Date of Award
2026
Document Type
M.A. Essay
First Advisor
Victoria Somoff
Second Advisor
Lada Kolomiyets
Abstract
Mykola Khvylovy’s 1924 novella My Self (Romantica) is a literary performance of revolutionary desire, ideological violence, and psychic fragmentation in early Soviet Ukraine. It asks how Khvylovy’s imagined topos of the “commune-beyond-the-mountains” functions not simply as a communist future, but as a transcendental ideal requiring fanaticism akin to religious devotion. The novella constructs two competing transcendences: the revolutionary commune, future-oriented and violent, and the mother, associated with the Virgin Mary, forgiveness, and a world outside historical violence. The protagonist “I” is shattered because he attempts to inhabit both orders simultaneously. His final act of matricide reveals the impossibility of actualizing the commune without destroying the human and compassionate self.
Through close reading and intellectual history, this paper examines Khvylovy’s symbolism and plot alongside his broader conception of the “Asiatic Renaissance,” arguing that the novella anticipates tensions later theorized in his political pamphlets within the Literary Discussion of the 1920s. Rather than reading My Self (Romantica) merely as a psychological narrative of revolutionary terror, this study argues that its fragmented form becomes the only space capable of sustaining incompatible ideological transcendencies. The text itself becomes a site where the unresolved conflict between “psychological Europe” and Asiatic renewal is aesthetically inhabited, even as such synthesis proves impossible in political reality.
Recommended Citation
Hulievska, Marta, "IMAGINING THE COMMUNE: KHVYLOVY'S TRANSCENDENCIES IN MY SELF (ROMANTICA)" (2026). Comparative Literature M.A. Essays. 218.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/complit_essays/218
