Lesya Ukrainka’s Play “Woman Possessed” and its Critical Interpretations

Outstanding Ukrainian writer of the early modernism epoch Lesya Ukrayinka (Larysa Petrivna Kosach, when married — Kvitka, 1871–1913) got a widespread acknowledgement first of all as a lyrical poetess, however it was her turn to the drama creation that determined her leading artistic searches and achievements. She experimented in the sphere of prosaic psychological plays (“Blue Rose”, “Farewell”), poetry plays, where the antique and romance traditions are actualized (“Iphigenia in Tauris”, “The Sculptor”) and finally came to the modernistic poetic drama. The play, which became the first dramatic masterpiece of the writer, according to many scientists, came to be the dramatic poem “Woman Possessed”. Here the Gospel images and motifs are brought to the circle of the up-to-date spiritual searches and unexpected interpretations. Artistically tackling the issue of love to humanity and love to the particular human, Lesya Ukrainka emphasizes its complication and versatility without any simple categorical conclusions. Although further creative searches of the authoress did include experiments, they basically followed the mould, determined by the “Woman Possessed”, within the system of poetic intellectual drama as a new-romantic example. The dominant style of the “Woman Possessed” and many other plays of authoress is the intellectual abundance. The interaction between ideological characters serves as the main mean of artistic intellectualism, unimaginable without the description of their complicity, without the deep psychologism. The ideology of the character (psychologically grounded temper’s dependence on the idea, its unity with the idea) relates to a mythological and symbolic interpretation of the empiric reality, its poetic transformation, connected with the unique imaginative spectacularity.