IN THE CIRCLE OF EMOTIONS OF CONTROVERSIAL AUTHORSAFTER THE UNION OF BREST:POLISH BORDERLAND DISCOURSE

Abstract

The publication examines the emotional sphere of baroque prose dedicated to union problems through the prism of the peculiarities of the Ukrainian-Polish borderland. The literature of the studied period is genre-diverse and created at the intersection of several areas of knowledge – theology, history, politics and literature. In this regard, the emotional background of the text material we have studied has so far been considered by scientists only occasionally. Among the large number of polemical works, it is worth highlighting from this angle of study the treatises and apologies of Meletii Smotrytskyi, Petro Mohyla, Lazar Baranovych, etc. The following main emotional markers of post-union prose are outlined: anger, sarcasm and irony, crying and despair, gentleness and admiration. We propose to divide the emotional sphere of polemical prose into individual (actually authorial) and rhetorical, aimed at the development of baroque concepts.

The conceptual emotionality of the baroque prose of the Ukrainian-Polish borderland arose on the basis of rhetorical techniques and persuasive figures with the aim of influencing the reader. It differs significantly from the author’s emotionality both in formal and substantive terms. The least conceptualized are those polemical works that originally existed in oral form, for example, polemical sermons. Usually such speeches were accompanied by emotionally saturated non-verbal means, which in the later, printed version were reproduced in the transformation of the writing style. Non-verbality, which develops into verbal means, is the main sign of this transformation.

The article attempts to dispel the stereotype that in baroque treatises the sphere of emotions was not developed due to their theological content. It is worth emphasizing that its main goal was to influence the reader not only with the help of intellectual arguments, but also with other means of a literary nature. Thus, the authors of polemical prose initiated a new type of borderland literature, in which the emotional sphere played one of the key roles. In the future, it is necessary to expand the perspectives of research on this issue.