The Epistolary Writings of Dariya Vikonska as a Speculum of Creative Existence

Abstract

The figure of Dariya Vikonska (Karolina Ivanna Fedorovych-Malytska, 1893–1945) is little known and is one of the least studied in contemporary literary and art studies. Today, her forgotten research and literary heritage is coming back into Ukrainian cultural society. The artist can fully and deeply experience the fullness of human existence and transfer these experiences to the canvas, express it in music, or put it in the “clothes of the word” – in literature. National tradition and the sense of national belonging are very important for the artist. Hence, the vision of creativity as a process is deeply national. This national orientation of the artist is directly related to creativity as a national phenomenon rooted not in the borrowed and universally dismantled ideas and images but in the space of the national psyche. Dariya Vikonska was constantly interested in the psychology of creativity of the artist (writer, painter, composer). Her epistolary inheritance, as well as her literary studies and art studies, create a special ideological system of the vision of mental processes associated with creativity. This interest in the psychology of creativity requires the vision of art and literature as a national phenomenon inextricably linked with the mental features of the creative process seen as directly connected with the national ethnopsychology. Dariya Vikonska’s ideological, cultural, historical, and aesthetic ideas about literature, literary work, and art were surprisingly innovative, extremely relevant, and expressed the most recent ideas of the development of Ukrainian culture in the context of European culture.