The Poetics of Mistake in Lesya Ukrainka’s Creative Work

Abstract

The presence of a mistake in the scientific and artistic text has its own specifics and a certain sense. The origins of the scientific interpretation of the phenomenon of false date back to the category of a Gammatia based by Aristotle. The attention to mistakes as a manifestation of the accidental and means of expression was actualized by researchers of avant-garde, futurism, postmodern literature. The purpose of the proposed article is to analyze the varieties of the artistic aberration as a factor in Lesya Ukrainka's poetics in the context of her modernist searchers. The mistakes in dramas of the author mostly are the plot center and they are the result of difficult choices of characters (“Blue Rose”, “Cassandra”, “Boyar”, “Rufin and Priscilla”, “Forest Song”, “Orgy”, “On the Blood Field”, etc). The formal mistake as a sign of absurdity most markedly forms the originality of the artistic world of Lesya Ukrainka's fantastic drama “Autumn Fairy Tale”. The semiotics of false facts in her writings is always subordinated to the figurative paradigm of the text. In particular voluntaristic temporal shifts in the usage of iconic symbols of nature or culture emphasize the essence of the characters in the drama “Advocate Martian”, “In the Dense Forest” and others. The aberration phenomenon appears the central problem in Lesya Ukrainka's story “The Mistake”, which is based on the self-analysis of the writer-revolutionary who stays in prison. It is proved that the narrator is close to admit his mistake to be “orpheustic” (Maurice Blanchot) which means that his desire to own the woman took precedence over the duty of the poet just sing about her. So, Lesya Ukrainka in her creativity offers a variety of interpretations of characters' reflections over the painful consequences of a false existential choice. In conclusions, Gammatia is recognized as a symbol of the author's interpretation of modern life, with the specific fluctuations of the individual between loneliness and solidarity.