On the possible reasons for Andrii Holovko's creation of the short story “On the Twisted Path”

The subject of the study is the intertextual connections between characters, ideas, motives, and conflicts in the works of Andrii Holovko: the short story “On the Twisted Path” (1924), the short story “The Red Romance” (1922), the play “I Want” (1920), “Autobio­graphies” (1925). In the article, the author considers such a problem as a solution to the conflicts of a writer of the Soviet era (the opposition of an unconscious peasant and a conscious communist, revolutionary eros, and the love for a woman who becomes an obstacle on the way to a socialist paradise) in the creative plane using Andrii Holovko’s texts as an example. The relevance of the study lies in the importance of the issue of self-determination of Ukrainian writers of the Soviet era. The article aims to find a possible reason for the creation of the short story “On the Twisted Path”. After all, the use of the plot and artistic images of one’s own work to write another in Holovko’s early work is unprecedented and deserves a separate study. At the same time, similar conflicts are raised by the writer in the play “I Want” and in the “Autobiography”. Therefore, the method of intertextual analysis was used. The novelty of the article lies both in the research topic itself and in the inclusion of the writer's lesser-known works (“I Want”, “Autobiography”) in the literary analysis. As a result of the research, the author hypothesizes that, along with the obvious reason for creating the story (as a direct agitation, that is, a call to the soldiers of the Ukrainian People’s Republic to not be afraid to go over to the side of the communists), there is also a possible, less obvious one. After all, there is a possibility that for the writer, the work “On the Twisted Path” became a peculiar way of resolving the conflict of choice between loyalty to the revolutionary idea and personal happiness with the beloved in the creative plane. The story can also be interpreted as an attempt at artistic self-justification for the betrayal of revolutionary ideals by the writer himself. The author only briefly touches on the issue of the opposition of color symbolism and elements (blue, dark blue, lake, swamp as the personification of a peaceful life with a loved one; red, lightning, ray, sun as the embodiment of revolution), which may become the subject of a future study.