Elements of Folk Culture in Władysław Reymont’s Epic “The Peasants”: to the Problem of the Author’s Style and Its Ukrainian Translation

Abstract

The article analyses the folk elements of the Polish language in Władysław Reymont's epic “The Peasants”, which was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for its closeness to Polish folk traditions. Attention is drawn to the peculiarities of translating these linguistic and stylistic features into Ukrainian and to the common Polish and Ukrainian folk sources that can be used in the process of book analysis. The aim of the study is to compare the folk elements of the novel “The Peasants” with their contemporary Polish and Ukrainian counterparts.   The writer used his own experience in studying the central region of Poland, in particular the outskirts of the city of Łódź, where he lived both as a child and as an adult. The recorded texts of folk songs, proverbs, folk legends and customs, elements of current folk speech in the form of dialectal units are the basis of the author's individual style. The author of the text adheres to these features not only in the dialogues of the novel's characters, but also in numerous landscape descriptions, monologues and lyrical digressions. In such folk traditions as Christmas, Easter, weddings and engagements, christenings, harvesting and celebrations of its completion, winter parties, we can trace common features of Ukrainian and Polish culture which allows us to draw conclusions about the folk linguistic peculiarities of the Ukrainian-Polish borderland. In the classified material, a separate group consists of folk phraseology and comparisons that help to reveal the richness of the modern Polish and Ukrainian languages in view of their historical past. Parallels are drawn between these stylistic elements of the novel in order to identify the difficulties of translating the author's style from Polish into Ukrainian. The collected material will serve in the future as further research in the field of Polish-Ukrainian translation, systematisation of folk traditions and elements of the author's style of Władysław Reymont who received a world-class award due to these features. In order to preserve the common Slavic heritage, it is proposed to implement the results of the study among young people of school and university age.