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16 WWW. UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ВЕРЕСЕНЬ 2013 Contemporary Life of Lesya Ukrainka’s Dramas by Olesia Wallo Written over a hundred years ago, Lesya Ukrainka’s dramas remain exceedingly relevant today. In fact, their philosophical and expressive richness may have become more apparent in the recent decades than it was in the early twentieth century. Although the a uthor herself considered her dramas to be her most important literary achievement, it was nonetheless her poetry that had initially gained her all - Ukrainian fame and recognition. In our time, perhaps like never before, Lesya Ukrainka’s plays are read, stu died, staged — and reinterpreted: contemporary writers and d i- rectors often choose to focus on one or two of th e- se dramas’ underlying ideas and develop them further in their own works. The latest example of this may be the show Fire. Water. Night. by Virlana Tkacz and Yara Arts Group, which rei n- terprets Lesya Ukrainka’s Forest Song as a co n- flict between nature and technology — a theme that has become so vital in our increasingly enviro n- mentally - conscious society. (Please see a review of this production by Yara b elow.) In the last years of the crumbling Soviet empire, as Ukrainian women’s writing powerfully re - emerged on the literary scene after decades of relative silence, some women authors also turned to Lesya Ukrainka’s dramas. In them and in the figure of th e modernist poetess herself they found a source of support and inspiration for their own writing. For instance, in one of her very first prose works — the novella Inoplanetianka ( The Alien Woman ) , published in 1989 — Oksana Zabuzhko directly engaged, explicat ed, and applied to her own time the philosophical questions raise d by Ukrainka in her 1908 verse drama Cassandra . These were questions of truth, freedom, women’s status in traditional societies, and, above all, women’s creative expression. Zabuzhko picked up on Lesya Ukrainka’s path - breaking rewriting of the myth about the fall of Troy , which Ukrainka made revolve around the tragedy of the prophe t- ess Cassandra, and likened the marginalized pos i- tion of a female writer in late Soviet Ukraine to that of Cassan dra. Just as Cassandra felt out of place among her countrymen, who mocked and ignored her prophecies, Zabuzhko’s autobi o- graphical heroine, writer Rada D., felt like an a l- ien in her society, which seemed to have no use for her art. Zabuzhko’s novella thu s makes Lesya Ukrainka’s Cassandra an ancestor and a spiritu al sister of sorts to the later generations of women writers. It is Cassandra’s ethical stance — especially her commitment to the truth, even when it is unpopular — which Zabuzhko emphasi z- es in The Al ien Woman and which her heroine appropriates for herself. Yet Zabuzhko also r e- writes the pessimistic ending of Lesya Ukrainka’s drama: while Cassandra abandons prophesying in the final scene, Zabuzhko’s novella ends with her heroine overcoming doubts about her art and writing down the first sentence of her new work. A year after Zabuzhko’s novella first a p- peared , the literary journal Zhovten’ (now Dzvin ) published the short story “Kaminnyi hospodar” (“The Stone Master”) by L’viv writer Nina Bichuya. The story, of course, borrowed its title from Lesya Ukrainka's 1902 verse drama about Don Juan, and like Zabuzhko’s novella, it developed some of the major themes of Ukrainka’s drama, making them relevant for late Soviet Ukraine. In her retelling of the Don J uan legend, Lesya Ukrainka had shifted the focus from Don Juan to the female character of Donna Anna and to the immutability of the societal order embo d- ied in the figure and stone statue of Commandor, who makes a comeback at the end of the drama. Bichuya’s short story also centers on a female character — her autobiographical writer - narrator — who is waging a losing battle against the seemin g- ly unchanging Soviet order, still controlled by its “stone master,” Stalin, decades after the dictator’s death. Bichuya’s fragmented, meandering narr a- tive, filled with horrific memories of Stalinist atrocities in Ukraine, gives a mini - portrait of a society that still bears a heavy imprint of trauma. “While coming out of my apartment building in L’viv, I was often afraid to lo ok to the side because I knew that back then, in Kyiv, Father saw, right under the gate, a woman in a beautiful embro i- dered shirt, with beads around her neck ― dead from hunger,” reminisces the narrator about her childhood years. It is the fear of such evi l’s poss i- ble return that animates Bichuya’s story. And just like Ukrainka’s Commandor, Stalin does re - appear in the end — as a sinister stone bust that suddenly comes to life. In turning to Lesya Ukrainka’s works in their own texts, Zabuzhko and Bichuya no doubt Cont. on p. 17
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