“Dirty Hands” and Troubled Conscience

The paper focuses on the complex issues of the short story Syluety’ (1923) by Mykola Khvylovy (1893–1933): the study of the motif of hands, the examination of how the traumatized characters experience spatiality (the space of a room), the dialectic of the body suffering from the consequences of the 1917 revolution, the indirect influence of filmic practice (inter-frame editing, the camera position of the narrator) on the artistic manifestation of the writer’s individual style. The religious, namely Christian, aspects previously described by Yurii Bezkhutryi were further elaborated. Special attention has been given to the characters of Dema and Veronika, who correlate with the author in terms of both biographical and artistic aspects, as well as some psychoanalytic features. The exceptionally complex deep-seated feelings of the characters touch upon the intersection of the fictional “reality” of the work of art and the reader’s present reality, as this piece of narrative is a vivid example of the analysis of relations between people in terms of their dissatisfaction with day-to-day reality and their desire for the ideal. Much like a cinema screen on which a film runs, presenting to the viewer what is to be seen and how it is visually perceived, Mykola Khvylovy conventionally does this in his fiction. The short story under study is a drama of the commonness of social reality, where the characters have already crossed the threshold of their private illusion (desire for change, desire to be needed, desire to love) to face disappointment (phobia) and then proceed to a next level of illusion. The study employs a system of biographical, systemic, hermeneutical, cultural, historical and poetic methods, justified by the specific nature of the survey, its object and subject. The findings are to prove useful to all those involved in the study of the Ukrainian writer’s signature world-view; the analysis of the Ukrainian literature of the first half of the twentieth century development; for experts in artistic anthropology and cultural art

Aesthetics · Art · Conscience · Dialectic · Disappointment · Drama · Epistemology · Feeling · Individualism · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Education, Literature, Philosophy Research · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Ukrainian Cultural and Linguistic Studies · Visual Culture and Art Theory

• European Influence in Ukrainian Modernist Prose

  Maxim Tarnawsky•Canadian Slavonic Papers•1992

  Add to list