Symfonia smutku – Valse Mélancolique Olhy Kobylańskiej
Symphony of Sadness – Olha Kobylianska’s Novella Valse Mélancolique

Summary/Abstract: The article is a proposition of interpretation Valse Mélancolique – short stories written by the Ukrainian women writer Olha Kobylianska (1863–1942). This is an example of literary research devoted to synthetic overview of the phenomenon of insanity / mental illness in Ukrainian Modernism literature (late nineteenth and early twentieth century). Insanity, being one of the main themes of modernist literature, today does not live to see a proper discussion in the Ukrainian literary studies. The resulting so far work has moved this issue only into a selective and fragmentary way, always on the margins of the main range of research interests, thus far definitely without exhausting problem. Madness constituted for Kobylianska one of the most important and dramatic forms of exclusion, hence the belief that the mentally ill is not so much a sick man, as enslaved, subjected to the pressure of power, deprived of the right to subjectivity, of their own forms of existence.

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