THE BODY AS A CONNOTATE OF OPPOSITION FRIEND :: ENEMY (in present-day Ukrainian prose)

Abstract

Introduction. The article focuses on the role of the body as a marker of the opposition friend :: enemy in military prose. The external features of belonging the person to this or that military camp, as well as the way of the individual’s bodily features correlation with his political position are analyzed. A group of lexemes used to describe the body of the enemy, as well as changes in the external characteristics of a person when changing its political position are singled out. Particular attention is given to the connotation of injury as a justification for the lack of its own political position, as well as the possibility of choosing the side of the confrontation.
Much attention is paid to the peculiarities of the image of the appearance of war criminals in contemporary works. As a material of the research, popular contemporary Ukrainian works devoted to the events in the East of Ukraine were selected: Sergei Zhadan's “Boarding School”, S. Dzyuba's “Call Sign “Banderas”, A. Kirsanov.
Purpose. The paper aims at revealing the vocabulary, which is used to describe the body of the enemy in military prose.
A descriptive method and the method of analysis of intelligence information are applied.
Results. In general, analyzing the lexemes that are used to describe the appearance of the enemy in the military texts denoting the conflict in the East of Ukraine, we can come to the following conclusions: contemporary Ukrainian writers gradually move away from the tradition of depicting persons belonging to the category “alien”, with distinct connotes of deformity. They are often described as ordinary people, can be neutral (like the Manequin) or have attractive features (for example, there is a description of the appearance of Beard from the “Call Sign “Banderas”). This tendency is about rethinking the portrait of the enemy. She also emphasizes the complexity of the situation in the East of the country, because her opponents are former friends, neighbors (according to the data analyzed by the Tories).
Conclusion. Of particular interest for further study is the consideration of other works devoted to ATO, the isolation of the somatic vocabulary used to denote enemies, the derivation of general patterns of its use, as well as a comparative analysis of these linguistic units and somatic words used to denote enemies in the literature of the twentieth century.