The Initiation of the Dramatist: Lesya Ukrainka’s “The Possessed” from the perspective of the phenomenology of creativity

Abstract

This article offers a phenomenological interpretation of Lesya Ukrainka’s dramatic poem Oderzhyma (The Possessed, 1901), the first major manifestation of her dramatic talent, based on the biblical narrative of Christ’s betrayal. The poem is examined as an autonomous aesthetic object whose meaning arises from within the text itself, with external biographical and historical facts already absorbed into internal intentional structures. The methodological framework draws on Roman Ingarden’s phenomenological aesthetics. The analysis focuses on the state of possession, the bipolarity of love and hatred, and the dynamic nature of the “cry” as an initiatory moment opening the “time of creativity” – the space for the emergence of a new Subject, the author herself. The protagonist’s dual onomastic identity (Miriam/ The Possessed) is interpreted as marking the transition from a historical figure to an eidetic mode of existence. The study argues that the poem constitutes an aesthetic gesture of existential freedom in which Lesya Ukrainka’s mythopoetic imagination converges with the energy of dramatic form, allowing the text to function as a “poetry of being” – a self-sufficient act of creation in which language becomes the medium of ecstatic experience.