COUNTERDISCURSIVE ARTISTIC STRATEGIES OF UKRAINIAN ROMANTICISM

Abstract

In Ukrainian romantic literature of the 1830s and 1840s, the authors turned their attention to folk art and historical themes. This aesthetic orientation of writing allowed the creation of texts that revealed aspects of the national life of Ukrainians. Romantic poets sought to artistically comprehend the Ukrainian past, to bring it out of oblivion, which was to help restore the historical memory of society and form a model of national self-identity. The ethnocultural identity, articulated in the texts of the Romantics, challenged the Russian imperial narrative, which sought to marginalize the Ukrainian value system by assimilating it with metropolitan axiology. Romantic literature of the first half of the nineteenth century created a powerful counterdiscursive strategy, which later transformed from the sphere of culture into the socio-political plane. The anti-colonial tendency introduces military symbols into romantic literature, as the appeal to the Cossack heritage actualizes in the Ukrainian cultural code markers of knightly victory and armed defence of the homeland. Romantic poets of the 1830s and 1840s transferred folklore and baroque chronicle imagery to written literature, in which the figures of the Cossacks were often heroized and glorified. Cossack military images allow Ukrainian authors to praise the pre-colonial period and poetize their military might, which, although in literary projection, opposes the oppressor. In the conditions of the Russian imperial discourse, the Ukrainian romantics resorted to the latent challenge to the metropolis, in the image of the enemy depicting the Poles, traditional opponents of the Cossacks. Such a strategy allows us to oppose the imperial narrative not directly, but through intermediaries, which are the Poles. At the same time, along with the military theme, the poetry of the Romantics includes the rhetoric of cruelty, which formats the Ukrainian world, dividing it into “Friends” and “Foes”. In general, the atmosphere of violence that often accompanies the image of the Other in romantic poetry allows us to represent the colonial trauma of the Ukrainian community, as acts of violence are interpreted as “just revenge” on enemies. At the same time, the glorification of one’s cruelty is an attempt to imitate the power of imperial discourse, which always labels such actions as a forced measure to subdue savages or preserve the achievements of civilization. The Ukrainian counterdiscursive strategy in the literature of Romanticism appears as an attempt to oppose and at the same time imitate metropolitan models.