“On the previous meeting in May, we mentioned the new movie called “Viy” and started the discussion about this character, his connection to the image in literature,” the participant of the scientific club, third-year student of the Faculty of Humanities of Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic Iryna Lobko said. “That’s why we decided to dedicate a whole meeting to this problem to study the origins of Viy’s image in detail and analyse the story by Mykola Hohol.”
The idea was supported by all the participants of the club, the third- and fourth-year students interested in literature studies and translation. The participants were analyzing scientific research articles on this problem for almost a month.
“We chose the most fascinating aspects of this problem and prepared short reports on the censorship according to which the descriptions of monsters in Mykola Hohol’s “Viy” were corrected. The meeting turned out captivating and educative, as a few editions of the story differed and the image of Viy was shown from various points of view,” graduating student Alina Shyian commented.
In their reports, the scientists described the origin of Viy’s image according to famous literature scholars and the connection of this character with the ancient Irani, East Slavic, Celtic and Welsh mythologies, Poltava folklore stories about the monster “with eyelids reaching the ground” etc.
The Head of the scientific club - PhD in Philology, Associate Professor of the Department of Germanic Philology and Translation Anna Pavelieva - added, “Viy’s image has been a subject of discussion among Hohol scholars from the moment of his appearance to nowadays. It does not matter whether his origins lie in the folklore or in the writer’s imagination, one thing is doubtless; the descriptions of monsters in an abandoned church and of Viy himself preceded the bravest descriptions in the European Gothic fiction.
“This ‘story of horrors’ was truly ahead of its time, inspiring the next generations of writers to create new scary characters of world literature. The story is still a subject of scientific research. Together with the students, we discussed one of the most contradictory characters of the world literature, the image of Viy, from various points of view, having analyzed it with regard to the folklore images of Koshchii Bezsmertnyi (an archetypal male antagonist in Eastern Slavic folklore) and Saint Cassian.
“The members of the club presented the trope of a ‘frightful glare’ in the literature and the influence of Hohol’s Viy on the folklore and world literature, compared Viy’s movie image and the literature image. The researchers concentrated on the literary and translation-related aspects of the problem, analyzing the classic translation of Viy’s description to English and making their own translations. The results of their work will be useful in writing the course and Bachelor’s theses, scientific articles.
“I wrote down the questions the students were most interested in, the most active discussions, during the English and literature classes and collected them for the meetings of the scientific club,” Anna Pavelieva commented.
The students often offered the topics for discussions. Thus, ten meetings of the club covered the research methodology (as asked by the fourth-year - graduating - students for writing their course theses), the story of the famous Irish manuscript - the Book of Kells, British music, corpus linguistics, the problems of translating Hohol’s idioms to English, the peculiarities of gender specific words in the English language, English abbreviations and shortenings on Instagram, William Wordsworth’s works and Viy’s image. All the topics except for the image of Viy were delivered and discussed only in English.
The activity of the Philology scientific club resulted in 14 scientific publications (2 of them being specialized articles and 10 were presented by students at all-Ukrainian and international conferences).
During the year, two meetings of the scientific club were held for the students of the seventh and tenth grades of Poltava Scientific Lyceum No. 3 and were dedicated to the peculiarities of translating movies with the examples of movies of 2019-2020.
The translation of movies became so interesting for the school students that the scientific club was joined by the ninth-grade student of Poltava Gymnasium No. 6 Nazar Boruta. His scientific article called “The Strategies of Translating English Movie Names (With the Examples of Movies of 2019-2020)”, under the advise of PhD in Philology, Associate Professor at the Department of Germanic Philology and Translation of National University “Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic” Anna Pavelieva, won the third place at the city and regional stages of the All-Ukrainian Competition-Defense of Scientific and Research Articles of Students - Members of the Minor Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
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