Łesia Ukrainka i Adam Mickiewicz w przestrzeni Sonetów krymskich

Abstract

The paper compares literary imagery and Crimean themes in the writings of Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), the most eminent poet of Polish Romanticism, and Lesya Ukrainka (born Larysa Kosacz, 1871–1913), the most prominent representative of Ukrainian modernism. In particular, it focuses on Mickiewicz’s “Crimean Sonnets” and Lesya Ukrainka’s “Crimean Memories”, which describe her impressions of a journey made in 1890 and 1891. The analysis uses the category of ‘displacement’, or change of place, proposed by the American researcher Stuart Curren in his article “Romanticism displaced and placeless”. For Polish and Ukrainian writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such displacement was a fairly typical practice, and the phenomenon had a significant impact on the character of their works. The article emphasises that the Ukrainian writer’s work is more or less reminiscent of Mickiewicz’s “Crimean Sonnets”. Many scholars – both Polish and Ukrainian – note that despite the thematic similarities to the poetry of Mickiewicz and Pushkin, who both visited Crimea, Lesya Ukrainka’s “Crimean Memories” stand out for their originality. The work testifies to the qualitative development of Ukrainka’s poetry both at the level of genre and stylistic features, as well as at the level of content and means of artistic expression. In Lesya’s work, the landscape is used to express precisely the thoughts and mental states of the lyrical subject (as is the case in Mickiewicz’s work). From the point of view of genre, these works can be classified as a sub-genre of lyrical meditations.