Bondareva Olena

Path of Ukrainian drama and screenwriting towards understanding the image of Stepan Bandera

Section: Biographical research

Abstract: The aim of the work of this publication is to chronologically present the mainstages and conceptual approaches to understanding the image of Stepan Bandera by Ukrainian playwrights and screenwriters, taking into account both biographical and conceptual strategies. Scientific novelty is due to the need to collect and systematize scattered sources and artistic texts (plays, films) that were not part of the mainstream of the relevant artistic discourses and were therefore practically ignored in the history of drama and screenwriting. This is the first chronologically consistent representation of such texts. Methodology. Biographical, historical-cultural, anthropological, and source-based approaches are combined and used for cultural and literary analysis of a historiographical nature. Conclusions. The image of Stepan Bandera remains a rather problematic area for Ukrainian screenwriting and playwriting. Screenwriters choose to work mainly with Bandera’s biography, and here, in the selection of facts and modes of their interpretation, the author’s personal attitude to Bandera’s place in the Ukrainian national pantheon is important. There is only one biographical play dedicated to this figure. Drama generally avoids direct biographism, placing Bandera mainly in symbolic, allegorical, and associative planes in various ways: Bandera becomes the semantic centre of the work; the protagonist Bandera has an antagonist; Bandera is introduced into the specific canon of Ukrainian dignitaries; Bandera is absent from the texts as a character, but meaningful and identifying discussions unfold around his name and ideas. In contemporary war dramaturgy, the terms “Banderivets” and “Banderivka” denote either the Ukrainian self-identification of characters or the “othering” of Ukrainians by their existential enemies, the Russians. Drama in this regard is consistent with many social processes and trends in artistic literature itself, as against the backdrop of war, it calls on readers/viewers to rethink themselves in the context of belonging to Ukrainian statehood, and Bandera becomes, as it were, the “key” to such rethinking.

Keywords: biography, Bandera, myth, discourse, narrative, Ukrainian resistance movement.

  Full-text PDF    https://doi.org/10.15407/ub.26.239     Citation

• Bondareva Olena (Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University (Kyiv, Ukraine), [email protected]) ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7126-452X

Cite:
Bondareva Olena (2025). Path of Ukrainian drama and screenwriting towards understanding the image of Stepan Bandera. Biographistica Ukrainica, (26) 239-264. (In Ukrainan). https://doi.org/10.15407/ub.26.239

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