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dead doe tied upside down to a pole. Lukash sees Mavka and utters, "Oh, how ugly you are." Turning to his mother he adds, "Mother, send the matchmakers for my wedding!" The birch tree symbolizes Mavka as a forest nymph. When she comes looking for Lukash at the cottage, she encounters Kelena. She is in the birch tree, naked, with crushed red berries on her heart. For a moment, her extended arms form a cross reminiscent of Jesus on the cross. She is the innocent who has been sacrificed. The sixth symbol is the horseless loaded cart which appears only in the film version of the story. In one scene, Lukash and his wife are harnessed to the cart like horses and both are being whipped. Humans, nor mally helped in their toil by horses, are compelled to do the work themselves, working, not like horses, but like even more lowly mules. In another scene, Kelena and Lukash's mother are alone, helpless and unable to pull the horseless cart. Lukash is gone. The forest has been raped and the trees have been sold. The house is burnt and the two women are abandoned in the snow with their children and their possessions. Among the bun dles in the cart is a bag from which the head of a midget protrudes, symbolizing the degradingly miserable life to which the women are reduced. Something is missing and it is not only Lukash, who may be a man who has gone mad and abandoned his family or may as easily be a man who has been arrested and sent to a labor camp and whose survival depends on a spiritual presence that the nagging wife concerned with material goods cannot give. It is Mavka, the feminine spiritual counterpart of Kelena who symbolizes this spiritual message; it is Mavka through whom Lesia Ukrainka demonstrates that there is more to human life than feeding and mating. Whether men create forest spirits to tame the environ ment or find their strength in religion, they need the spiritual dimension to give meaning to their survival. Both Lesia Ukrainka and Ilyenko deal with the hidden forces of nature which exist in the environment and in the spirit and hearts of people. In order to con quer the world around them, people from Ukraine de veloped a mythical world and lived in close harmony with it. A fine line separated this mythical world from reality; the intangible link between them was music. In both the drama and the film, we find a synchronization between the human life cycle and the cycle of seasons perceived in nature. There is only one reference in the literary work which allows the reader to place this drama historically. In one scene there is mention of the Germans who come to inspect the woods of Volynia. They want to buy the forest's oak tree, but the woodcutter refuses to let it go. The drama in the forest suggests the drama of the whole country of Ukraine, which on the one hand was politically subordinated to an authoritarian regime and was, on the other hand, the envy of foreigners be cause of its great wealth. Lesia Ukrainka's The Forest Song appeared in 1911 when writers and poets were in fluenced by the rebirth of romanticism in literature and music and dance sweeping Europe at the turn of the century. In 1914 World War I erupted and the people of Volynias were caught up in a whirlpool of history for which neither they nor the rest of the world were pre pared. The 1981 cinematographic production of Yuri Ilyenko may have been a symptom of the desolation that the Soviet regime had brought to Ukraine and a symbol of the need for a similar rebirth, one of spiritual vitality. The film, like its literary inspiration, can be seen as a cry for the reintegration of human values into a society where "human-ness" had been too long eroded and de pleted. Copyright Helene Turkewicz-Sanko John Carroll University October 1998 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR I am delighted with your magazine. The essay about Kateryna Hrushevsky moved me deeply. Bohdan Soroka. Editor's Note: Bohdan Soroka is an artist whose work is currently on exhibit at the Ukrainian Museum in New York. He is the son of Katrusia Zaricka, a political prisoner who was sentenced to, and served, twenty-five years in a Soviet prison. 20 НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ", ГРУДЕНЬ 1998 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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