Theme

The theme is the range of life phenomena, events, and problems placed at the basis of a literary work and made the object of the author's depiction and comprehension — what the work is 'about'. The theme determines the material of the depiction and directs the selection of images and events. One distinguishes the concrete-historical theme (connected with a certain era or social phenomenon) and the eternal theme (the universal themes of love, death, good and evil, the meaning of life). A large work usually has not one theme but their totality — a thematics — in which a leading, main theme is singled out. For example, the leading theme of the poetry of Taras Shevchenko is the fate of Ukraine, of its people, the struggle for freedom; the theme of social injustice and human dignity is central in the realist prose of Panas Myrny and Ivan Franko; the theme of fidelity to a lofty ideal permeates the work of Lesia Ukrainka. The theme is inseparably connected with the idea of a work: if the theme is the object of depiction, then the idea is its comprehension, the authorial conclusion.