REPRESENTATION OF THE FRONTLINE SPACE IN BORYS HUMENYUK’S COMBATANT POETRY

Abstract

The article analyses the peculiarities of the functioning of the frontline space in Borys Humenyuk’s combatant poetry, based on material from his collection “Blokpost”. Despite the active study of war literature in contemporary literary studies, the concept of “combatant poetry” has not yet acquired an established terminological status and is mainly considered in the context of the broader phenomenon of war lyrics. The paper outlines the theoretical principles of studying combatant poetry as a type of war creativity, the author of which is a direct participant in hostilities, it contains personal experiences of war, combines fiction with documentary authenticity, and reproduces personal experiences and extreme states of a person, caused by the experience of being in the space of war.
The specifics and functions of the frontline topos in the author’s poetic works are determined, and the images of checkpoints, trenches, shelters, and the destroyed landscape of peaceful villages and cities, as well as the motifs of death, sacrifice, moral choice, and spiritual test, are analysed. The role of toponyms in modelling the frontline space is clarified: creating the effect of a reliable spatial delineation of the war and the formation of cultural memory. It is proven that the frontline space in Borys Humenyuk’s combatant poetry performs localization (he specifies and spatially outlines the events of the war through the names of settlements and geographical objects), meaning-making (space becomes a means of forming the key meanings of the work: understanding the existential issues of life and death, fear, brotherhood, human responsibility) and cultural-memorial (the topos preserves the memory of the events of the war, records the experience and contributes to the formation of cultural memory about the struggle and losses) functions, transforming the individual experience of the combatant into a part of the collective experience, forming a narrative about the realities of the Russian-Ukrainian war.