FICTIONAL STORIES OF SHEVCHENKO`S LOVE IN EXILE (BASED ON THE WORKS OF SHEVCHENKIANA)

Abstract

The article is a part of the systematic research project “Intimate-Love Discourses in the Ukrainian Literary Shevchenkiana”; this problem has not yet become a subject of study specifically in various genre works about Taras Shevchenko. Several works on Shevchenko Studies state that for over a century, this topic was “sacrificed” for the sake of a broader display of the social existence 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 research emphasizes a number of social and everyday circumstances – Taras Shevchenko’s almost completely lawless, enslaved soldier’s life, detachment from a more natural environment, in particular the Ukrainian one, and forced integration into a completely “different world” – the barracks and the East – which radically affected the poet’s life, including on the possibilities of his relationships with women, about which there is very little information. There is very little information about the Tatar woman Zabarzhada and much more information about Ahata Uskova. So, the writers who wrote Shevchenko’s biographies resorted to fabrications and conjectures in their part about the exile. This article analyzes the fictional stories of the Ukrainian poet’s probable relationships with the “women of the East”, created in the novels of O. Ivanenko “Taras’s Paths”, Karakalpak U. Bekbaulov’s “Taras on the Aral Sea”, A. Tsvid “And dark nights... And girlish caresses”, O. Denisenko “Taras. Return”. The level of artistic skill of each of the works is noted, special attention is paid to the analysis of the novels of U. Bekbaulov and O. Denisenko. Information about the structural features of artistic and biographical texts is quite widely included.