About «Тілько» and not only in Lesіa Ukrainka’s language creation: in search of idiosyncrasy

The article elucidates the regularities of the use and functioning features of the lexemes til’ko and til’ky in Lesya Ukrainka’s autographs and published epistolary and poetic texts. The study, using the comparative analysis approach, proves that both lexemes have the status of variants and are fixed in the similar semantic contexts. The actualization of the lexemes in the usus of the Ukrainian language confirms that they are polysemantic by nature and grammatically heterogeneous. The case study has revealed a clear quantitative dominance of using the variant til’ko in autographs. But the form has been repeatedly corrected, mostly in the epistolary texts. The study of the twelve-volume edition of Lesya Ukrainka’s works confirms the statement. Although we come across the use of the lexeme til’ko in the poetic texts, such facts are less frequent and reveal the general tendency of editors to replace the lexeme, arguing the need to avoid this variant, most obviously, due to classifying it as dialectal and atypical in the speech of a person who ought to serve a model of modern literary language. Epistolary texts of the nearest relatives of the Kosachs and Drahomanovs families have been also used in the case study to determine the organicity or, on the contrary, the accidental presence of the lexeme til’ko in the vocabulary of Lesya Ukrainka. It favorably authenticated the naturalness of its use.The key findings of Lesya Ukrainka’s epistolary and poetic microcontexts comparison, both author’s and edited, argue that proofreading not only changes but, in fact, destroys the authentic text, distorts the individual style, and hinders the research process. We are to restore these features in modern editions of Lesya Ukrainka’s works and offer the scholars a genuine, rather than ‘retouched’, individual style of the author.