Melanholijas motīvu aktualitāte latviešu literatūrā – latviešu rakstnieču piemēru apskats

Abstract

The meaning and representation of melancholy in culture have changed from ancient times, when the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers about the four humours, the connection of black bile with the spleen, were dominant. These approaches developed and improved in the Renaissance and Enlightenment until the beginning of the 20th century, when the rapid development of psychoanalysis included new premises, significantly reconstructing the values and beliefs of previous eras. Melancholy is successively connected with the divine spark of creativity, loneliness and sadness, evil spirits and the “acedia” disease. The difference between the sexes should be evaluated as an important aspect: the analysis of research sources allows us to conclude that creative and writing women have historically often been excluded from the discourse of melancholy. According to the historically dominant view, a loss connected to a man’s world could be perceived as more special and significant than a loss affecting a woman and her world and successively reduced to a banal and irrelevant ‘mourning’.

Therefore, the purpose of the article is to characterise the interpretation of melancholy in Western culture, particularly from the perspective of psychoanalysis, while defining the distinguishing features of the concepts of melancholy and mourning, as well as to identify the presence and relevance of melancholy motifs in Latvian women’s writing. The following works by Latvian women writers have been selected for analysis: Sabīne Košeļeva’s story collection “Ministry of Loneliness” (Vientulības ministrija, 2019), Krista Anna Belševica’s story collection “Grey Dog Dreams of Goldfish” (Pelēks suns sapņo par zelta zivtiņām, 2021), Laura Vinogradova’s long story “River” (Upe, 2020). The research approaches chosen for conducting the study and analysing the literature included psychoanalysis, narratology, and feminism.

The analysis of the prose texts allows us to establish that melancholy, in general, can be evaluated as a topical motif in the analysed works. At the same time, it can be concluded that all texts are also united by the motif of (real and/or imaginary) loss, which often acts as a transforming force, thus helping to stimulate and/or solve the problems of the heroes’ growth. A unifying element is also the depiction of the traumatic experience, often related to parental inaction (the concept of “parental sins”) and the heroes’ expectations regarding the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of family models/roles accepted in society.