IN THE INSIDE-OUT WORLD: MADNESS AS A THEME AND PLOT

Abstract

The paper focuses on the madness as a theme and plot in Ukrainian literature of the 1st half of the 20th century. The researcher analyzes ideological and aesthetic tendencies associated with the understanding of the madness phenomenon, clarifies its functional features, symbolic and ideological significance, and emphasizes the connection between the psychological atmosphere of the totalitarian reality and literary interpretations of madness. The analysis involves works of different genres, styles, and dates of writing in which the theme of madness acquires ideologically engaged and symbolically significant content. In “Sanatorium Zone” by M. Khvylovyi the madness phenomenon is associated with the problems of split personality and suicide. It may be explained in a modernist context, as a reflection of the internally conflicting nature of a man, incapable of changing the existing world or getting adjusted to it. In the tragicomedy “People’s Malakhiy”, M. Kulish introduced the idea of madness into the complex sociopolitical context of the soviet reality which he revealed in various forms (from mythological to social-political) using satirical and grotesque images, philosophical generalization, etc. An episode of madness in the novel “The Garden of Gethsemane” by I. Bahrianyi emphasizes the anomality of the soviet world which is symbolized by the punishment cell and characterized as a “conveyor belt for dismantling human souls”. The story of the romantic poet Hӧlderlin in the novel by V. Domontovych is socially and politically conditioned. It reveals the state of a man and the world in a difficult transitional era. In “The Enameled Bowl”, Domontovych elaborates the theme of illness through the idea of the lack of consistency between the internal and external and understands it as an artistic convention that marks the absurdity of the world. T. Osmachka in his prose was especially focused on the theme of madness. He was interested in mental disorders both as a form of the character’s self-awareness and as a clinical story. The mythological and ideological image of a mentally ill man, reflecting a creative person subjected to repression and persecution, is a symbol of his own biography. In general, the changes in the interpretation of mental disorders are associated with the renewal of the modernist poetics and caused by the writers’ attempts to clarify the connection between the external and internal.