«Very ardent in words and frank in thoughts» (touches to the boigraphy of Ulas Samchuk)

Abstract

The epistolary of the writer is an important material for literary studies. He retains a powerful biographical potential, has a cultural weight and, losing the status of privacy and acquires the status of documentary evidence of a particular era. Letters allow you to feel the artist as a person, delve into his inner world, learn something special about his worldview, emotional movements of the soul, and penetrate the secret of the creative laboratory.

For the first time, the poetics of Ulas Samchuk’s intimate letters is analysed in the article; an attempt is made to add essential details to the psychological portrait of the writer. The author described the thematic content of love letters, their mood and expression, revealed the writer’s understanding of the concept of «love» and its meaning in the life of a person. The emotive space of the love epistolary is associated with the author and his beloved. The letters contain precise auto-characteristics of the writer related to the realization of his own artistic mission. The writer expressed his attitude to the artistic tastes of his chosen one, appreciated the organic combination of sensuality and intellectualism in her paintings.

The mature love of U. Samchuk showed a deep personal transformation of the writer, made an ennobling and harmonizing influence on the work of this period. During this time, two books of memoirs and three novels were created and published, one novel and two plays were completed. The writer’s love letters made it possible to assess the degree of autobiography of the novel «On Solid Land» (1967), including finding in the work undoubted elements of autobiography. An intimate epistolary gave unique evidence of where the writer got his inspiration for fruitful work in the 1950s-1960s, what were the prerequisites and mechanisms of the creative process while working on a novel from the life of Ukrainian emigration in Canada.