Creativity of Uncertainty: A Poetic Text in One Hundred Years

Abstract

The article under studies reveals the ties between Pavlo Tychyna’s first (distinctly multiformat by the poetic writing technique) poem collections “The Clarinets of the Sun (1918) and “The Plow” (1920), which reflect the tragedy of the historical boundary of epochs. Despite the fact that the biographical path of this genius poet has been more than efficiently investigated, many scholars estimated him rather ambiguously. He was referred to in numerous ways: as a poet of exaggerated fame (V. Hadzinskyi), as a farm Orpheus (V. Barka), as a clarinetist (Yu. Lavrynenko), as a talent corrosion (M. Kotsiubynska), as a genius-victim on the Calvary of Glory (V. Stus), as eternally young (S. Telniuk) and as three times dead. His “uniform dressing” (from a shy and, at the same time, a too gifted village boy-hypodiacon to an academician and the Minister of Education of the Ukrainian SSR) prevents him from being perceived in a fair and unbiased manner. The poetics and the contents of his first collection “The Clarinets of the Sun” (1918), which contained the verses of 1913–1918, have marked the emergence (according to H. Hrabovych) of a “resonating ego” of the personality that stands on the existential edge between the terrestrial and the divine. The collection cannot be considered as consonant with Tychyna’s next work “The Plow”, which, in fact, contained the poem “On the Square” (also 1918). The article under discussion interprets the text of the verse as a peculiar, essential “chain” that fastens together almost drastically heterogeneous (by their pathos and poetics) collections “The Clarinets of the Sun” and “The Plow”. P. Tychyna’s first collections, at the intersection of the poem “On the Square”, appeal to the notion of “metalyrics” (poetic self-reflection). Today, the latter term expands the area of its meanings, although is still mostly interpreted in the context of Theurgy (“created art”). The above feature, so peculiar for modernism, is very distinct in the first collections by P. Tychyna, which is reflected in the poetics of their titles. The second collection seems to contrast “The Clarinets of the Sun” due its pathos: the clarinet and the plow are the tools that can in no way go together. This imagological contradiction is presented as a solid proof of the integrity violation (bifurcation) of the poetic world perception. However, it only looks so at first sight. The analysis of the poem “On the Square”, in the aspect of consonant peculiarities of both collections, confirms their deep unity.