Lwów jako konstrukt nostalgicznego polskiego i ukraińskiego kryminału retro

Maciej Jaskot , Iurii Ganoshenko

Abstract

The chapter Lviv as a Nostalgic Construct for Polish and Ukrainian Retro Crime Fiction by Maciej Jaskot and Yurii Ganoshenko raises the question of assessment of the factors that help to create the text of an increasingly popular meta-genre, i.e. the retrostyle crime fiction. By focusing on the semiotic code of the city of Lviv—which, because of its history, becomes a convenient scenario used by the authors as the environment for their literary heroes—the study shows how symbols are used in writing techniques of retro-style crime fiction. Of particular interest are the Lviv retro-style criminal stories by Paweł Jaszczuk, Bohdan Kolomyjchuk, Andriy Kokotukha, Marek Krajewski, and the books of Yurii Vynnychuk and Petro Yacenko, that are not crime stories in the strict sense of the term, but nonetheless show some trends and a wider context of for understanding of the given metagenre. The poetics of space manifests itself through the detective layer of the work by creating an attractive, nostalgic image of reality carefully constructed by the author; the real city turns into a fictional, wheres historical details are only an exotic background for the events described. Particular attention has been paid to the functionality of the artistic microimages in the structure of the text. These microimages, by simultaneously appealing to the sensual and symbolic perception of the reader, play a very important role in creating a retro style and explain the popularity of retro-style crime fiction.