The article is dedicated to the evaluation of creative work by poet and translator Jānis Hvoinskis, and it characterises the content and artistic qualities of Hvoinskis’s poetry process. The main focus is on the representation of the phenomenon of the city as an essential and characteristic poetic chronotope segment in Hvoinskis’s poetry. The study aims to identify and assess the characteristic kinds of city concept formation and their importance in building Hvoinskis’s artistic style. The article highlights and evaluates the techniques for designing the artistic structure of the indivisible chronotope in Hvoinskis’s poetry. This view is based on the fundamental principles of phenomenology, i.e., an individual phenomenon (phainómeno) is crucial in the reflection of consciousness, inner temporality, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and lifeworld. In turn, the highlight of poetry subject’s primary condition and existential motifs is logically linked to the main ideas of existentialism in their attitude towards the reason of an individual’s existence, relationships to life and death, freedom of will and choice, determinism.
The study’s theoretical and methodological basis includes the ideas of phenomenology theoreticians (Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others) and the theories of existentialism philosophers (Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre).
Hvoinskis’s poetry allows us to speak about a city as a concept, i.e., as a universal and capacious generalising notion (which includes images, notions, symbols) from which its associative components – poetry themes, motifs, images – derive. Thus, it is possible to speak about the depth dimension of the city phenomenon. The city phenomenon in Hvoinskis’s poetry is the landscape that has been adopted as the centre of the world of the lyric subject in both poetry collections that have come out to date: “Lietus pār kanālu e” (Rain over the Channel e, 2009) and “Mūza no pilsētas N” (Muse from City N, 2019). The depth dimension in Hvoinskis’s poetry appears in the natural synthesis of mythical and real chronotope, associatively impressive and plastic imagery, expressive style kindred to surrealism poetics. The city appears as a modernism project created by the logic of industrialisation, simultaneously revealing a metaphysical dimension where symbolic images as constituents of a myth preserve the memory of wholeness of the world. The emotional atmosphere of Hvoinskis’s poetry is defined by the highly existential atmosphere – despite the harsh indifference created by the city, the sadness of existential loneliness, social distance, and aversion towards life, the poet makes the tragic and ugly strangely appealing without losing the feeling of lightness and hope. The poet’s intense intuition and imagination exhibit the congeniality with the 20th-century French modernists. Hvoinskis’s poetry muse is death, which implies life.