INTERPRETATION OF THE RELATIONSHIPS OF TARAS SHEVCHENKO AND AGATA USKOVA IN THE LITERARY SHEVCHENKO STUDIES (ARTICLE ONE: SHEVCHENKO STUDIES OF THE 1960S)

Abstract

This article was written according to the systematic research project “Intimate and Love Discourses in the Ukrainian Literary Shevchenko Studies”. Such issues have not yet become the subject of in-depth study, precisely in various genre artistic and biographical works about Taras Shevchenko. The conscious inattention of the researchers to the mentioned issues for the sake of a broader display of the social space of the existence of the Ukrainian genius in several Shevchenko studies works, including the Shevchenko encyclopedia, was ascertained. It is noted here that this practice led to the impoverishment and simplification of the image of Shevchenko, in whose real life the relations with women played a significant role. The article analyzes the creative interpretations of the history of the relationship between Taras Hryhorovych and Agata Uskova by the authors of biographical works about Shevchenko, studies its source-documentary base in detail, notes the peculiarities of the social and everyday context (in fact, of Shevchenko’s completely servile position in the soldiery), during which the specified story unfolded. It was noted that the availability of sufficiently broad source information (letters, diary, literary and painting works) about the relationship between Shevchenko and Uskova limited the possibilities of artistic conjectures or fictions about them. At the same time, it is emphasized that the same richness of the source base caused several quite similar interpretations of the analyzed history in the works of Shevchenko studies or in the few studies written on the topic of “Shevchenko and women”, e.g., in the publications of Yuriy Kovtun, Myron Kozak, Stanislav Repyakh. In the first article, the main analytical attention is focused on the multi-genre works of Shevchenko studies of the 1960s to the great anniversaries of Taras Hryhorovych in 1961 and 1964: the corresponding works of Oksana Ivanenko, Liubov Zabashta, Borys Vadetskyi, Hryhoriy Donets, Jerzy Jędrzejewicz, Vasyl Shevchuk. In their works, an artistic and documentary understanding of the intimate sphere of Shevchenko’s life was born.