SHEVCHENKO’S VISIONS OF UKRAINE’S DREAM HEAVEN: THE POEM “STILL DREAMING: AT THE MOUNTAIN”

Culture of the word, 2018, № 89
UDC 821.161.2-108 Шевченко

https://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-0503-2637

Mykola FILON,

Candidate of Philological Sciences, Head of the Ukrainian Language Department V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University

Е-mail: m.filon@karazin.ua

Heading: Word in fiction
Language: Ukrainian

Abstract: The basis of the idea-sense organisation and genre-stylistic integrity of Shevchenko’s text is the idea-artistic conceptualisation of reality in terms of a dream that determines the interaction of the possible and the wished, the imaginary and the real. To decode Shevchenko’s poetry one is to consider the author’s poetic vocabulary units which are connected with the corresponding names and, eventually, the facts of Ukrainian life – cultural landscape, nature, family values etc.

The text accentuates the lyric character’s constant return to the dream that is peculiar in its content. The repetition and endurance of the dream as a factor of fixation and hold of Ukraine’s virtual image are gained by several uses of the adverb досі, which points out the processual features of the worldview, highlights its lasting inviolability and motionlessness while signaling the extremely expressive subjective modality of the poetic text.

The beginning of the work contains the key formants of the author’s poetic vocabulary, among them верба, гора, вода, хата, дід. These topoi-symbols of Shevchenko’s universe are as well characteristic of general national, folk and conceptual worldviews. In the semantic space of symbolic world image, they demonstrate not just their “landscape” but also ceremonial, folk and mythological symbolism of semantics.

In the coordinates of T. Shevchenko’s universe, the dying, suffering, declining, ruined Ukraine is depicted in the images of the unhappy Ukrainian family that breaks up, the ties between different generations ruined and lost. In the analysed poem, the opposite is observed: harmonious life of an entire Ukrainian family. Its ancestral endurance is marked by means of three image words that represent different generations.

Shevchenko’s poetry contains sacred text–the prayer “Our Father”. Its functional and sense-generating significance is determined by the way the Ukrainian prophet understands the essence of salvation. It is not the Eschatological perspective of salvation ending in eternal life in a better world that is important for Shevchenko, but living in Christ in this world. Salvation –as completeness and integrity of living in harmony, faith and love.

Key words: Shevchenko, poetry, author, text, image, symbol, semantics, intention.

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