«САМОТНІЙ МАНДРІВНИК...» В. ДОМОНТОВИЧА В СВІТЛІ ФІЛОСОФІЇ ЕКЗИСТЕНЦІАЛІЗМУ

Abstract

The article analyses V. Domontovych’s biographical novel “The lonely traveller is heading along the lonely way” as a fictional specimen of the philosophy of existentialism in the Ukrainian prose of the 40s of the XXth c. that proves the intellectuality of Ukrainian literature. It is proved that the main statements of this direction in the philosophy of the twentieth century penetrate the entire work from the beginning to its completion at all levels, starting from the concept-headline, the essence of the central hero of the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, plot-compositional features, means of shaping, external and internal structure. Understanding of the work through the prism of this problem is carried out with the help of involvement of relevant considerations of Socrates, Hryhorii Skovoroda (the idea of finding an own place in life – “know yourself”), Albert Camus, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Nikolai Berdyaev (“Sisyphean work” (“The Myth of Sisyphus”) for the sake of establishing oneself ; a comparative description of Van Gogh and Mersot from the story “The Stranger”: the conflict between the person and the society, the problem of “the other”, voluntary “suffering – the highest law of life”, suffering as one of the main existential things, coming/escaping to God, testing yourself by a religion as your destination, disappointment in the voluntary apostolate, etc.), as well as the thoughts of Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Jaspers, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. The analysis of the work is carried out accordingly in the context of Ukrainian and world literature.