Buryak Larysa

One year in the life of a woman: the reconstruction of a woman's biography (from the letters of Varvara Semenivna Zhytetska to her son)

Section: Personality in the biography science discourse

Abstract: The idea of reconstruction of the biography of Varvara Semenivna Zhytetska, based on her letters to her son Hnat, is justified. According to the theory of performativity, emotions and commentaries on the things a person saw, heard and lived determine the person’s identity. As they serve as key markers of biography in private and public areas, they provide a biographic reconstruction with the stereoscopism sparkling with multiple facets of life situations. The biographical sketch contains data on the origin, year of birth, entourage of V. S. Zhytetska, and reflects her thoughts, anxiety and concern for relatives, worries in the kaleidoscope of everyday life with trials, losses, encounters with friends, and communication with close ones. The emotions about the environment and events that took place in Kyiv in 1904, recorded in letters, reproduce the woman’s life in one of its segments. The biographic reconstruction raises a veil over the female figure, little known by this time, unlike her husband, the outstanding Ukrainian linguist-scientist P. H. Zhytetsky, and allows answering the question, what was it like to be a wife of a Ukrainian intellectual in the dimension of the socio-cultural ideas and events of the second half of the XIX – early XX century.

Keywords: biography science, women’s biography, Varvara Semenivna Zhytetska, Pavlo Hnatovych Zhytetsky, Hnat Pavlovych Zhytetsky, epistolary sources, performance studies, performative turn.

  Full-text PDF    https://doi.org/10.15407/ub.16.015     Citation

• Buryak Larysa (National Library of Ukraine, Kyiv.)

Cite:
Buryak Larysa (2018). One year in the life of a woman: the reconstruction of a woman's biography (from the letters of Varvara Semenivna Zhytetska to her son). Biographistica Ukrainica, (16) 15–44. (In Ukrainan). https://doi.org/10.15407/ub.16.015

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