“My Sweet Mother…”: Empathetic Interpretation of Olena Pchilka’s Epistolary Portrait

Abstract

The paper deals with empathetic characteristics of Olena Pchilka’s personality in the family letters. The correspondence of the writer’s children, in particular Mychailo and Lesia, contains a number of details for the psychological portrait of Olena Pchilka; it captures her various emotional states and reactions, allows dening the communicative frames that dominated in the family. The researcher traces the formation of a specic Olena Pchilka’s cult, which concerned her roles of a writer, public person, and mother. It is conrmed by numerous enthusiastic and thankful words in the letters of her children. However, the main attention is paid to the synthesis of self-sacrice and authoritarianism in Olena Pchilka’s family pedagogy. Communication at distance between Lesia Ukraiinka and her mother turned into an experiment of modeling the image of a national writer. At the same time, the letters testify to the fact that Olena Pchilka recognised the unique gift and powerful intelligence of her daughter Lesia Ukraiinka. The mother managed to establish quite friendly relations with her elder children, but Pchilka’s desire to control the emotional world of young Kosaches, her insistent interpretation of it, and the fear of other people’s excessive influence on her children caused long-lasting conflicts, accompanied by ‘tactics of silence’. These destructive tactics resulted in emotional traumas, which, in particular, were sublimated in the literary world of Lesia Ukraiinka as a discourse of communicative rupture (“Advocate Martian”, “Johanna, Chusa’s Wife”, “Aisha and Mohammed”, “Babylonian Captivity”, etc.). It should be noted that children tried to tolerate their mother’s dependence on her psychological complexes and insistent self-isolation, understanding the unique role of Olena Pchilka in their personal development.