Trauma Wielkiej Wojny w wybranych opowiadaniach Wasyla Stefanyka. Lektura w kontekście twórczości pisarza

Abstract

Vasyl Stefanyk (1871–1936) is one of the most outstanding Ukrainian writers of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. He created his own form of literary expression similar to a short story or a picture. His stories present the life of Ukrainian peasants. For this purpose, he used free indirect speech. He wanted to reliably recreate the truth about the peasant’s soul. He wrote in the Pokuttia dialect, which additionally made his texts more credible. In his stories the most important themes are suffering, pain, orphanhood, disease and death. The world presents itself as a nightmare and torment. Stefanyk created a non-exotic image of his homeland Pokuttia. The image of World War I as seen through the eyes of a boy in Children’s Adventure fits in with the formula of this writing. In addition to these motifs, in Stefanyk’s works such as Mother Earth, Sons, The Boundary Line, Winter Grains, we find the land motif, which documents the strong relationship of Ukrainian peasants with land. Without it, they don’t exist.They work for land and die fighting for land. For Stefanyk, they are the subsoil of the nation. Stefanyk’s work is strongly mythologized. This allows a national philosophy to be included in his texts. The myth of “little homeland” present in it brings this work closer to the Blut-und-Boden-Dichtung literature, derived from the Romanticism, promoting irrationalism, instinct, and the mysticism of “blood and earth”.