Abstract

The objective of the study is to analyze the reception of the personality and of the works of Pedro Calderón de Barca in Ukraine. By the term «the Ukrainian reception of Calderón» the author of the paper understands the corpus of texts (translations of the playwright’s works and academic papers, critical essays, etc., about the classic of the Spanish literature of the Golden Age) produced in the Ukrainian language. There are two factors which infl uence Calderón’s discourse in Ukraine: 1) the frontier position of the country, which has always been a zone of contact and exchange of ideas between Europe and Asia, Catholicism and the Orthodox Church; 2) the situation of Ukraine as a colonized nation. The fi rst encounter of Ukraine with Calderón was not direct. It took place in the 17th-18th centuries in the works of representatives of the Ukrainian baroque who used the same concepts that appear in Calderón’s dramas and poems. The person who discovered the Works of the Spanish playwright for Ukraine was Iván Frankó (1856-1916). He did his best to inscribe Calderón in the paradigm of the Ukrainian culture. The fi nal part of the study focuses on the history of translations of Calderón’s works into the Ukrainian language and the critical evaluation of the academic production about the Spanish classic.