A Conflict of Substitution of Concepts in the Dramatic Poem "In the Dense Forest" of Lesia Ukrainka (a Projection on Drama of Existentialism)

Abstract

Founding to search analogies in two plays – Lesia
Ukrainka’s "In the dense forest" and Albert Camus’ "Caligula" – is that
circumstance, that both the works are marked the protracted process of authorial
work over them. Obviously, an artist goes back to a planned text or even ready
text because he searches on the questions, set in it, an answer which is impossible
to find or that contradicts the expectation of society. It prompts the readers also
certain likeness in the range of problems. Both the works show the substitution of
veritable concepts by their substitutes that satisfies majority members in the
society.
The dramatic poem of Lesia Ukrainka "In the dense forest" is related to the
until now unsolvable substitution of concepts on a way to freedom, not only with
artistic problems, which literary critics usually put at the first place. A research
aim is reading of social-philosophical conflict – searches of ways to freedom and
substitution of concepts in this search as a tragic collision – in a dramatic poem
"In the dense forest" through comparing to the later play of the French artist and
philosopher А. Camus "Caligula".
Philosophical contents, fitted by the authors in these plays, do not lie on a
surface. And it does not cost to compare works to the traditional dramatic form. The
poetic of "new European drama" developed by the increase of theatrical convention, the increase of abstractions – "pointlessness", if to conduct a parallel with fine arts,
where analogical processes were. The drama of the existentialists – of the most
prominent its creators А. Camus and J.-P. Sartre – shows the same increase to the
"abstract" (conditionally speaking), even in comparing to play writers of modern
directions in the first half of the 20th century. The Ukrainian author went on her
independent way, although she knew about the achievement of the colleaguescontemporaries on the fracture of the century. Her play is distinguished by innovative
poetics: an intellectual conflict is incarnate through contrasting bright individual
heroes-characters. The author masterly lines uploaded by philosophical senses
dialogues and monologues, at the same time she contains in them psychological
implications, emotional nuances, she satiates them by intertextual links and rich
symbolism.