Sikorska I. "Mother and stepmother" in Ukrainian and German fairy-tale prose (the opposition of images)

In this dissertation it was attempted for the first time in the domestic folklore studies to make a complex research on the artistic antinomy of images "mother and stepmother" in Ukrainian and German fairy-tale prose. A big layer of source materials on this problem has been analyzed and the corresponding variants of the fairy-tale plots in German and Ukrainian folklore texts have been revealed. It was confirmed that the collision "stepdaughter - stepmother" is inherent to both of the fairy-tale repertoires, but the nature of the conflict is different. It was proved that the antinomy 'mother-stepmother" generates the dichotomy of images "orphan - stepdaughter".