Статтю присвячено дослідженню роману “Діти Чумацького Шляху” Докії Гуменної, який
розглянуто в контекстах літературного процесу повоєнної української діаспори загалом і прози
Докії Гуменної зокрема. З'ясовано, що визначальними в романі постають проблеми взаємозв'язку
митця та влади, літератури й політики, життя і творчості письменника в умовах тоталітарних
держави й культури.
The paper considers the novel “Children of Milky Way” by Dokiia Humenna in the context of the
postwar Ukrainian diaspora’s literary process. The focus is on the issues of relations between fiction
and documentary writing, the individual and collective experiences.
The literary Kyiv, being one of the central images in Dokiia Humenna’s novel, appears not only as a
page from individual or national histories, a sample of the Kyiv text in the Ukrainian diaspora’s prose,
but also as a generalization based on such texts and made due to various forms of intertextuality,
which absorb the history and atmosphere of the Kyiv 1920s.
The problem of interrelations between the writer and government, art, politic, and ideology is one
of the most essential in the novel: Dokia Humenna reveals various aspects of the writer’s life and
work in conditions of the totalitarian state and culture – from suicide to madness, from resistance to
adaptation and collaboration.
A future person and society in “Children of Milky Way” are represented in a commune. The histories
of the two characters-antipodes Taras Saragola and Seraphym Carmalita are connected to its progress
and decline; in the world of totalitarian repressions and control they choose different life strategies
and roles.
The memory about Soviet terror and repressions, as well as the Holodomor-genocide, “killing the
Ukrainian peasantry as a foundation of the nation and destructing intellectuals as a brain of the nation”
is important in the novel.
The history of collectivization is related to the traumatic memory of the serfdom times, which affects
the second and third generations and deepens the trauma caused by disintegration of a family,
destruction of the patriarchal peasant world. This process was accompanied by desacralization of the
Father’s figure as a personification of power, by infantilization of masculinity.
The writer associates totalitarian reality with the metaphor of Night, which acquires different
ambiguous meanings in the Ukrainian anti-totalitarian discourse.
