INTERPRETIVE PARADOXES OF TEXTUAL OPENNESS: NARRATOLOGICAL, PSYCHOANALYTIC, AND FEMINIST DISSECTION OF THE SHORT STORY “THE SINNER” BY LES MARTOVYCH

Abstract

The scholarly debate over the writer’s outlook and individual literary style of Les Martovych (1871—1916) is still relevant. The ironic mood of his works and its genesis, the psychological and cultural foundation of his writings, the vision of Martovych’s narration in the context of examining his psychological ground – this is what modern researchers, in particular, Roman Pikhmanets, Olena Hnidan, Oleh Ilnytskyi, and Hanna Marchuk, most often reflected on. Just as topical is the interpretation of the compositional and semantic level of the writer’s texts along with the study of the peculiarities of using linguistic and stylistic means for the realization of the author’s intention in the translations of his works into foreign languages.
 This paper focuses on the man-woman relationship in the short story “The Sinner” (1904) in terms of post-structural psychoanalytic, narratological, and feminist perspectives. Obvious is the gap between the notion of a woman as a feminine character and as a sociohistorical subject in a patriarchal world. The interpretation of the psychological portraits of the characters strives for defining the elusive nature of a reality that is driven by the ideology of patriarchy on the one hand, and the emancipation of women on the other.
 Using the method of ‘suture’, the paper demonstrates the process of creating female and male subjectivity at the level of narrative discourse. The findings may serve those who research the Ukrainian literary trends of the late 19th — early 20th centuries, peculiarities of the development of Ukrainian prose of the mentioned period in relation to the general European context, feminist-psychoanalytic discourse in literature, and the mechanisms of creating female and male images in prose works.