The conflicting emotions of incarceration and exile in Shevchenko, Dostoyevsky and Ukraïnka

Abstract

This article examines the emotions evoked by two situations at the intersection of the individual and public spheres: captivity and exile. It comparatively studies a dual corpus of Russian (primarily Dostoevsky) and Ukrainian (Shevchenko, Ukrainka) prose as well as narrative poetry. Our hypothesis is that the incarceration and exile narratives we examine are characterized by the impediment of emotion or its expression, but in very different configurations, perhaps linked to the position (peripheral or not) of the culture these writers represent within the Russian Empire. While Dostoevsky expresses all the melancholy of life in the marginal and enclosed space of the prison camp, where emotions, by becoming depersonalized, eventually transform into a mood that atrophies them, Shevchenko and Ukrainka offer different configurations. By expressing exile in a language considered non-literary at the time, and by emphasizing (for Ukrainka) the near-intransitivity of the emotions of banishment, which the exile cannot make understood to the local populations that receive them, they undo the imperial cartography and give full meaning to exile, which is not simply displacement within the same (imperial) territory, but exclusion from the cultural space where, through the grace of the native language, emotions are communicable from the individual to the community and vice versa.