THE TIME-SPACE OF MOSCOW IN LESYA UKRAINKA’S DRAMATIC POEM «BOYARYNIA» AND Z. TULUB’S HISTORICAL NOVEL “MAN EATERS”

The article compares some elements of the biographies of Ukrainian writers, Larysa Petrivna Kvitka-Kosach (Lesya Ukrainka, 1871–1913) and Zinaida Pavlivna Tulub (1890–1964). The author analyzes the vision of the history of Ukraine and its place in world history in the works of both writers. Lesya Ukrainka made the events of world history the main topic of her first dramatic poems, in the end of her carrier she studied Ukrainian history. Zinaida Tulub placed the history of Ukraine at the heart of her work and analyzed through it the events of world history.The article studies the time-space of Moscow in two works from the women- writers under study: the dramatic poem “Boyarynia” (1910) and the historical novel “Man eaters” (1934–1937). In these works the figure of Moscow as a city is the epicenter of the forced assimilation of two female characters in the works: a Ukrainian woman named Oksana, who accompanies her husband Stepan, a Moscow employee of Ukrainian origin, during the period called The Ruin (from 1657 to 1687), and a Crimean Tatar woman named Medzha, who finds herself in Moscow not of her own free will but because of the tragic events of the Cossack-Tatar confrontation (at the end of 16th and the start of 17th centuries).In Moscow, the characters first were deprived of their national identity and then their physical lives. The article discusses such stages of assimilation as the ban on wearing national clothes, the rejection of household traditions, and religious convictions. The article’s author considers that all the described stages of loss of national identity are manifestations of gender-based violence against women.The time-space of Moscow narrows to a single house in which moral and physical torture is carried out on the characters. For example, in the dramatic poem “The Boyarynia”, it is either “the rooms”, “Stepan’s House” or “the Terem” (a specific room in the traditional house of Russia, called “Muscovy” in the past).The conflict “friend or stranger”/”myself or the other” is central to both works.Researchers of Lesya Ukrainka’s work consider this conflict as the main one in her dramatic works. The same conflict can be studied in the novel “Man eaters”.The author of the article believes that the study of the tragic influence of Russia on the fate of Ukraine through the prism of the depiction of the destructive power of the Moscow patriarchal society in the Ukrainian literature of the twentieth century is promising.