Genre and Ideological Memory of Landscapes in Ukrainian Medieval Walkings into Paradise

The article considers the phenomena of genre and the ideological memory of landscapes by using the tools of philosophical epistemology, phenomenology, the theory of intertextuality, and deconstruction. The distinct functions of spatial depictions in Ukrainian medieval walkings into Paradise are shown. From a literary history perspective, the paper focuses on reception mechanisms of ancient Greek and Roman “Indian texts” in the medieval apocryphal tradition. The theoretical model suggested in this study offers a new approach for rethinking the antagonism between the authorial instance of a new text and genre/cultural memory that contains all the ethical and aesthetical programs of pretexts. It is proposed to designate the phenomenon as the “cryptogrammaticality of literary discourse”, resistance to which is strictly equal to the limits of the individualism of a writer’s freedom, established within the confines of every cultural-historical epoch. From this point of view, we hypothesize that the nature of walking into Paradise as a separate taxonomic unit is determined by the sum of its pretexts and architextual reactions. The modification and intersection of different genres often become a key form of self-expression for the medieval scriptor. Mediated by template ecphrasises, the narrative structure of apocrypha always contains fragments of other types of rationality and worldviews of different periods of cultural history. Spatial structures of mediaeval fiction texts include not only “traces” (J. Derrida) of ancient Greek and Roman literary genres but also saved – as a result of genre interactions – “traces” of other ideologies and ethnocultural and gender stereotypes. Thus, it is shown that the boundary of value systems in medieval belletristic texts is also the boundary of genres as “stiffened contents” (M. Bakhtin) and implicit ideologems of medieval writings that cannot be assimilated and integrated into axiological and architectonical integrality.