manifested by the dominance of the female
element in Ukrainian ethnography.
“Feminocentricity” of Ukrainian culture is
associated with the sacralization of the archetype
of the “Great Mother”, which in further
semiospheres is metonymically personified with
the “Mother Earth” and Mother-Ukraine and
becomes the ethnic dominant of the national
character, minimizing the degree of
aggressiveness of the Ukrainians’ worldview, but
defining the initial desire of the Ukrainian people
to protect their native land. This symbolic image
is preserved in the Ukrainian proverbs, e.g., “It is
a sin to beat the ground – she is our mother”, “It
is a sin to beat the ground in the spring – she is
pregnant”.
On the contrary, the Russian ethno-mentality is
characterized by the archetype of the father
(Novichkova, 2001), which determines the
foundations and continuity of the authoritarian-
patriarchal political culture (Vovk, 2010), with
an approach to society as a single large family
headed by a “father”. The image of the father in
Russian fairy tales is compared with the image of
the king, who gives tasks to his sons, demands
from them obedience, can expel from home for
disobedience (“The Tale of Ivashka the Thin
Ladder”, “Bulat-well done”, “The Monster –
Copper forehead”) (Afanasyev, 2014) or punish
them for disobedience in other ways (“The Tale
of Ivan Tsarevich, the firebird and the gray
wolf”, “The Tale of Rejuvenating Apples and
Living Water”) (Afanasyev, 2014). Daughters in
fairy tales, at the behest of their father, choose
suitors for themselves and can be imprisoned for
disobedience. The patriarchal foundations of
Russian culture are reflected in proverbs and
sayings: “God gave a son, gave an oak tree”, “An
unpunished son is dishonor to his father”. In
subsequent semiospheres the image of the tsar-
father is transferred into the image of the ruler,
who, on the one hand, is responsible for his
children, and on the other hand, is free to control
their destinies. It underlies the mythologemes of
divine power (under the influence of Orthodoxy)
of the Grand Duke and the “Tsar-father”, whose
subjects were called “отроки” (children).
Mythologemes, metonymically associating the
ruler and the Fatherland are embodied in the
motto “For Faith, Tsar and Fatherland” and
heraldically reflected in the Great State Emblem
of the Russian Empire adopted in 1882, as well
as in the motto “for Stalin and for the
Motherland” in the Soviet period, which became
the ideologeme and resulted in the allegiance of
the Soviet type, with the veneration of leaders. In
the projection into modern political myths, the
mythologeme of the parent and children
correlates with the mythologemes of the
“fraternal people” and “older and younger
brother” motivating one of the strategies in
Russia’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine.
Another example of the core archetypes is the
spatial archetypes of “поле” (field), derived from
the agrarian Ukrainian civilization, and
archetypes “Даль” (distance), “Ширь”
(vastness) and “Путь-Дорога” (Path-road),
specific for Russian ethnic mentality.
The image of a field is presented in many
Ukrainian fairy tales (“and they had their own
field. They sowed wheat in that field. As the
wheat also bore them – they began to share the
grain”, Egg-raitse) (Magic fairy tales, 2022). The
locus “field” is defined by Ukrainian researchers
(Naumovska, 2017, 72–75) as the most frequent
among loci with mythological background, and
as opposed to the “lower world”. On the axis of
symbolic syntagmatics the “field” archetype is
associated with archetypes of “ploughman” and
“native house”, metonymically extending on the
image of Mother-Ukraine. In Ukrainian
mythology there is an image of a field mother –
a pre-polytheistic image-totem, which was used
in relation to a woman, who was the best in the
family (community) versed in field work, was the
best reaper, etc. (Plachynda, 1993, 63). In
subsequent semiosphere the “field” archetype
interacts with the “khutor” archetype as a symbol
of the transformation of the steppe element into a
“plowed field” – habitable corners of nature,
personally conquered from the nomadic space.
In contrast, the archetypes Dal, Shir, Path-road
indicate the need for the Russian people to
overcome endless distances and the conquest
new spaces. In this vein, N. Berdyaev
emphasized that “the organization of vast spaces
into the world’s greatest state was not easy for
the Russian people” and, as a result, all its
external forces were directed to the service of the
state (Berdyaev, 2004, 95). Another projection of
this spatial archetype is the “non-spatial nature of
Russian culture” noticed by Russian
philosophers, geographers and anthropologists
and the inertia of the spatially scattered Russian
people resulted in the following of any authority,
be it a king, an emperor, or a modern ruler.
The archetypes-images that make up the core of
the archetypal-mythological field of the
semiosphere are associated with archetypal
motifs that also differ for the ethnoculture of the
two peoples. For example, the motive of work,
associated with the archetype “field” and the
importance of agriculture in the life of
Ukrainians, is embodied in the Ukrainian fairy