Symphony of sadness - Olha Kobylianska’s novella Valse Mélancolique

The article is a proposition of interpretation Valse Mélancolique – short stories written by the  Ukrainian women writer Olha Kobylianska (1863–1942). This is an example of literary research devoted to synthetic overview of the phenomenon of insanity / mental illness in Ukrainian

Modernism literature (late nineteenth and early twentieth century). Insanity, being one of the main themes of modernist literature, today does not live to see a proper discussion in the Ukrainian literary studies. The resulting so far work has moved this issue only into a selective and fragmentary way, always on the margins of the main range of research interests, thus far definitely without exhausting problem. Madness constituted for Kobylianska one of the most important and dramatic forms of exclusion, hence the belief that the mentally ill is not so much a sick man, as enslaved, subjected to the pressure of power, deprived of the right to subjectivity, of their own forms of existence. 

“The Ugly Truth”. Cahus’ Dream Revisited

The aim of this paper is to propose an analysis of the Cahus’ Dream, a well known episode of the Perlesvaus, Arthurian romance from the 13th century, within the context of the medieval dream theories. Inspired mostly by Macrobius’ Commentary on the Dream of Scipio – fo­cusing on the divinatory (or deceptive/ illusory) role of dreams – as well as by Tertullian’s and Augustine’s Christian reflections on the relations between the soul and the sleeping body, these theories permit to shed a new light on the oneiric adventure of the squire. In fact, the author furnishes numerous clues which make it look as an insomnium or fantasma: a false, illusory dream, deprived of any deeper signification. Thus, unable of uncovering some hidden, symbolic meaning, the mirage paradoxically turns out to be a material, “ugly”, as the text has it, truth, blurring the border between dream and reality in a most confusing way, and setting the specific Perlesvaus tone from the very beginning of the romance.

In the poetry of Boris Maruna (1940–2007), a Croatian modernist poet who is, together with Viktor Vida, considered the best Croatian emigrant poet, one can see the influences of American popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. By living on three continents – Europe, South America, and North America – and having gained education in Los Angeles, Maruna incorporated into his poetic code some of the fundamental and typical determinants of American cultural and subcultural lifestyle. Fast food, television, film, rock/pop music, cars, freedom of sexual behavior… are some of the adopted forms of American culture that Maruna in his narrative poems both thematizes and advocates, but also questions in an extremely critical way. Irony, humor and strong satire represent the aesthetic aspects by which Maruna reveals the hypocritical, vain, and existential face of the United States of America of that period. On the other hand, like a distant Arcadia, there are landscapes and symbols of the homeland that he abandoned, and the desire to one day return into its physical spaces. However, even the so desired homeland cannot go without critical invectives and poetically ironic comments. Even then, Maruna’s liberal “unadjusted” consciousness makes itself heard, outside all the dictates of expected behavior, thus completely isolating him from the matrix of Croatian emigration poets.

     Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Its Postmodern and Neomodern Progeny