Artistic representations of Ukraine and Ukrainians in French literature: evolution of the ethno-image from Hugo to Levy

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the ethno-image of Ukrainians in French literature and traces its evolution, starting from the poetic works of the nineteenth century and ending with contemporary French novels. The analysis of the hetero-image as a marker of the French perception of the Ukrainian nation is of particular relevance in the context of current events. It is found that Ukrainian allusions and reminiscences in French literary works of the nineteenth century were rare and had mainly signs of the exotic, were associated with Cossack themes, such as in the poems “Mazepa” by Victor Hugo (1829) and “The Response of the Cossacks of Zaporizhzhia to the Turkish Sultan” by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913), where the Ukrainian national image was built on such imagothemes as freedom-loving, disobedience, and audacity. The analysis of the epistolary works of Honoré de Balzac confirmed that in the French perception of the time, Ukraine appeared as a foreign and romanticised land. It is found that at the turn of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, Ukrainian allusions are mostly mentioned by French writers in the same associative line with the imagothemes of Chornobyl, man-made disaster, corruption, crime, etc., as exemplified by Morgan Odick's novel “Good Reasons to Die” (2019), and the separation of the Ukrainian hetero-image from the post-Soviet one was not typical. In contemporary literature the war in Ukraine becomes a key imagotheme, as in the case of the novels “Donbass” (2020) by Benoît Vitkine and “The Symphony of Monsters” (2023) by Marc Levy. The comparison of the images of Ukrainians in the novels reveals changes in the Ukrainian ethno-image, particularly a transition from the stereotypical vision of a corrupt nation in search of its own identity to the depiction of Ukrainians as representatives of a European nation that shows its best human sides, such as dignity, courage, unity and mutual assistance, intelligence and bravery, in the conditions of war. It is concluded that the analysed works testify to the renewal of a number of imagotemes in the hetero-image of Ukraine and Ukrainians in French literature, its transition from the image of the “alien” to the “other”, which is a manifestation of the reactualisation of Ukraine's national identity and subjectivity by Western societies.