Creative Connections between Prose Legacy of Olena Pchilka and Lesia Ukrainka

Abstract

The expediency of comparing prose works of Olena
Pchilka and Lesia Ukrainka is due to the fact that they came to readers almost in
sync, although Olena Pchilka is still commented by researchers in the context of a
realistic-populist tradition in nineteenth-century Ukrainian literature, and Lesia
Ukrainka as a twentieth-century modernist. In fact, as Oksana Zabuzhko has shown,
these are two iconic figures of Ukrainian modern culture, which constitute different
archetypal patterns of behavior in colonial conditions. However, both have several or
similar themes in prose: 1) peasant life; 2) the life of the Ukrainian intelligentsia; 3)
"women's issue" and the position of a woman in marriage. Lesia Ukrainka has
developed her talent of a prose writer extremely quickly, while Olena Pchilka was
striving for some conservatism. But they were close in their views on the most
important principles and perspectives of contemporary Ukrainian life in their time,
professed humane and democratic principles of treating the people without idealizing
them. Both were irreconcilable with colonial oppression. Lesia Ukrainka went much
further in applying the techniques of psychologizing and lyricizing prose. In the prose
of Olena Pchilka, there is a tangible satirical flow.