“WITHOUT FOUNDATION” BY V. DOMONTOVYCH IN THE LIGHT OF SCHOLASTIC EXEMPLARISM

Abstract

The paper aims to find an appropriate interpretative key for one of the central episodes in V. Domontovych’s novel “Without Foundation”. In this episode, the protagonist meets a woman for the first time and, solely based on his feelings and emotions, recognizes her as a person to whom a symphony by Karol Szymanowski was dedicated. The analysis of interpretations in the recent works of literary scholars leads to the conclusion that the explanations at hand do not clarify how this episode could actually occur, as they are limited by the Modern concept of relative truth. These interpretations either treat the episode as impossible or suggest a connection to psychoanalytic theory without any supporting evidence from the text. To avoid this limitation, the researcher seeks for a theory that aligns with V. Petrov’s philosophical and artistic interests, treats the episode as possible, and offers the necessary conceptual tools to explain the relationship between a piece of art and a source of inspiration. The comparative analysis showed that the use of scholastic exemplarism as an interpretative key significantly aids in explaining the episode. Scholastic exemplarism as a teaching about the correspondence between all the created things and the eternal ‘exemplars’ present in divine intellectus, enables the establishment of an objective link between the woman and the symphony, which is inevitably missing in the analysis of the novel through any of the Modern empirical approaches. Thus, the process of human cognition of God, described by Bonaventure, looks like a blueprint for describing the protagonist's recognition of the woman in “Without Foundation”. Moreover, explanation of the specific ontological and epistemological relationships between God and His creature, provided by Thomas Aquinas in “Compendium Theologiae”, clarifies many obscure aspects of the episode and the novel in general. The paper demonstrates the heuristic efficiency of employing scholastic exemplarism for the interpretation of “Without Foundation”.