EXPERIENCING THE TEMPORALITY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE IN THE POETRY OF MARIANNA KIYANOVSKA AND IYA KIVA

Abstract

The author calls the deformation of the experience of temporality in human existence one of the existential challenges faced by millions of Ukrainians of the current stage of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Today Ukrainian poetry has become a distinctive form of testimony to the war, endowed with medial potential for the creation and dissemination of meaning. It articulates an original existential and temporal discourse and frequently offers examples of non-academic philosophising. In the works of contemporary Ukrainian poets, reflection on temporal experience has become part of a broader meditation on life in extreme conditions. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the relationship between the past, present and future and meaning of images of the future and existential hope in poetic texts by Marianna Kiyanovska and Iya Kiva, written after February 24, 2022. Author’s point of departure is the assumption that poetry itself may constitute a form of non-academic philosophising, which makes it possible to combine approaches from existential philosophy and phenomenology in a philosophy of poetry. The contemporary Ukrainian poets Marianna Kiyanovska and Iya Kiva, through their non-academic philosophising in poetic form, articulate an understanding of human existence in the situations of wartime. In their collections published after 24 February 2022, they portray the phenomenological reality of war as it manifests in people’s experience of distorted temporality and the loss of the horizon of the future. At the beginning of the study, the author analyzes poems from previous collections of poets and argues that they contain an awareness of the importance of a holistic experience of temporality in human life, but the existential hope does not yet have an intersubjective meaning. Analysis of the existential aspects of experiencing the modes of time based on the material of Marianna Kiyanovska’s collection «Lightning Meets Water and Wind » and Iya Kiva’s «The Laughter of an Extincted Fire» allows the author to substantiate the philosophical originality of their works written after February 24, 2022. Both poets advance the idea of the inter-existentiality of human life, reinterpreting hope as an inter-existential and thus moving from existential to inter-existential analysis. Compared with their earlier poetry, the notions of the future and of hope become, in the new collections, the central focus of their philosophising.