From Translation to ‘New Drama’: The Blue Rose in the Oeuvre of Lesya Ukrainka

This article examines the position of the first play, The Blue Rose, within the dramatic legacy of Lesya Ukrainka. It also considers the relationship between the history of writing the play and the author’s work on literary translations. The hypothesis put forth is that the factors that shaped the author’s concept of a modern dramatic work were the circumstances of Lesya Ukrainka’s personal life and her immersion in world literature. The recently published Complete Academic Collection of Works by Lesya Ukrainka, released in 2021 to coincide with the author's 150th birthday, offers insights into the evolution of her oeuvre. The variants and drafts of texts of fiction, translations and correspondence, as well as extensive commentaries by researchers make it possible to trace how unsuccessful theatre productions of The Blue Rose, the self-translation of the play into Russian, and her fascination with Hauptmann's dramas led the writer to create a landmark work that influenced her entire dramatic oeuvre. This analysis considers how Lesya Ukrainka, operating within the context of her era’s innovative artistic ideas, was able to comprehend them simultaneously in a variety of artistic texts, literary critical articles, and literary correspondence. Furthermore, it examines how her translation work facilitated the penetration of different cultures into each other. Subsequently, the same freedom of transformation enabled her to extend the limits of her own creative output. It can be concluded that the result of Lesya Ukrainka’s artistic search was the play The Blue Rose, which can be considered the ‘new drama’ of the fin de siècle era. The writer considered the emergence of a new type of hero, akin to that described by Hauptmann, to be a defining feature of the 'new drama', and wrote about it in her article on modern drama. The Blue Rose presents a new type of heroine, who subsequently became a central figure in the writer's dramatic works. Consequently, despite the differences between The Blue Rose and other dramatic texts, all of Lesya Ukrainka’s plays can be seen to be conceptually connected.