Problems of female emancipation in Orest Avdykovych’snovelistics: text and context

The article examines the sources of the author's interest and the peculiarities of thefeminist social discourse interpretation in the novels of Orest Avdykovych, a second plan Western Ukrainian modernist writer, whose work belongs to a rather short period of the border between the ХІХ - ХХ centuries. The author emphasizes that the social and political factors of the Ukrainian women's movement development in the western Ukrainian lands have already found a fairly wide coverage in the Ukrainian humanitarian scientific space. Known not only as the author of several collections of short stories ("Poetry and Prose" (1899), "Netley" (1900), "Butterflies" (1900), "The Demon of Ruin" (1901), "My Popularity and Other Stories" (1905)), a teacher and an active public figure, in his prose the writer addressed various top problems of Ukrainian social life, while not renouncing the movement towards decadent stylistics. However, the writer's appeal to gender issues is determined not only by his civic position, but also by personal motives. His wife, Klimentуna Avdykovich-Glynska, was an active participant in the women's movement, and after her husband's death, she became much more famous thanks to her commercial, philanthropic and feminist activities, founding the "Fortuna" candy factory in Przemyshl (later - "Fortuna Nova" in Lviv), which became one of the subdivisions of modern "Svitoch". Several short stories of the writer from the collection "My Popularity and Other Stories" were selected for consideration of the featuresof feminist issuesembodiment.A special interest in gender is given to the analysis of the author's reception naturefor the position of Ukrainian women in the small-town Galician environment during ХІХ-ХХ centuries and the problem of female emancipation from a male point of view. The analysis of the writer's texts from the collection "My Popularity and Other Stories" allows us to assert that Orest Avdykovich's short stories revealed a general trend of awakening interest in gender issues, which became an important component of the formation of Ukrainian modernity.The inconsistency and caution of the author in his views on the question of the patriarchal tradition destruction illustrates the process peculiarities of social consciousness modernization in Galicia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.