“I am a Rusin, I am a Hutsul…”: Ethnoimagological dominants of Yuriy Fedkovych’s vision

Abstract

The article examines how images of other nations are formed in the artistic world of a writer – a representative of another nation. Employing the imagological approach with its tools for studying the ethnic structures of the text and drawing on E. Smith’s concept of the national identity and E. Levinas’s concept of the Other, the author analysies the problem of perception of the Other on the interpersonal and intercultural levels, using the artistic heritage of the Ukrainian Rusin writer Yu. Fedkovych as a case study. The article highlights the dominants in the representation of other ethnic groups in the context of the writer’s identity, taking into consideration the cultural and historical discourses of the literature of a particular nation. Born into an interethnic family in Bukovynian Hutsulia, which was part of multicultural Austria, working and doing military service in various territories of Europe, communicating with representatives of various ethnic groups, Y. Fedkovich recorded the main stereotypes in perception of other nations’ representatives, which reveal the specificity of European interethnic relations. The main attention is drawn to the analysis of the Hutsul image of the world and the dominant images of the Other (Italian, Austrian, German, Moldavian / Romanian, Serbian, Polish, Jewish, Gypsy Imago). According to Levinas, the factors that determine the image of the Other are situations of freedom / enslavement, reinforced by the experience of war. Theoretical considerations are confirmed by examples from creative works. In this perspective, the literature represents intercultural dialogue in the European space to become a source of ethnoimagological studies.