Psychoanalytic and Existentialist Versions of Don Juanism: Lesia Ukrainka’s The Stone Host

Abstract

The article substantiates the necessity of psychoanalytical and existential methodology in interpreting Lesia Ukrainka’s drama Kaminnyi hospodar (1912; The Stone Host), including the works of José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno on Don Quixote, Albert Camus on absurd characters (The Myth of Sisyphus. Essay on the Absurd), and Jacques Lacan’s The Mirror Stage. Biographical data testify to the critical attitude of the writer to world treatments of the legend. Her challenge to tradition was bold and conscious. It is regarded that the main point of Lesia Ukrainka’s polemics with tradition concerns Don Juan apologetics, introduced by romantics and developed by modernists. Exploring Don Juan’s psychological makeup provides the opportunity to show that all participants of the legend have become victims of Don Juan apologetics (that distinguish the tragic fi nale of the story). The Don Juan myth has played an integral role in the image of the Person (social mask) being accepted by characters as a trustful image of the Self. Interpretation of the Mirror Image in The Stone Host and its crucial role in the final scene allows for justifying that the mirror serves the narcissistic characters’ admiration of themselves and shows them not only an attractive appearance but an ideal version of the Self, created by myth.