UNDECODED TRAGEDY OF THE NATION IN THE DRAMA POEM “CASSANDRA” FOREST UKRAINIAN

Volume 61 (2021)

Yu. Kovalev
Dr Hab., Prof., Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv

Summary

The article highlights Lesya Ukrainka’s authorial interpretation of the ancient Greek plot of the Trojan War through the worldview of the soothsayer Cassandra, which foresaw the tragedy of her hometown, doomed to die by the Achaean invaders. In her dramatic poem, the author did not emphasize battle scenes, but psychological conflicts related to the problem of adequate vision and decoding of reality as it is, and not as it is thought or imagined, so the main character inevitably comes into conflict with others. characters who tend to be manipulated while living in an illusory world, unable to verify the information offered to them by the demagogue and pragmatist Helen, who paralyzes the trust of short-sighted Trojans. Parallels with the Ukrainian reality in which Lesya Ukraine lived and the beginning of the XXI century. – quite obvious. History has taught no one anything. However, the playwright did not fall into didactics and moralization, did not illustrate the past, as contemporaries believed, so she had to explain the essence of the dramatic poem, only showed a script-metaphor not so possible as an inevitable national tragedy, but Ukrainians will trust charming simulacra, not harsh. reality. She proposed a “drama of ideas” inherent in the “new drama”, a tense intellectual agon of the Priam House, developed the plot dynamics on the existential border, which is inherent in her dramatic poems, which failed then and current theaters, because they did not find, mistakenly fitting them into the genre category Lesendrama.

Key words: dramatic poem, “drama of ideas”, agony, divination, prophetic catastrophe.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/2520-6346.2(61).70-78

References

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