Authors

Discussion

Oksana Zabuzhko is a well-known Ukrainian writer, essayist, and philosopher; she is often referred to as the “voice of Ukraine in the world”. Her oeuvre has been translated into many languages, meanwhile her fiction and essays have their own audience. Her activity as a writer and intellectual often turns into a search for narratives that can explain the separateness and originality of Ukrainian history to Western readers. In her interviews the writer often formulates the idea that intellectuals are responsible for how the world sees Ukraine.

The book-length essay “The Longest Journey” was originally addressed to the Western world, then it was translated into Ukrainian.

The study aims to analyse the ways of functioning of the disruption motif as a literary category in Oksana Zabuzhko’s essays. This motif of disruption with the empire is an essential constituent of the plot in the writer’s works. The motif generates a movement of thought from the author’s meanings to social values and appears to be a generalisation of recurring events.

The writer strives for explaining the path Ukraine has made to disrupt its ties with the empire. To do so, she refers to history and traditions, as well as aesthetic, moral, and social values. Oksana Zabuzhko addresses the reader, constantly emphasizing the following: you do not see diversity where it really is; she stresses the fact that there has been a disruption “that you have not noticed”, and highlights the fundamental keypoints that prevent someone from identifying Ukraine with Russia (“are looking for a centre of volunteer movement”).