THE INTERPRETATION OF ANCIENT GREEK CHARACTERS IN DAVID GEMMELL’S TRILOGY ‘TROY’

The article focuses on the images of ancient Greek characters in the trilogy Troy written by the British novelist David Gemmell. The plot of the trilogy, as the title of the cycle implies, refers to the events and heroes of the legendary Trojan War. The relevance of this article depends on the current revival of interest in classical mythology and literature. In particular, there is an increasing interest in various literary interpretations of the myth of the Trojan War. In addition, Russian literary criticism has not paid sufficient attention to the study of David Gemmell's novels. The interpretation of ancient Greek characters in the Troy trilogy has not yet been the subject of special study and comprehensive literary analysis. The purpose of the article is to study the interpretation of ancient Greek characters in the trilogy of David Gemmell's Troy based on the inquiry of the main and minor characters' imagery in the nexus between them and the ancient Greek traditions. In the article, we applythe comparative methodand the holistic analysis of literary works along withthe citation method. However, unlike the plot of Homer's Iliad which tells about the events during the last months of the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, the deconstruction of the plot takes place in Gemmell's novels, shifting the emphasis to the initial period of war between the Trojans and Greeks. The writer pays great attention to the reasons and details of war, while profoundly revealing the inner world of the characters, the motifs and the results of their actions. David Gemmell removes the factor of divine intervention from the hoary legend. In the trilogy, the distortion of well-known mythological plots is made consciously in keeping with the author's intention