Tamara Hundorova, Professor and Principal Research Scholar, Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Visiting Scholar and Lecturer, Princeton University; Associate, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
This lecture deals with the formation of modernist writing at the end of 19th century in Ukrainian literature. The special accent is made on the anticolonial discourse that transgresses limitations of Ukrainian language usage, inscribes the "other" in the historical narrative and reinterprets European cultural codes. The topic refers to the role of the female authors and reveals how Lesia Ukraїnka (1871 -1913), a famous Ukrainian female writer, becomes engaged in the discussions on topical themes and motifs of the European fin de siècle consciousness, in particular female insanity, hysteria, and sexuality. The analysis of the first drama The Blue Rose (1896) by Lesia Ukraїnka as a multidimensional and experimental drama shows the author’s work with moral norms, psychological states, and personal biography. By enlarging the multinational field of Ukrainian language and reinterpreting the cultural codes of different epochs, from the medieval to the modern, Lesia Ukraїnka includes Ukrainian literature in the context of the fin de siècle European modernist culture.