Personal Image Building of Lesia Ukrainka (on the Writer's Epistolary)

Abstract

The article deals with Lesya Ukrainka's personal image
building on the material of the writer's epistolary. The origins and interpretation of
the concept of image and style associated with self-expression of the individual, the
influence of writers on the manifestation of certain meanings using their appearance,
including national issues (Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko). Oksana Zabuzhko was
one of the first to raise the issue of the writer's image, emphasizing the long-term bias
of artistic and scientific interpretations of Lesya Ukrainka's image. The author's
letters represent her various incarnations and interpretations of the author's existential choice, her priorities in clothing. Lesya Ukrainka's image building was mainly
subordinated to her professional reputation as a Ukrainian writer from a noble family.
Attention is paid to the formation of the girl's taste in the family.
At the heart of the study is the experience of Lesya Ukrainka as a fashion
designer and dressmaker, as she often sewed clothes for herself or adapted the
purchased clothes. It is proved that Lesya Ukrainka followed fashion trends, in
particular European ones. At the same time, she sought to modernize the Ukrainian
traditional clothing and jewelry filling the folk details in her outfit with image
meaning. Among the symbolic attributes of the image of the writer are hats (felt,
straw). Attention is paid to the colour scheme of the writer's clothes, her tendency to
bright details in her youth, her attraction to white and the gradual choice of black in
her wardrobe, which emphasizes her focus on business style and at the same time
marks the tragic inner world. It is defined camouflage as one of the functions of the
writer's self-image. Lesya Ukrainka's reception of her own photos, her ability to be
self-ironic about her images, and her discomfort within the comme il faut are singled
out.
The study proved that Lesya Ukrainka's image building is characterized by the
following priorities of a European woman-intellectual of the fin de siècle: elegance,
restraint, nobility. At the same time, the originality of her image was added by the
gender-attraction and national rhetoric of the elite of that time.