СULTURAL EPOCHS AS TEXT IN LESIA UKRAINKA’S DRAMAS

Abstract

Based on Lesia Ukrainka’s dramas “Iphigenia in Tavrida”, “Cassandra”, “The Orgy”, “Ruphin and Priscilla”, and “The Stone Master”, the paper highlights peculiarities of cultural and historical codes of the Antiquity and the Middle Ages in the writer's works as well as literary manifestation of the world-view features of European and Ukrainian Modernism in the antique and medieval images and motifs. Lesia Ukrainka reconsidered the heritage of archaic and late Antiquity, Hellenistic period, Galilee at the time of Jesus, Early Christianity, and Medieval Spain. Each of these epochs has its own dichotomy of social and biological phenomena, parameters of the world model, and dominant fundamental points. Lesia Ukrainka’s dramas transform the material of various cultural epochs, providing polysemantic images that transfer the cosmos of a certain period into the neo-romantic and neo-classical system of images and symbols. In the dramas, the writer raised the issues recurrent in her works, such as love and sacrifice; beauty and ugliness; prophet, artist and ‘revolt of the masses’; reality and dream; good and evil; truth and benefit; nostalgia for chivalry; nostalgia for the Absolute; psychological and moral freedom and violence; spirit, soul, and body; spiritual nobility and the rule of brutes; nature and culture, etc.  Numerous issues and characters, multifunctional ontological, cultural, and historical phenomena, cultural codes, symbols, and mythologems acquire an existential meaning in the author’s dramas fitting not only into various cultural contexts but also into the modern reconsideration of mythopoetics.