Леся Українка. Лісова Пісня (1985) [djvu] | Оцифровано Гуртом

Lesya’s Forest Song, written in the reactionary period that followed the 1905 Russian uprising, exposed the narrowness of a purely material desire for personal gain, and poetized mankind’s lofty dream about happiness. The bourgeois nationalists strive to glide over and even conceal the revolutionary content of Lesya Ukrainka’s faery dramas, calling her a romantic poet retreating from the realities of the Ukrainian lifestyle into a world of either the past or of fantasy. This is purely malicious slander. Lesya lived according to the modern interests of her time and was under the strong influence of the most advanced ideas of the revolutionary working class — i. e. Marxism. On choosing historical, mythological or fantastic plots for her creative writing, the poetess used them to express broad and artistic social and political generalizations. The first dramatic works of Lesya Ukrainka were linked with the tasks of an all-Russia or nationwide liberation movement: they were directed against reactionary and anti-popular tendencies. The national features underlying the Forest Song define the character and composition of this drama.