Taras Shevchenko and Tatar Zabarzhada: creative interpretations of relationships (by the works literary Shevchenko studies)

Abstract

The article is part of a systematic research project “Intimate and love discourses in the Ukrainian literary Shevchenko studies”; these issues have not yet been the study subject of works about Taras Shevchenko in various genres. A number of Shevchenko studies works state that this topic has been “sacrificed” for more than a century to show the social life of the Ukrainian genius, and this in turn led to a certain impoverishment and simplification of his image in general, and in biographical works in particular. The study notes the peculiarities of Shevchenko’s relationship with women during his exile and military service. It is noted that the history of the poet’s relationship with the Tatar girl Zabarzhada, about who extremely sparse documentary and memorable information has been preserved, its interpretations in the works of Shevchenko’s biography have a number of characteristic features inherent in this genre formation. The study particularly emphasizes the significant art role of artistic conjectures and fictions in the creation of the relationship between Shevchenko and Zabarzhada, and points to different levels of their artistic embodiment in different works. A certain evolution of the interpretation of the analyzed history in the epic works of the 1960s and 1990-2010, under the condition of lack of creative nonfreedom and liberty, is traced. The artistic embodiment of the history of Shevchenko and Zabarzhada in the novels of “Taras’s Ways” by O. Ivanenko, “And Dark Nights… And Maiden’s Caress” by A. Tsvid, in the dramatic story of “Angry God” by M. Bratan, and also for literary comparison, in the novel of “Akin Theresa” by Russian B. Vadetsky, are analyzed in more detail. The study contains information about the structural features of artistic and biographical texts – generic genre, chronotope, documentary phenomena.