Статтю присвячено системному аналізу корпусу екранізацій творів Володимира Винниченка від
появи української декадентської драми до наших днів. У статті досліджено історичні зв’язки
Володимира Винниченка з німим кінематографом, контексти перших екранізацій його п’єс і сценаріїв, а також особливості "сукупного кінотексту" В. Винниченка, який формується у 1990-ті роки
та створює цілісну екранну парадигму рецепції творчості Винниченка кінематографом.
The article explores the cultural history of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s screenings from 1918 to 2014, in
contexts of decadence and “decadent film”. The argument is that Vynnychenko’s pattern had been taken as
a basis for Ukrainian local version of the world cinema of decadence. There are certain major periods in
this cultural history of screenings marked out. The first one, the period of silents, was characterized by the
necessity of shaping specifically independent Ukrainian decadent cinema together with the achieved political
independence of the Ukrainian state. In 1918 this aim resulted in two films based on popular Vynnychenko’s
plays, both unreleased: “The Lie” (Biofilm Studio, by V. Vyskovskyi, found and reconstructed) and
“Black Panther and Polar Bear” (Ukrainfilm Studio, by S. Veselovskyi, unfinished and lost); they were
opposed to silents emerging in cultural contexts of “multinational diffusion” in the decadent film of the
Russian Empire (“The Devil’s Staircase/Black Panther”, by G. Azagarov, 1917), that of German expressionism
(“Black Panther”/Die Schwarze Pantherin”, by J. Gutter, 1922) and, finally, the Soviet cultural
context exploiting Vynnychenko’s children’s fiction (“Poltynnyk’s Adventures”, by A.Lundin, 1929), which
was rather an exception in ‘Vynnychenko’s film paradigm’.
The next, Post-Soviet period of Vynnychenko’s screenings started after the gap in the 1990s, shaping
the key conceptual points of the mentioned ‘film paradigm’. It was based upon specific Vynnychenko’s
“ethical symbolism” and “erotical decadence” based upon such re-evaluated concepts as “law”, “sin”,
“truth”, “lie” as the key dialectical symbols. This paradigm also includes a system of special motives:
1) infanticide as thanathoteurgy / creation by means of death (obviously borrowed from “dannunzianesimo”
– ‘decadent’ lifestyle described by Gabriele d’Annunzio; 2) love as hate / love-hate / Hassiliebe (from
German) aiming at the destruction of the object; 3) psychological experiment in inter-subjective relations
(mainly sexual). This system of motifs is supplemented by a number of specific codes, the code of sacrifice,
the code of seduction, the code of pornographism among them. They are represented in the whole complex
of screenings after V. Vynnychenko’s works (these are eight Ukrainian productions screened from 1989 to
2014, the brightest of them by Oleh Biyma: “Black Panther and Polar Bear” – 1990, “The Sin” – 1991,
“The Engagement” – 1996).
