A WOMAN IN THE VALERIAN PIDMOHYLNY'S PROSE: A PSYCHOLOGICALLY ORIENTED VISION

Abstract

This article is devoted to the psychopoetic interpretation of female characters in Valerian Pidmohylny's prose from the perspective of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. The study outlines the problem of representing femininity as a multi-level phenomenon associated not only with compositional needs, but also with the author's internal mental processes. We consider female characters in Pidmohylny's work as significant markers of his mental dynamics, combining archetypal structures (primarily the Anima and the Great Mother) with personal and cultural experience. This approach allows us to rethink the interpretation of the writer's characters, taking into account their functional and psychological depth. The focus is on the specific dichotomy of the feminine in the writer's artistic world-spiritually idealized and devalued-physical, which correlates with the Madonna-Whore complex and causes a constant conflict between the desired and the real in male characters. Based on an analysis of short and long prose, it is shown that women mostly serve as catalysts for men's internal processes and markers of their Eros, Shadow, or other structural substances. An important component of the study is the interpretation of the image of the mother in biographical and archetypal dimensions, which sets the initial matrix of the artist's attitude towards women and determines the nature of further literary emanations of femininity. Special attention is paid to the novel «A Small Drama», which is presented as a unique case of the evolution of the female character in Valerian Pidmohylny's psychopoetics. For the artist, the image of Marta Vysotska is the most complete embodiment of the Jungian Anima, because the author endows her with individual unconscious and personal development, striving to integrate feminine traits through her. It is through Marta that we trace the transformation of the author's attitude towards women as subjects, not just objects of male affections, which emphasizes the psychoautobiographical significance of the novel.