Motyw choroby i dysfunkcji w powieści Marii Matios Słodka Darusia

Abstract

The text concerns the subject of the disease in Ukrainian literature based on the novel by Maria Matios Sweet Darusia. The novel was published in 2003, has received many awards and is one of the most famous Ukrainian novels of the last decades. Many Ukrainian literary scholars have written about this novel, including Sofi a Filonenko, Jaroslaw Holoborodko, Nila Zborowska and Tamara Hundorowa. Maria Matios analyzes in Sweet Darusia an illness as a metaphor for social and cultural phenomena. In the fi rst part of my paper, I analyse the metaphor of a disease and dysfunction in Ukrainian literature. The second part of the text is about a disease as a consequence of the traumatic experience of the heroine, in which Maria Matios illustrates the problems of memory of the Ukrainian nation. Diseases, dysfunctions, and pathological states are quite popular motifs in the Ukrainian prose of the independence period. They appear, among others, in the texts of Yuri Andrukhovych, Stepan Procuik, Oksana Zabuzko, Yuri Gudz, and Yuri Izdryk. All mentioned authors combine a state of disease with the mental, political and economic condition of post-Soviet society. In Ukrainian prose, the disease is a posttraumatic symptom, manifested in both the individual plan – in the hero’s body and psyche – and also with a broader, over-individual dimension, allowing to diagnose the condition of post-totalitarian space residents. In the novel Sweet Darusia, physical suff ering and illness of the main character is an image of a historical trauma experienced by totalitarian society. The illness in this novel is the starting point for self-refl ection and the stimulus to construct new identifi cation, basing on what is individual, human, intimate but often painful and difficult to accept.