No. 8 : Lesia Ukrainka’s Global Artistic and Philosophical Universe: Past and Present

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    A Word of Welcome From the Editor-in-Chief
    (2021) Tkachuk, Maryna
    Welcome word from the editor-in-chief Maryna Tkachuk.
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    Modern Intentions in Lesia Ukrainka’s Drama Cassandra
    (2021) Pastukh, Taras
    In her drama Cassandra (1903–1907) Lesia Ukrainka pays considerable attention to language and demonstrates its two defining forms and functional paradigms. One of them is language that appeals to the essential components of being. It is language that reflects human existence in all its acuity and fullness of appearance. This language is complex and difficult to understand, but is the only real language of the age of modernism. Another language is superficial, appealing not to the depths of life and universal categories, but to temporary human needs and aspirations. Its task is to identify the ways and means of achieving a desired goal. Such language is manipulative, because its speakers tend to hide their personal interests under claims of the common good. Also, in the drama, Lesia Ukrainka innovatively raises a number of questions related to the internal laws of world development, the processes of human cognition, the functioning of language, and the understanding and interpretation of the word. The formulation and presentation of these issues demonstrate the clear modern attitude that the writer professed and embodied in her drama.
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    The Stone Host, Lesia Ukrainka's "Spanish" Play
    (2021) Pronkevych, Oleksandr
    The article provides an analysis of the "Spanish code" inscribed in the text of Lesia Ukrainka’s drama Kaminnyi hospodar (The Stone Host). The constituents of the code include: 1) conventions of 17th century Spanish baroque drama, in particular, use of the dialectics of the concepts of dignity and reputation as a driving mechanism for conflict throughout Lesia Ukrainka’s play and transformation within the classical scheme of characters suggested by Lope de Vega and his followers; 2) stereotypes of "Spanishness" through which the playwright produced a hetero- image of Spain. Lesia Ukrainka’s variant of the famous legend of Don Juan is a sophisticated modernist drama. The "Spanish code" serves as a prism through which the playwright examines the world. Lesia Ukrainka created an astonishing modernist tragicomedy of dishonesty, full of the spirit of uncertainty.
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    Psychoanalytic and Existentialist Versions of Don Juanism: Lesia Ukrainka’s The Stone Host
    (2021) Moklytsia, Mariia
    The article substantiates the necessity of psychoanalytical and existential methodology in interpreting Lesia Ukrainka’s drama Kaminnyi hospodar (1912; The Stone Host), including the works of José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno on Don Quixote, Albert Camus on absurd characters (The Myth of Sisyphus. Essay on the Absurd), and Jacques Lacan’s The Mirror Stage. Biographical data testify to the critical attitude of the writer to world treatments of the legend. Her challenge to tradition was bold and conscious. It is regarded that the main point of Lesia Ukrainka’s polemics with tradition concerns Don Juan apologetics, introduced by romantics and developed by modernists. Exploring Don Juan’s psychological makeup provides the opportunity to show that all participants of the legend have become victims of Don Juan apologetics (that distinguish the tragic finale of the story). The Don Juan myth has played an integral role in the image of the Person (social mask) being accepted by characters as a trustful image of the Self. Interpretation of the Mirror Image in The Stone Host and its crucial role in the final scene allows for justifying that the mirror serves the narcissistic characters’ admiration of themselves and shows them not only an attractive appearance but an ideal version of the Self, created by myth.
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    Ecofeminism in Film Adaptations of Lesia Ukrainka's Forest Song
    (2021) Andrianova, Anastassiya
    This article offers a pioneering ecofeminist study of Viktor Ivchenko’s Lisova pisnia (1961) and Yurii Illienko’s Lisova pisnia. Mavka (1980), two Soviet Ukrainian film adaptations of Lesia Ukrainka’s eponymous fairy-drama (1911; Forest Song). It focuses on the interrelated depiction of gender and nature along with the drama’s ideological and material aspects: androcentrism and deforestation. The production of both films coincides with, and arguably reflects, what Marko Pavlyshyn describes as "the emergence of a conservationist consciousness" in the USSR in the 1960s. The article’s goal is therefore twofold – to bring new ecofeminist insights into Ukrainian film studies and to raise eco-awareness about the Volyn Polissia, which provides the setting for Ukrainka’s drama and its adaptations, and currently faces environmental devastation from illegal amber mining.
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    Lesia Ukrainka's Crimean Cycles: A Poetic Dialogue with Adam Mickiewicz
    (2021) Severina, Yelena
    This paper examines Lesia Ukrainka’s two lyrical cycles about Crimea, Krymski spohady and Krymski vidhuky, as examples of a poetic dialogue with Adam Mickiewicz’s Sonety krymskie. I begin my analysis by highlighting the different sensibilities of Mickiewicz’s Sonety krymskie and Lesia Ukrainka’s Krymski spohady, and underscore their formal and thematic peculiarities. The paper continues with an examination of Lesia Ukrainka’s second cycle, Krymski vidhuky, as an experiment in drama – a genre that is absent from her first cycle – before situating a dramatic scene, "Ifiheniia v Tavridi," this cycle’s only text about Crimea’s Hellenic history, within the cultural contexts of Lesia Ukrainka’s oeuvre. In doing so, I argue that Iphigenia’s lament echoes the voice of an exiled poet from Mickiewicz’s sonnets and conclude my analysis by probing reasons behind Lesia Ukrainka’s choice of a Greek (not Tatar) heroine.
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    The Reception of Lesia Ukrainka's Works in German: The Significance of the Concept of "Struggle"
    (2021) Lysetska, Nataliia
    The article examines individual German translations of works by Lesia Ukrainka in various genres, which activate the concept of "struggle." To establish the linguistic and stylistic analogues, coincidences, and differences of the translated works, their typological comparison with the original Ukrainian sources was carried out. It was found that key motifs in the works of Lesia Ukrainka, such as affection, resilience, courage, confrontation, and great strength of will and spirit are factors that form the concept of "struggle." The conceptual meanings and axiological values of the concept of "struggle" created by the poetess are: internal strength and independence; free choice, freedom, and liberty; the desire to have freedom and longing for it as the beginning or continuation of the struggle, a sign of insubordination, the spirit of disobedience; the word as a future weapon for the native language and Ukraine; the desire to prevail; the antithesis of death, sad thoughts, obedience, and others. The analysis revealed that there are some linguistic and stylistic differences in the analyzed German translations that are related to the peculiarities of German grammar and word formation. The selection of German equivalents sometimes further reinforces the emphasis of the original text. The concept of "struggle" in Lesia Ukrainka’s works in the analyzed translations into German by well-known translators fully reveals the conceptual picture of the author’s works and expands the possibilities of the reception of Ukrainian linguistic culture for German-speaking readers.
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    Playing Upon Biographical Myths: William Shakespeare and Lesia Ukrainka as Characters in Contemporary Drama
    (2021) Vysotska, Natalia
    The article sets out to explore two plays by contemporary playwrights, one American (Don Nigro, Loves Labours Wonne), the other Ukrainian (Neda Nezhdana, And Still I will Betray You), focusing on William Shakespeare and Lesia Ukrainka, respectively, within the framework of "the author as character" subgenre of fictional (imaginative) biography. Accordingly, the article considers the correlation between the factual and the fictional as one of its foci of attention. Drawing upon a variety of theoretical approaches (Paul Franssen, Ton Hoenselaars, Ira Nadel, Aleid Fokkema, Michael MacKeon, Ina Shabert and others), the article summarizes the principal characteristics of "the author as character" subgenre and proceeds to discuss how they operate in the dramas under scrutiny. The analysis makes it abundantly clear that in Nigro’s and Nezhdana’s plays the balance between fact and fiction is definitively tipped in favor of the latter. By centering their (quasi) biographical plays on highly mythologized artists of national standing, both dramatists aimed at demythologizing these cult figures, inevitably placing them, however, within new mythical plots combining a Neo-Romantic vision of the artist as demiurge, with a Neo-Baroque as well as fin de siècle apology of death and a postmodern denial of one objective reality.
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    Lesia Ukrainka and Qiu Jin: The Confluence of Their Poetic Worlds via Translation
    (2021) Isaieva, Nataliia; Vorobei, Olha
    This article deals with the poetry of two prominent writers: Ukrainian poetess Lesia Ukrainka (1871–1913) and Chinese poetess Qiu Jin (1875–1907). The diversity of wide fields of self- expression of both poetesses created the grounds for a broad and comprehensive comparison in terms of poetic, thematic, and literary similarities. The article provides a background to the translations of Lesia Ukrainka in China and accounts for the perception of Lesia Ukrainka’s poetry in China in the light of the poetic world of Qiu Jin. The main aspects of the poetic discourses of Lesia Ukrainka and Qiu Jin are outlined and studied within the core concept of the national heroine in China, formed by Qiu Jin, consisting of key elements important for the perception of Lesia Ukrainka’s works – revolution, nationalism, and feminism.
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    "Oh, My Thoughts, My Thoughts...": Olena Pchilka's and Lesia Ukrainka's Contributions to Epigraphic Embroidery
    (2021) Brovarets, Tetiana
    The article focuses on the role of Olena Pchilka and Lesia Ukrainka in epigraphic embroidery development. Undoubtedly, Olena Pchilka was an ardent proponent of folk art purity. Following from this, there is a tendency to think that she was against all novelty in Ukrainian embroidery. Many researchers and antiquity enthusiasts refer to her authority when arguing against inscriptions on textile as a phenomenon resulting largely from printed cross-stitch on paper. However, not all embroidered verbal texts have been of print origin. Most of them were folkloric (or folklorized) texts. What is more, Olena Pchilka to some extent provided her own comment on epigraphic embroidery in approving Lesia Ukrainka’s rushnyk (embroidered runner) containing the inscription “Oh, my thoughts, my thoughts, woe is with you! Love one another, brethren, love Ukraine” (devoted to Taras Shevchenko). In modern embroidery, embroideresses reproduce the citation with new connotations of these words, thereby continuing the epigraphic embroidery tradition. The author illustrates the folklorization of oft-cited lines from Taras Shevchenko’s poetry with examples of epigraphic embroidery from her own Interactive Index of Folklore Formulas (Epigraphic Embroidery).
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    Feminists Despite Themselves: A Look Back
    (2021) Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Martha
    Reflections on "Feminists Despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community Life 1884–1939" by Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak.
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    Anti-Colonial Discourse in Lesia Ukrainka’s Dramas
    (2021) Ageyeva, Vira
    National ideas in Lesia Ukrainka's dramas.
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    Lesia Ukrainka in Cinema
    (2021) Moussienko, Oksana S.; Moussienko, Natalia; Moussienko, Oksana O.
    Reflections on biographical films.
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    Povne akademichne zibrannia tvoriv u 14 tomakh [Complete Academic Collection of Works in 14 Volumes] by Lesia Ukrainka, eds. Vira Aheieva, Yurii Hromyk et al.
    (2021) Borysiuk, Iryna
    Review of the collection of works by Lesia Ukrainka in 14 volumes by Iryna Borysiuk.
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    Buntarky: Novi zhinky i moderna natsiia [Women-Rebels: The New Women and the Modern Nation], ed. Vira Aheieva
    (2021) Kalytenko, Tetiana
    Review on "Buntarky: Novi zhinky i moderna natsiia" by Tetiana Kalytenko.
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    "The Female Artist as an Icon of National Modernization: The Phenomenon of Lesia Ukrainka in a Comparative Perspective" (International Conference)
    (2021) Polishchuk, Olha
    "The Female Artist as an Icon of National Modernization: The Phenomenon of Lesia Ukrainka in a Comparative Perspective" (International Conference). Reviewed by Olha Polishchuk.
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    In Memory of Volodymyr Morenets
    (2021) Peleshenko, Nataliya
    In Memory of literary critic Volodymyr Morenets.