AccScience Publishing / BIJP / Volume 12 / Issue 1 / DOI: 10.18491/beytulhikme.1851
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RESEARCH ARTICLE

The ‘Magic Mirror’ Metaphor as a Philosophical Concept of Holistic Reality: Lesia Ukrainka’s Forest Song and Patrick Süskind’s The Story of Mr Sommer 

Richard Gorban1
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1 Lviv National Academy of Arts, Depart. of Art History and Social Sciences and Humanities 78601, Lyviv, Ukraine
BIJP 2022, 12(1), 297–332; https://doi.org/10.18491/beytulhikme.1851
Received: 24 September 2021 | Published online: 3 February 2022
© 2022 by the Authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
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Abstract

Based on the comparative method, the article reveals the philosophical meaning of one of the most outstanding works7- of Lesia Ukrainka, the classic author of Ukrainian literature, whose 150th anniversary is celebrated by the world literary community in 2021. This is an in-depth study of the philosophical concept of interdependence of the integrity of the world and man, embodied in the Forest Song by Lesia Ukrainka and The Story of Mr Sommer by Süskind, in consequence of the “magic mirror” metaphor, attributable to oxymoronic poetics of magic realism. The archetypal potential of the mirror image and the laws of mirror symmetry made it possible to express the actual ideas of personalism and existentialism in artistic form and to reveal the existential experience of a person in opposition to the destructive tendencies of the anthropological crisis. A comparative historical analysis of both works revealed that the writers showed the main problem of the 20th century in different socio-cultural material, namely, the loss of authenticity by the person, which turns a man’s life into a psychological hell, and him himself into a beast or a mechanical doll.

Keywords
Magic realism
archetype
person
authenticity
personalism
existential truth
mercy.
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Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy, Print ISSN: 1303-8303, Published by AccScience Publishing
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