ATHENA PASHKO. UNUSUAL THOUGHTS ABOUT UNUSUAL WORLDVIEW AND POETRY OF PASSIONARY PERSONALITY

The proposed article outlines the multifold semiosphere of understanding the worldview and poetics of the bright creator of the figurative word of the second half of the 20th – early 21st century – Athena Pashko. In the universe of her personality, the deep rootedness in the whole worldview-aesthetic discourse is organically combined with the specific need and ability to actualize this discourse in the Ukrainian semiosphere. The images and poetic visions created by the poetess pave a unique bridge from the «past to the future» (D. Humenna’s statement). The actual dominant of the proposed study is the study in the phenomenon of Athena Pashko specific ancient union of artistic image-meaning with the universe of the author’s personality. This dichotomous unity is recorded in the reflections and memories of contemporaries about her extraordinary personality. Attention is paid to the musicality of A. Pashko’s works and their agreement with the musicality of P. Tychyna’s poetics. Such harmony is based on the medieval-baroque aesthetics of Ukrainian music by D. Bortnyanskyi, A. Wedel and large-scale perspectives in the 21st century. A special dominant of the article, which determines the worldview-poetic universals relevant for the present and prospects, is the discourse of concordances between spiritual-intellectual phenomena of V. Svidzinskyi, P. Tychyna, V. Stus and A. Pashko. The outlined multidimensional discourse is still terra incognita in philosophical-Ukrainian studies and in particular literary studies. The article notes that the world of ideas and actions of A. Pashko as a passionary person is an unknown perspective field in the context of understanding the prospects for the revival of the Ukrainian state and the semiosphere of state formation as its ideological basis. In conceptual connection, the ideological world of A. Pashko is studied, which appears in correspondence with her husband V. Chornovil, analytical memoirs of M. Kotsiubynska, S. Kyrychenko, where philosophical and state-building dominants of the «Sixtiers» are interpreted as sources of poetics of their work and worldview.

Universuri antagonice în poeziile avangardiste: Geo Bogza și Lucian Blaga

The work will be based on a comparison, by briefly examining the two poetic visions: Bogzian and Blagian. The aim of the study is to determine both common elements of the creation of the two poets, through which to attest the characteristic aspects of the Romanian and European avant-garde, as well as the features by which they have individualized their works.

Stimmungen, Spannungen, Visionen

Wilhelm Klemm, Expressionist poet and military surgeon on the Western front during World War I, published approximately 60 war poems, both in his collection Gloria! (1915) and in several literary magazines such as Franz Pfemfert’s Aktion. Some of them were soon hailed as eminently critical of common, glorifying poetic visions of war. This is certainly adequate; a closer scrutiny of the entire corpus of Klemm’s war poems, however, reveals a peculiar diversity which requires an awareness for their ambivalences. The article therefore considers three fields of inquiry: the poems’ depiction of the human body, their relation to lyrical paradigms focussed on nature and Stimmung, and ways of transcending both these paradigms and naturalistic representations of war and its effects. It thus identifies Klemm’s different modes of perceiving, interpreting and processing the experience of the Great War.

‘The Fixed and the Fluid’

This chapter addresses the question of poetic identity in the works of and literary relationship between Shelley and Byron. It identifies the mutual responsiveness of the two poets as well as their responsiveness to the self in poetry. For both poets, there is a great awareness of the possibility to re-imagine the self through poetry: to ‘multiply’ and be multiplied, to become ‘immortal’ through the continuance of one’s ideas and poetic visions, and to be born again in the minds and hearts of those readers who are receptive to the poet’s creations. Both poets, through their poetic works, explore the value of poetry through different forms. Byron’s narrative form provides means by which he can explore the self through opposing poles. As the chapter points out, for Byron, ‘Stories fix and identify; but they are also the doorways towards novelty and escape’. Shelley’s intense lyricism provides an opportunity to test the imagination’s capacity for movement between poles, to be at once fixed and fluid. Both poets present identity through the lens of poetic surrogates through whom they explore notions of isolation, the concept of heroism, a sense of suffering, and the very mortal wish for the timelessness of the soul. The two authors also deftly probe the relationship between author and reader. The chapter also explores the converging and diverging ways in which Byron and Shelley respond to Wordsworthian ideas of identity. It details how the poets’ friendship and intellectual exchange ‘changed who they were as poets’. Throughout, the chapter examines the skill with which each poet creates his works, and traces how poetic form corresponds to poetic idea.

‘It is the poems you have lost’

This chapter suggests that, after Dunkirk, civilian morale in Britain was galvanized around three sacrificial moments: the purging of the National Government, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz. Accordingly, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas and others published powerful poems on the idea of sacrifice, many deriving their power from drafting tradition and mythology into new visions of social organization. In analysing a variety of these poetic visions, this chapter also considers work by Alun Lewis, Louis MacNeice, R. N. Currey, Keith Douglas, Timothy Corsellis, and Sidney Keyes. Three salient issues that bear on sacrifice can help us understand the poets’ hopes and misgivings: the relation of sacrifice to numbers and consent; the moral stasis induced when deaths are ritualized; the insight that members of a given society live in harmony not because of the periodic bloodletting of war, but in spite of it.

Harper’s Hearts: “Home Is Never Natural or Safe”

This chapter examines how Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, from her early invocation of the specter of the Poetess on the auction block to her late replacement of earlier “heart” tropes with the figure of Harriet Tubman's bruised hands, deploys Poetess performance as a powerful, if ultimately insufficient, resource for articulating poetic visions of globally aware, politically ambitious African American intellectual culture. Building on Harper's own self-depiction as “our most celebrated poetess and oratrix,” the chapter considers the strenuousness and virtuosity of her engagements with “separate spheres.” It also explores how, through the “click of the cliché,” Harper corporealizes her narrator Chloe Fleet's well-known challenges to slaveholding domesticity. Finally, it analyzes two poems that seek to break the bounds of haunted, suspended spheres: “Do Not Cheer, Men are Dying” and “The Vision of the Czar of Russia.”

Iranians, Armenians, Prince Igor, and the Lightness of Pushkin

The Animal Style that characterizes Scythian art came into Armenia and Russia, where it is attested in bas-reliefs on churches; and the epic Song of Igor's Campaign, a unique verbal reflection of it, inspired Pushkin and his descendants in their poetic visions.

La musique sacralisée dans les œuvres de quelques écrivains romantiques

This article analyses poetic visions, based on synesthesia and referring to Swedenborg’s correspondence theory, evoked by listening to music. In these visions the musical impressions are in some way sanctified and they contribute to the development of the spiritual area. This aesthetic phenomenon is noticeable in Balzac’s novels. The music for him is the light penetrating the listener’s soul and a means of accessing divine mysteries. Similarly, in George Sand’s works music is the inspiration to create soulful poetic visions and the character of Consuelo who, by her singing, is vouchsafed by divine revelations.