – an invariant of a hermetic genre continuum.