Pitannâ lìteraturoznavstva

Taras Shevchenko in the Space of His Readings: The Period of 1837–1843

2025-08-22T10:29:27+00:00

The aim of this research is to characterize T. Shevchenko’s history as a reader during the period of 1837–1843, which corresponds to his early literary activity in Petersburg, where he initially resided as a nobleman’s servant and later as a student at the Academy of Arts. The scholarly analysis of reading experiences acquired during each distinct period of T. Shevchenko’s creative development contributes to the expansion and specification of this fundamental topic. To achieve this aim, an extensive source base has been studied from the relevant perspective (primarily epistolary materials, memoirs, the poet’s autobiographical prose, scholarly literature in Shevchenko studies, including the viewpoints of authors who questioned Shevchenko’s erudition). The primary research methods employed were biographical, cultural-historical, and receptive aesthetics approaches. The conclusions can be summarized as follows. During 1837–1843, Shevchenko moved within a unique multicultural and educational-intellectual environment of Petersburg, created in part through his own efforts, while simultaneously establishing connections with like-minded Ukrainian writers and socio-cultural figures beyond the capital who shared his love for books. His emancipation from serfdom in 1838 also meant gaining the right to read; from then on, Shevchenko’s relationship with printed texts acquired true fullness, and his reading and development within the colonial context essentially became a form of resistance against the empire. This recipient’s motives and stimuli for reading were determined by both non-utilitarian, internal self-assignments and purposeful creative and even scholarly interests. Thus, according to R. Escarpit’s classification, Shevchenko during his early period emerged as a reader of two types simultaneously, corresponding to objective and literary types of human behavior. The study examines the circumstances (details) of some of Shevchenko’s encounters with books, his reaction to what he read, and notes the significant quantity and diversity of literature he encountered then, including its broad literary-artistic, scholarly, and popular science specifics. While works of literature and art criticism dominated, there were also studies concerning world history, religion, philosophy, and aesthetics. Certain impressions Shevchenko gained from his readings during this time can be interpreted as prototexts of his literary and artistic expressions. At the turn of the 1830s–1840s, the author of “Kobzar” essentially fully discovered for himself his native literature and related spheres of national historical science, folklore studies, etc., formed his own judgments about them, which shaped his ideological and aesthetic priorities. He thoroughly familiarized himself with a significant body of literature created by Muscovites, perceiving it quite critically (such as Pushkin’s works). However, he absorbed an even greater volume of world literature in translation, and Polish-language literature in the original. All this, considering all segments of the literature mastered thus far, contributed to Shevchenko’s multifaceted educational, professional, and general cultural development, not to mention that it proved to be one of the forms of communication with the world and himself, and a means of overcoming nostalgia.

Taras Franko’s Scientific Memoir Book “About the Father”: History of Publication, Censorship, and Soviet Conjuncture

2025-08-22T10:39:53+00:00

The article is devoted to the scientific memoir book “About the Father” (1956) by Taras Franko (1889–1971), the eldest son of Ivan Franko. The purpose of the study is to reveal the history of the publication of the book “About the Father”, to find out the circumstances of its writing, censorship and cutting out “unwanted” text fragments, to find out the author’s true creative intentions and the real conditions of Soviet reality that influenced the structure and content of the book. The study is based on historical and documentary research using analytical, synthetic, biographical, cultural, historical, and genological methods. The novelty of the study lies in the comprehensive coverage of the history of the publication of the scientific memoir book “About the Father”, the comprehension and introduction into scientific circulation of a number of facts and documents that were in public and private archives and were out of the attention of researchers. On the basis of the analysis of new facts and texts, conclusions are drawn about the peculiarities of Taras Franko’s creative style in the period of the 50s and 60s of the twentieth century. It’s found that the book “About the Father” reflected, on the one hand, the author’s own intentions designed to preserve and convey to society the true image of his father, and on the other hand, it represented the messages and opportunistic ideologemes that the Soviet government broadcast through the son of the famous classic. Often, both of these factors were combined in one text, creating a strange mix of truth and frankness with outright lies, concealments, and distortions. The writing, compiling, publishing, and reprinting of the scientific memoir book “About the Father” demonstrates the complex process of Taras Franko’s adaptation as the son of a famous classicist to the Soviet system, its ideologemes, and propaganda goals. Most of Taras Franko’s texts that showed the writer as a living person weren’t included in the book and today constitute a valuable layer of factual material that their author tried to convey to society. The book “About the Father” was doomed to become only a sample of what was allowed, the official studies about Franko.

An Attempt at a Historicising Reading of Novella IX, Day II (Bernabò and Ginevra) from Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron”

2025-08-22T09:59:59+00:00

I attempt to restore elements of the horizon of perception that readers and listeners of the Bernabò and Zinevra novella (IX, Day II) from Decameron may have had in Italian cities in the mid-14th century. The novella provides opportunities for relating to values, beliefs, knowledge, behaviours, and life experiences within the historical environment in which it was created; these are what interest me. I discuss topics such as sustainability in social roles, cruelty and justice, the image of wolves, topography, the relationship between fairy tale and authenticity, the importance of the exemplum, the function of money. The novel exemplum conveys experience, indicates a norm and its violation. Speaking of truth, deception and punishment, the short story establishes a pattern of behaviour. I dwell on some of the interpretations of the novella. I am trying to make clear the fundamental difference between a reconstructive reading and the interpretations that modernise the novella. I compare Boccaccio’s novella with a novel by Franco Sacchetti’s and a novel by Giovanni Sercambi’s.

Reflection and Dialogism as Discourse Markers of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Prose

2025-08-22T10:20:04+00:00

The article explores the literary-philosophical discourse of Iris Murdoch’s texts with regard to its narrative specificity and genre modification. The genre specifics of her novels are examined in the historical and cultural retrospective, with the emphasis on their discourse markers. Previous research indicates that this aspect of her philosophical novel poetics remains insufficiently studied. The paper aims to examine the discourse of Murdoch’s prose within theoretical-historical context, considering its main markers as reflection and dialogism. The discourse analysis basically employs a qualitative methodology that includes the integrative approach comprising the fundamentals of historical poetics, genre study, narratology, receptive poetics and transitivity theory. The findings support the idea that the analysis of dialogues (conversations) in close rereading of Murdoch’s texts contributes to the insight of her philosophical prose dynamic nature due to the specific patterns of complex interplay of voices in her writings (novels, philosophical dialogues). Consequently, we find that the phenomenon of universal dialogism in Murdoch’s prose appears to be qualitatively diverse: ‘dialogic protagonist’, plot dialogism, dialogues with the reader, reflections of characters, discussions on various issues of philosophy, religion, being, morality, etc. Overall, reception links of Murdoch’s philosophical essays and her novels are traced and analysed within the broad context of European literary-philosophical reflection.

From the Editorial Board

2025-08-21T08:21:12+00:00

From the Editorial Board

Between Fiction and Evidence: The Artistic Space of the Non-Fiction Narrative “The Man in the Red Coat” by J. Barnes

2025-08-21T08:39:39+00:00

The article studies the specifics of nonfictional prose relevant to literary studies. In the modern “transliminal era” the non-fiction literary genre is developing rapidly and is in great demand among the readership. Modern non-fiction demonstrates a wide range of non-fiction forms and literary experiments with representations of human experience, confirming the opinion of scholars about the openness and flexibility of this literary genre. The work of the British writer J. Barnes is indicative for understanding the main trends and potentials of non-fiction literature. J. Barnes’ latest non-fiction “The Man in the Red Coat” demonstrates the non-standard nature of narrative strategies and the related image of the narrator, the creative freedom of artistic search, and its manifestation in language and speech. The text’s narrative and genre complexity determined the article’s purpose, which is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the hybridity and uniqueness of J. Barnes’s work as an example of contemporary “creative” nonfiction. J. Barnes traditionally demonstrates transgenre, hybrid writing, making no exceptions when creating non-fiction texts. The study found that non-fiction actively uses the artistic techniques of epic literary genres, adapting them to the requirements of non-fiction prose. The analysis of “The Man in the Red Coat” allows us to conclude that this book is a stylistically refined and complexly constructed hybrid in which elements of fiction and non-fiction prose coexist in a single narrative space, but the boundaries between them are as blurred and shaky as possible. The book’s text manifests the strategies of the individual author’s writing style and the traditional elements of a non-fictional narrative based on documentary evidence belonging to the bright representatives of the Belle Époque depicted in the book. At the same time, a clear tendency to “fictionalization” of the narrative was noted. It is observed that the artistic space of the non-fiction “The Man in the Red Coat” is formed with the help of artistic techniques familiar to the writer, among which irony, the mode of doubt and questioning, the amplification of details, through and constant Barnesian leitmotifs and themes that make up the transtextual nature of the book, which is manifested in a complex of intertextual, metatextual, paratextual, architextual features and an intermedial factor. “The Man in the Red Coat” reveals distinctive features of such artistic genres as novel-essay, novel-biography, novel-ekphrasis, and the novel of culture, which shakes the genre boundaries of non-fiction. The artistic space of the book is supported by the features of Barnes’s fabulations, which play a special role in presenting the image of the narrator-author. It was determined that in “The Man in a Red Coat” there is an atypical image of the narrator, whose voice is almost inextricably linked with the author’s voice, often completely merges with it and directly correlates with a specific referent. Barnes’s “The Man in the Red Coat” is an original and complex hybrid narrative that fits into the writer’s traditional transgressive writing model and has a high potential for further literary research.

“Creative Autobiography” as a Chronicle of the Formation of the Writer’s Personality

2025-08-21T09:37:08+00:00

The author considers the tools available in the terminological discourse for tracing the development of the writer’s creative personality – the categories of author’s subjectivity and individuality, writer’s identity (H. Syvokin), autobiographical synergism (K. Dub), megatext (S. Mykhyda), intertextuality, individual style of the author, the need for a comprehensive study of the entire corpus of the writer’s autodocumentary works in its relationship with both literary creativity and the writer’s real life is emphasized. The term “creative autobiography” is proposed to denote the history or chronicle of the writer’s creative formation, which depends on his psychological traits, lecture, environment, but is provided for reading from diaries, letters, autobiographies, memoirs. On the example of O. Kobylianska’s work, the author analyzes that these tools can be used to study the relationship between autobiographical and fiction by the same author and reflect a change of views, ways of processing autobiographical material for introduction into a fiction text, work on improving the author’s language skills, etc. It is concluded that the peculiarities of the writer’s “creative autobiography” are the dependence of self-awareness and growth as an artist on life circumstances and feelings, but autobiographies show that O. Kobylianska overestimated this dependence in her adulthood; intertextual manifestations through direct and indirect quotation, endowing characters with her own habit of keeping a diary; switching and mixing of language codes due to polylingualism; attempts in autobiographies to emphasise the development of her own talent from a different perspective than it appeared in her diary. Personal themes and motifs, such as fascination with nature, reading, horseback riding, music and painting, peculiarities of everyday life, life experiences, which began in the diary, influenced the further development of the writer’s talent, determined the plot and figurative solutions of future works.

“The Whims of Love” by Markus Gasser: Nonfictional Romantic Romance about Literature

2025-08-21T09:47:40+00:00

The article examines the book “The Whims of Love: True Stories of Books and Passions” («Die Launen der Liebe: Wahre Geschichten von Büchern und Leidenschaften», 2019) by Austrian literary critic and writer Markus Gasser (born 1967) in the aspect of the dialogue between fiction and nonfiction. The structure consists of a kind of mini-preface (motto) and eleven parts, divided into fifteen chapters, and demonstrates the nominative nature of the compositional ring. It is emphasized that M. Gasser uses the stylistic principles of the “love story” genre, which enhance the author’s intention to recreate the plot of a nonfictional text in a fascinating way. The clichéd titles of the book’s parts indicate the stages and / or variants of the lovers’ relations, which ultimately ends with a traditional for romantic romances “happy ever after ending”. The spatiotemporal organization of the book shows a fairly broad geography and describes sixteen private stories from the 19th–20th centuries. Given the author’s concept of the whims of love, we found various interpretative constellations of love relationships, based primarily on the experience of heterosexual lovers. There are classifications of autobiographical prototype couples (Bowles, J. Gabrial and M. Lowry), scandalous (George Eliot and J. H. Lewes, E. Barrett and R. Browning), star couples (S. Plath and T. Hughes, Y. Ono and J. Lennon), epistolary (B. von Arnim and J. W. von Goethe) and couples of literary inspiration (E. Brontë and Lord Byron), classical / real love triangles (Galsworthy; I. Guadanini, V. Nabokov and V. Slonim; R. Antelme, D. Mascolo and M. Duras) and nominal love triangles (literary couple and their creator – J. Updike and G. G. Marquez). An example of homoeroticism (E. M. Forster) and the affective search for love (J. Frame) are highlighted.

The Artistic Potential of Bohdan Lepky’s “The Fairytale of My Life”: Fiction Versus Non-Fiction

2025-08-21T10:07:40+00:00

The article analyzes Bohdan Lepky’s “The Fairytale of My Life” as a complex phenomenon of autobiographical prose, which scholars and publishers often classify as fiction. First of all, the main attention is paid to its genre specificity. Based on the research of B. Lepky’s contemporaries, diaspora critics, and contemporary researches (M. Yevshan, V. Lev, M. Cherminska, I. Konstankevych, and others), the authors argue that the problem of a clear genre definition arises due to the vividly expressed artistry of the text, which is associated with the specific poetic style of the writer, who also showed features of artistry in non-fiction prose (publicistic writing, essay writing, etc.). Among the main features of B. Lepky’s autobiographical style are mentioned poeticization, folklorization, mythologization, and sacralization, which are partly caused by the significant (over 50 years) time distance between the time of writing the memoirs and the time when these events occurred in the writer’s life. Therefore, the poetics of memories is interpreted in the paradigm of memory / oblivion, historical truth / authorial fiction. It is argued that the text of “The Fairytale...” can be viewed in the context of the philosophical concept of the author, who was raised within the traditional values in a Galician priestly family, which he, being in exile, tried to record and pass on to future generations as a memory of the authentic Ukrainian universe destroyed by the Russian invasion. The authors conclude that despite the powerful artistic flow of Bohdan Lepky’s memoirs, “The Fairytale of My Life” should not be considered as artistic prose, but should be interpreted in the context and framework of memoir and autobiographical writing, taking into account the originality of the author’s style, which is characterized by features of artistry that partially “blur” clear genre boundaries and add new sense-making facets (philosophy, aesthetics, pedagogy, psychology, cultural studies, etc.), encouraging deep rethinking not only of artistic, but also of existential phenomena. Based on the analysis, it is suggested that the breadth and scope of the already existing intertextual dialogue of the analyzed text gives reason to believe that it will continue to draw into its force field the literary intentions of other authors, each time expanding and acquiring new previously hidden meanings. The fact that such a dialogue continues is the most obvious proof of the power of its semantic and artistic potential.

How to Tell the Story of Something Beyond Your Imagination? Historical Truth or “Factual Truth” in the Works of Francophone Writers under Nazism

2025-08-21T10:20:49+00:00

This article examines the integration of History within the field of literature, with a particular focus on the 1940s during the Nazi occupation. It attempts to examine the unique function that reality assumes within the narrative, which contributes to redefine the concept of literariness. The central question posed by these texts and narratives, which are composed in the context of war, is as follows: from a certain historical juncture onwards, particularly with the experience of Nazism, can the world be apprehended through reality as it presents itself, given that this reality transcends the imaginary? In order to address this question and others, we propose to examine the writing of two female authors who found themselves in extreme historical circumstances and had divergent destinies: Françoise Frenkel and Édith Thomas. The texts in question were composed in the heat of the moment (in the case of Thomas) or almost immediately afterwards (in the case of Frenkel). They may be regarded as pieces of everyday history, lived through and immediately put down on paper by the authors, so as not to forget anything of what was (the facts), but also of what was felt (experienced). Drawing on recent literary approaches to “fictional truths” and the literariness of writing that belongs to hybrid (non)fiction, we will question the literary strategies employed by these writers, who have an intuition for the urgent need to make what is happening “intelligible”, while being aware of the impossibility of doing so through a world of references, familiar images and the known past.

Morally Indefensible: The Non-Fictional Experience in Italian War Literature: from Rastello to Wu Ming

2025-08-21T10:33:29+00:00

The article suggests to consider non-fictional writing like a global “symbolic form” (Cassirer) of XXth century and tries to analyse its caracteristics starting from some Italian examples: La guerra in casa (1998) and Piove all’insù (2006) by Luca Rastello, a journalist and writer engaged in historical research and L’invisibile ovunque (2015), a book by the group Wu Ming: which is the notion of time in these works? Which is the relationship between non-fiction and truth? Which the relationship to historiography ? which the links with engagement? Finally: is non-fiction a form of fiction?

Gender Autofiction as “Non-Fiction”: A Paradox?

2025-08-21T10:43:51+00:00

This text aims to explore the concept of autofiction as a form of non-fiction, challenging the definitions traditionally assigned to each of these genres. It argues that differentiating and opposing writing methods tied to declared aesthetic and/or cognitive fields proves unproductive. Autofiction revolves around an “I” that may appear singular but is, by nature, plural, according to Jean-Luc Nancy. This “I” increasingly distances itself from the narcissism initially attributed to it, shifting instead toward an inclusive “we.” The article examines three contemporary female writers as examples. Chloé Delaume embraces the label of autofiction for her literary work, while Annie Ernaux rejects it, presenting herself instead as an autosociobiographer. Christine Angot, for her part, associates the term “fiction” with entirely invented characters, which contradicts the message of truth she proclaims. Regardless of their self-designations, all three focus on writing about their lived experiences, breaking societal taboos. Their personal narratives serve as political tools. Their writings echo human suffering and are rooted in an identifiable social context, representing a form of self-writing as a mirror of the other. Thus, the article advocates for dissolving the genre boundaries between autofiction and non-fiction. For, if all writing “fictionalizes”, the real is obviously present in the intimate testimony conveyed in the first person within autofiction. This “I”, considered to be literary, now extends into disciplines traditionally classified as scientific. The article concludes by highlighting the convergence of writing modes and the shifting definitions of genre.

Literature as Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Describing Extermination (from Primo Levi to Varlam Shalamov)

2025-08-21T13:52:46+00:00

The article under studies proves that the literature of extermination necessitates a radical re-evaluation of the entire literary tradition. Its very existence poses a silent yet eloquent challenge to the narcissism and complacency of mass-media-influenced literary circles. Moreover, it effectively deconstructs the foundations of modern literary heritage, beginning with the Renaissance. In this context, the author ceases to be a romantic visionary who, obeying a higher calling, cultivates his inner self and commits himself to serving the art. Testimonies of mass political violence break the imaginary alliance between Evil and Beauty, embedded in traditional aesthetic discourse. These literary texts restore dignity to victims and resist literature that strives for venality, reduced to the rhetorical pathos, a favorite tool of executioners. Thus, the ethical responsibility of the artist comes to the forefront – as resistance against violence and as an act of restoring the truth. The function of testimony, which comprises both the recording of facts and the honoring of memory, demands stylistic restraint, devoid of decorative aestheticism. In the creative process, aesthetic intuitions cannot be divorced from practical rationality – they must operate within the bounds of ethics, not in opposition to them. This necessitates a re-evaluation of the opposition between ethics and aesthetics introduced by Nietzsche: in reality, aesthetics can interact with politics only indirectly – through the ethical dimension. However, political upheavals became merely a starting point for a profound rethinking of the artistic universe, giving impetus to the formation of new aesthetic “worlds”. The ethics of resistance, which emerged as a response to violence, gave rise to a number of unprecedented aesthetic solutions – diverse in form, but united by a common tonality and depth of moral concern. In this respect, the issue of lying is particularly acute, as no act of mass political violence occurs without lies – both as a tool of disguise and as a mechanism of systemic oppression. Realizing that the already set forms of writing and familiar means of literary language proved incapable of conveying the truth about the catastrophe, authors like Levi and Shalamov concluded that literary testimony must not only record the past but also pave the way for a new literature – a literature of the future, rooted in ethics and aimed at counteracting the devaluation of human experience.

Bokeh in Non-Fiction Literature. The Depth of Field’s Blurring in Moments of Closeness. An Intercultural Investigation

2025-08-21T14:08:23+00:00

In literature – and, hence, in literary theory – it has been assumed that the author is not identical with the narrator. The opposite appears to be true of all non-fiction genres. Here, it seems essential that the author – for example in a reportage – is identical with the narrator and has (usually) followed the action himself. Yet, it could be argued that the vast majority of non-fiction texts in narrative prose genres (such as reports, biographies or autobiographies) contain fictional elements. The decisive factor here is not only the deliberate limitation of the narrative (negatively: framing), but above all the narrative perspective, and particularly the fine-tuning of its descriptions. But exactly at those points where the factual text should be extremely precise, the focus becomes blurred – moving back into fiction; rather like binoculars whose depth of field becomes blurred when the fine adjustment is overtightened. Or as in photography, where the quality of the out-of-focus area, such as in bokeh (from the Japanese: 暈け/ボケ), can be deliberately designed. In my article, I concretize those theses using two case studies from German- and English-language non-fiction literature – Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012) and Günter Wallraff’s Schwarz auf Weiß – attempting to develop an approach that might help to complement literary theory. In a final interdisciplinary excursion, I try to work out fictionalizations in economics, taking examples from Peter Bofinger’s Grundzüge der Volkswirtschaftslehre, namely Adam Smith’s reference to pin production and the Robinson Crusoe economy to explain the division of labor and comparative cost advantages.

Intermedial Strategies of Overcoming Trauma in W. G. Sebald’s Prose: An Analysis of the Novel “Austerlitz”

2025-08-22T10:53:20+00:00

The article analyzes the therapeutic potential of interlude components in a literary text, considering W. G. Sebald’s novel “Austerlitz” as an example of a literary representation of the process of overcoming traumatic experience. On the basis of this text, the author traces the gradual reconstruction of the protagonist’s personal memory, the deliberately displaced trauma of the Holocaust, and fragments of his own identity through intermediate markers such as architecture, photographs, films, and documents. In the novel, these visual and material components perform a therapeutic function: they serve as triggers of recollection and trigger the process of reconstructing blocked memories. Attention is focused on the images of the father and mother, who had long been pushed out of Austerlitz’s memory. It is emphasized that through photographs, narratives of the mother’s Czech friend Vera, and architectural details of places associated with the family, the protagonist finds the forgotten figures of the family that disappeared due to deportation, gradually accepts the loss and integrates the events of the past into the gaps of his own consciousness. The main thing is that it is Vera who acts as a living carrier of collective and family memory and creates the conditions for Jacques’s cathartic experience. The transition between the verbal and visual structures of the text creates the effect of “dialogic memory,” in which intermediate objects serve as a kind of “psychoanalytic artifacts” and combine the individual experience of the hero with the collective historical trauma. It is shown how the topoi of memory (from private childhood loci – Prague, to historically marked places associated with the Holocaust – Terezin, Paris) function in the text as “therapeutic guides” between the present and the past and open up the possibility of affective rethinking of tragic events. The novel is analyzed as a peculiar form of retraumatization and existential search, in which the art of words becomes an effective tool for returning to the displaced experience, forming a holistic identity and post-traumatic recovery.

The Metamodernist Dimension of the Literary Screenplay “The Cherry Orchard...” (2008) and the Film “The Guide” (2014)

2025-08-22T11:02:24+00:00

The article attempts a comprehensive analysis of the literary screenplay “The Cherry Orchard...” (2008) by O. Sanin and I. Rozdobudko and its film adaptation – the film “The Guide” (2014) in the context of the aesthetic dominants of metamodernism. The attention is focused on identifying the key ideological and artistic foundations of the metamodern worldview, in particular, such as new sincerity, oscillation, personalism, immersiveness, as well as on identifying the leading metanarratives – national identity, historical memory and personal involvement of the individual in social and cultural transformations. The author’s concept evolved from the poetic code of Shevchenko’s text to a deeply personalised story of spiritual insight that comprehends the national tragedy through the prism of individual experience. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the characters of Ivan Kocherha and Peter Shemrok as carriers and translators of cultural memory, who appear as representatives of the existential search for meaning in the context of a historical catastrophe. It is noted that the script and the film function as examples of national cinema of the metamodern era, which synthesise documentary truth and artistic convention, emotional authenticity and symbolic versatility. Through the dialogic nature of the narrative, the appeal to archetypal images, the integration of national codes and the actualisation of traumatic historical experience, the works under study represent a new type of aesthetic reception that ensures a reflective understanding of the past and the formation of a modern identity. In this way, the film “The Guide” and its literary basis are considered as significant markers of the contemporary Ukrainian metamodern discourse, which contributes to the reconstruction of historical memory, humanistic guidelines, and national self-knowledge.

The Score of the Lyrical Narrative: Musical Poetics in the Poems of the Almanac “Musaget”

2025-08-22T11:12:03+00:00

This article explores the musical poetics embedded in the works of the Ukrainian Symbolist poets affiliated with the Kyiv literary and artistic group “Musaget” (1919), considering these through the framework of aesthetic transformations characteristic of the modernist era. The study aims to identify and interpret the mechanisms through which musical elements – such as rhythm, interval, harmony, pause, tempo, and dynamics – are integrated into lyrical narratives, functioning as suggestive codes of meaning. The sound poetics are examined in relation to the semantic structures within the texts of Pavlo Tychyna, Dmytro Zahul, Volodymyr Yaroshenko, Mykhailo Zhuk, Klym Polishchuk, Mykola Tereshchenko, Pavlo Fylypovych, and Volodymyr Kobyliansky. The analysis traces how musical intervals, rhythmic contrasts, syntactic fragmentation, alliteration, sound imagery, and parcellation serve to represent new ontological states – ruptures, losses, and transcendental quests. Central to this analysis is the improvisatory structure of the poem, conceived as an analogue to symphonic thinking, with the score-based organization of content and polyphonic imagery allowing the lyrical text to function as an acoustic space for existential experience. Drawing from poems in the “Musaget” almanac, the study demonstrates how lyrical musicality serves as a means of shaping the worldview and semantic field of the era. In doing so, the paper highlights the manner in which musical narratives offer deeper insights into the polyphonic nature of Ukrainian modernism. It concludes that in the modernist poetry of “Musaget”, music functions not merely as a thematic element or object of representation but as a structural paradigm of meaning-making – one that transcends linguistic systems to inhabit an intermedial space of symbolic existence. Ultimately, the Musaget approach represents an intermedial model of poetic expression, in which the lyrical “I” is not a singular center of consciousness, but rather a multiplicity of acoustic positions.