ABOUT THOSE ON THE ROAD: ARTISTIC EXISTENTIAL IN SERHIY ZHADAN’S 30 POEMS ABOUT LOVE AND THE RAILROAD

Abstract

The article is devoted to specifics of the manifestation of existential motifs in Serhiy Zhadan’s poetry book 30 Poems about Love and the Railroad (2023). The study purpose to outline the content of the artistic existential of this book. To pursue this goal, the article analyzes the key motifs and their correlation with the existential of being, death, loneliness, love, choice, etc.; reveals the author’s interpretations of the topos of memory in the context of individual and generational identity; and clarifies the role of biblical intertext and railway poetics in the artistic space of Zhadan’s book. The main research methods are receptive, intertextual, and philological analysis. The results of the analyses indicate that in 30 Poems about Love and the Railroad, one can observe the poet’s creative dynamics. The traditional motifs of “a journey without a goal” (T. Gundorova) and the feeling of “homelessness” acquire the semantics of a journey to find the individual and national identity. The central topoi of the collection are the city, the railway station, and the carriage. They appear as the author’s variants of places where the lyrical character’s love for the Motherland, the women, nature, and the creative Word is tested. They are also topoi of boundary situations, where choices are made in meetings and escapes as a way of overcoming or searching for loneliness, protecting from death, etc. The study concludes that existential motifs are revealed in all the poems, which synthesize elements of philosophical, civic, and intimate lyrics within one work. The biblical intertextuality is dominated by this book. It is organic for the embodiment by the collective and autobiographical experience in images-metaphors of existential situations and states. The specialty role in the book belongs to the so-called railway poetics. These demonstrate Zhadan’s creative dynamics. For the poet the comprehension of a full-scale war as a new existential reality becomes a source of new meanings for the concepts of memory, road, railway, and an optic in interpreting the image of a contemporary “passenger” for whom traveling by railway is an initiation.