Quest for Selfhood and Dystopia in Valerii Shevchuk’s<i>Eye of the Abyss</i>
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that Valerii Shevchuk’s recent work, Eye of the Abyss(1996), is a dystopian novel that ponders post-Soviet dilemmas through the lens of mythological events that take place in Ukraine’s pseudo-historical past. The novel’s themes include a utopian quest for happiness and totalitarianism; the value of true knowledge and the consequences of unawareness; a search for self-awareness and conformism. The quest of four main characters, who set out on a pilgrimage to a famous saint, Mykyta of Pereiaslavl’, in pursuit of faith and cultivation of high selfhood, provides the framework for the novel’s major philosophical discussions. Although the novel’s ostensible thematic concerns are presented in terms of ecclesiastical and theological issues, they point to urgent problems in post-Soviet Ukraine. While a fictional religious utopia is at the center of the plot, the very real Soviet antipode is implied in the subtext. The narrator, a self-appointed hagiographer of Mykyta, the pillar saint (i.e., Stylite) of Pereiaslavl’, seeks the truth about this acclaimed miracle-worker as well as a cure for his own spiritual despondency and creative void. Eventually, the hagiographer’s task supersedes itself and turns into its opposite. He ends up writing an anti-hagiography of the fraudulent saint, which acquires the significance of a dystopia. Indeed, the narrator’s account of the false saint’s criminal deceit translates into an allegorical criticism of the mythology, transgressions and eventual collapse of the Soviet utopia. Thus, the narrative’s exposure of the fraudulent saint also provides a venue for contemplating Ukraine’s dystopian Soviet past.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it