Re-Writing a Woman’s Biography: Marco Vovchok as a Character of Literary Work

The attitude to biographical works has changed significantly under the influence of postmodernism: the refusal to perceive the author as a single authoritative source of meaning has led to the perception of biographical fiction as a fiction biography, creating in the context of the ideology a biography of the biographer himself. The aim of the proposed study is to find out how gender and ideology form the strategies for presenting the Ukrainian woman writer as a character of a biographical novel. The proposed article will deal with 4 works of different periods: “The Silent Deity” by V.Domontovych (1930), “At Dawn” by Y. Tys (1961), “Maria” by O. Ivanenko (1983), “Like a Magnet” by I. Rozdobudko (2013). At the heart of all of them is the life of the first Ukrainian writer Marco Vovchok (Maria Vilinska), but quite different women are represented in these works. The biographical works under consideration demonstrate more attention to the events of the writer’s life than to what she wanted to say in her work. The interpretation of Marco Vovchok’s stories is dominated by their political (social) significance and they are presented as a basis for talking about the life of the woman (with the exception of Rozdobudko’s story).