Some observations on ethnic-ritual elements as a means of national identification of characters in Lesya Ukrainka’s dramatic poem Boyarynya (The Noblewoman)

Abstract

This article analyzes Lesya Ukrainka’s well-known dramatic poem Boyarynya in an aspect still, unfortunately, little-studied: a comparison of the mental characteristics of Ukrainians and Russians, formed by different conditions of existence and development in the diachrony of the 17th–19th centuries. The purpose of the article: using historical materials, to compare the mental first Ukrainians and Muscovites, to determine the features of interstate relations in the social vertical.

First of all, we are talking about the traditions, rituals associated with the awareness of national identity, the importance of the religious component in the national mentality. The political, socio-economic, ideological foundations of the two peoples’ lives are also compared, it is proved that the cardinal difference between them lies in the difference of views on the fundamental foundations of organizing the society, the possibility of self-realization in a society where the individual is respected, on the one hand, and on the other, according to the principle of hierarchization, the absolutization of submission within the social vertical and the submission of all and everything to the supreme power tsarism. This refers to the opposition of democracy and monarchy Lesia Ukrainka vividly embodied in her work.

A separate aspect of the study is the information from foreign diplomats and travelers about the state institutions, the life of the Muscovites at the time, which prove the artistic reliability of the Muscovy depicted by the writer in Boyaryna. The artistic techniques and the ways to write out the era in the poem, the images (contrast, speech, nuances of the emotional, color scale) are highlighted in the paper.