Christianity vs the idea of freedom in the language of Lesіa Ukrainka

The article is devoted to the analysis of Christianity and civic position as nuclear concepts of language creation of Lesia Ukrainka in the context of cultural and historical conditions and philosophical ideas of the late XIX – early XX centuries. Particular attention is paid to the contradictions between the sacredness and rational and emotional value of traditional for Ukrainian linguistic biblical concepts and ideas of national revival. The semantic and stylistic potential of language means (abstract names of feelings, positive and negative vocabulary) to denote the value dominants of Christianity and national identity is revealed. Performing stylistic, compositional, pragmatic functions in the literary text, sacred and evaluative units are the expression of individual-authorial reception of the language of Scripture, cultural world heritage in the projection on the development of Ukrainian poetic and literary vocabulary and at the same time a manifestation of the nation’s spiritual memory.The idea of rational and emotional assessments of early Christianity in Lesia Ukrainka’s dramas is aimed primarily at understanding in the Ukrainian space the similarities with turning points in the history of Roman and Russian empires, awareness of irreconcilable contradictions of epochs and cultures: Roman and Christian, Ukrainian and Russian. The assertion of one’s own identity, the desire to create with one’s own hands one’s full-fledged earthly life with its “struggles, passions, sufferings” leads to the achievement of “peace and harmony” on one’s land. And this is the only way to “world harmony”.