As a poet, P. Kulisch is the author of four collections: “Dawns” (1862), “Peasant Poetry” (1882), “The Bell” (1893), and “The Borrowed Kobza” (1897), and a number of poems. A characteristic feature of the vast majority of Kulish’s poetic works is that, according to M. Zerov, he responded with his poetry to the “wickedness of the day”, “separating too little among what was bypassed, proper to poetry and proper to journalism”. We have some reasons to speak about Kulish’s “dependence” on Shevchenko in terms of poetry. One of the program pieces in Shevchenko’s work is the poem “Chygyryn, Chygyryn …”. The fate of Chyhyryn in Shevchenko’s mind was associated with the fate of the Ukrainian state. There is no reason to speak about the topic of Chygyryn in Kulish’s works, although it could potentially exist, given the content of the poem “Ukraine”. On pages of three collections, P. Kulish only mentions Chygyryn in the poem “The National Ideal” from “The Bell” once. At the same time, with the help of Shevchenko, Kulish comes to the understanding of the topic of Chygyryn. In part of his poetry, he rethinks the motifs found in the poem “Chygyryn, Chygyryn…”; there are Kulish allusions to Shevchenko’s text. Therefore, we have grounds to speak about the Chygyryn-related meanings in P. Kulish’s poetry. The Cossacks motif prevails in the “Dawn” collection, and P. Kulish avoids dissonance with Shevchenko. In the collection of “Peasant poetry” the author resorts to the debunking of the last glory, the Cossacks’ past for him is “fierce robbery”, “the way of the predatory evil” (“To the native people”). P. Kulish, on the other hand, raises the role of language and culture. In the collection “The Bell” there is an aggressive accusation of the Cossacks and those who praised them. If according to Shevchenko the motif of word that can renew the nation, awaken it to life, does not deny the motif of glory, then Kulish constructs the motif of word as antonymic to the motif of the Cossack glory (according to Kulish’s interpretation – non-glory). In the collection “The Bell” we find the most cases against Shevchenko and Kulish’s interaction with Shevchenko’s text through its denial. At the same time, P. Kulish disputes Shevchenko’s motif of the double-bladed knive, that is, the two-way mode of building the future: through physical resistance to colonization, manhood and thanks to the action of the word, Shevchenko’s in particular, which is able to renew the nation, and offers his own humane way – the way of revival through the word through culture (“To Shevchenko” “Peasant Poetry”; “On the Crossing”, “We Forgot” – “The Bell”, etc.).
Keywords: P. Kulish, Т. Shevchenko, Chygyryn, poetry, the motif.
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DownloadDOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/2520-6346.1(59).24-37