Lesia Ukrainka wrote Woman Possessed at the very turn of the twentieth century and at the bedside of her dying friend, Serhiy Merzhynskyi. An emphatically modernist text, it marks a rupture with nineteenth-century literary traditions not only for Lesia Ukrainka but for Ukrainian literature in general. It explores the turn-of-the century themes of Liebestod (love-death) and spiritual rebellion. In this first of her poetic dramas, Lesia Ukrainka shifts the focus of the founding narrative of Christianity from Messiah to his impassioned disciple, the New Testament’s Miriam. As the translators Britta Ellwanger and Lessia Jarboe point out, the ‘provocative and enraged woman’s voice, boiling over the page, remains shocking and profound, even for a reader situated a century later in a far more secular environment’.
MIRIAM
There he is, he continues to sit so still
just as the rocks that encircle round him.
Above him — it seems to me that I see this —
thoughts hanging over as like a heavy cloud
out from which very soon will strike bright lightning
emblazoning the world. Oh, when already,
when will the lightning tear apart the dark cloud?
If only I could die struck by this lightning
I yearn, yearn, for it to blaze across the sky,
so his mind could clear, if just for a moment.
He gave food to the throng, both bodies and souls,
to all he gave peace, yet he alone in the wild
tends as a shepherd to his flock of countless thoughts.
Incessant thoughts with no end, and He no rest…
How lonely He is, O good God almighty!
Can it be? Is He not allowed some help?
Can it be? Must He remain always alone?
‘The Messiah comes in glory to be earth’s judge’, —
that was the written prophecy, nothing more.
For the world all righteousness and charity
and for the Messiah what? Only glory?
‘War and discord, death, disease will pass away,
peace on earth and good cheer among humankind…’
And the Messiah? — more ‘glory in the highest’?
And only glory? Oh, what a punishment
to be the Messiah who redeems the world!
To all give happiness, and to be unhappy,
for endless solitude is sure misery.
Who would be able to redeem him
from loneliness, from this terrible glory?
(The woebegone suddenly exhausted, sits under the rock, leaning against the stone).
18 January 1901
Image: Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, 1611 or 1613-1620, Private collection. Wiki Commons.
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