James Joyce’s Dubliners and Nataliia Kobrynska’s Galicians: Concurrences, Mirrorings and Differences

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the short stories by the writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Irishman James Joyce and Ukrainian writer Nataliia Kobrynska. The research investigates typological similarities and differences of the authors’ concept of a human being based on the images of the inhabitants of Dublin (Joyce) and the inhabitants of Galicia (Kobrynska). There is a distinctive duality of the material world in the short stories of the writers; it is aimed both at reproducing the reality of ‘Dublin’ and ‘Galician’ space, as well its symbolisation. Dublin for Joyce is a topos of unfulfilled dreams, ‘the centre of paralysis’ and disappointments. Its inhabitants experience a moment of enlightenment that highlights their loneliness, alienation, and inability to find or preserve their national, religious, or personal identity. Similarly, against the background of realistically portrayed social environment Kobrynska’s short stories unfold complex psychodramas of the characters: the destruction of family and conflict of generations, confrontation of village and city, the fate of women in a patriarchal society, the awakening of the countryman’s national and political awareness, the formation of the civic culture and philosophy of altruism, and the helplessness of a human during technological progress.