Human person vs ideology: representations of the intellectual in ‘The Black Angel’ by Oleksa Slisarenko

Abstract

The subject of the study in this article is the artistic representations of the intellectual in O. Slisarenko’s novel The Black Angel. The purpose of the article is to identify the main types of intellectuals in the novel and to characterise their features. The theoretical and methodological frameworks for the research were provided by Edward Said’s, Zygmunt Bauman’s and Czeslaw Milosz’s works devoted to the identity of the intellectual and his mission in society, Paul Ricoeur’s and Julia Kristeva’s studies on the ambivalence of human identity, the concepts of “split souls” (Dmytro Dontsov) and “the lost Ukrainian person” (Mykola Shlemkevych) as well as papers on the peculiarities of Slisarenko’s fiction. The methods of literary hermeneutics, anthropology and semiotics are used in the paper. The novelty of the research lies in the interpretation of the characters from Slisarenko’s The Black Angel as the representatives of the different standpoints and value guides the educated people choose in the face of historical cataclysms.

The study shows that the intellectuals of the post-revolutionary era in the novel The Black Angel are experiencing an identity crisis and are trying to find the meaning of their own existence. The author represents the oddball inventor that collaborates with the communist authorities and dreams to make an invention, which would be able to change the life of mankind. Finally, the character obsessed with his own idea appears to be a pseudointellectual that ignores the laws of nature, does not realize the limitations of human capabilities and pursues his own fame rather than scientific truth. The novel also brings to fore other types of intellectuals, in particular, the educated man that devotes himself to the irreconcilable armed struggle for Ukrainian statehood, and the sage that opts for the path of escape from social confrontations and ideologies to solitude and self-absorption. The representation of intellectuals in The Black Angel is associated with references to the symbols, mythologism of thinking and philosophical reflections about the imperfection of all ideologies, human nature and limited human knowledge, the element of life and its eternal mysteries. The attention to the problem of intellectual’s identity at the turn of historical and cultural epochs makes Slisarenko related to other 20^th-century writers that pondered over the issues of their own mission and human destiny.