Novel by A. Liubka “Your Look, Chio-Chio-San”: Criminal Plot in Optics of Stage

The paper deals with the literary style characteristics of the novel “Your Look, Chio-Chio-san” by  A. Liubka. The researcher analyzes the presence of the musical element as a signi cant component of the novel’s poetics on the levels of sense, structure and semantics. The events of the novel unfold in an intertextual dialogue with Giacomo Puccini’s opera “Madama Butter y”, so that the content of the opera becomes an active component in creating meanings. The connection with the musical text allows tracing the variability of the literary textual content both on the literal and conceptual levels. The opera aects the narrator with greater force than his living communication with the people around. Insertions from the opera, bringing some chaos in the orderly verbal text, at the same time clarify a number of aspects hidden behind the scenes of ideological, plot and imaginative cause-and-eect structure. While the rst part of the novel, which records the fact of a young woman’s death and shows everything as unambiguous and understandable, looks like a forensic documentary, the nal section seems to be a puzzle of hints and allusive assumptions. Moreover, the author is in no hurry to decode the text; this must be done by the recipient, drawn into the game of looking for hidden meanings. It is proved that the co-operation of dierent semiotic levels within the limits of one text and combination of verbal and musical works contribute to psychologizing and individualizing images, deepening the actual problems and intellectualizing the author’s narration. Incorporation of the stage work into the verbal text impacts on the decoding of hidden meanings. The analysis of the novel allows the researcher to assert that the style of A. Liubka is being formed under the in uence of postmodern aesthetics.