Variazioni del mito in Medea di Ljudmila Ulickaja

Lyudmila Ulitskaya in Medea and Her Children elaborates the myth of the killer mum-woman by proposing a new kind of feminine character: innocent, without guilt, victim of an imposed order, where masculine characters reveal their inadequacy and brutality. The choice by the author in identifying such myth is to be searched at the internal dynamics of a woman and the role played by Medea, where the residual of the classic legacy is represented by the aura of the magic surrounding her own protagonist. The novel is one of the most complete expression of the new realism, which has been taking place in Russia in the last few years. The reality represents both the expressionistic point of view and the prism of archaic family, which is the only solid bastion able to give the sense of collective belonging, to define the identity and to generate adequate thoughts and social practises necessary to justify the existence of this world. In the novel, the crucial role of the family colludes with the suburban depersonalization of the big city. We can also observe the additional antinomian North-South, where North, in its acute negative value, reveals through the face of the capital the ancient Russian selfishness and its materialist present. On the contrary, both Medea and the author, claim with a clear voice the necessity to escape from the social, cultural and political homologation.