Visual Marking of the Road Motif in Vasyl Mysyk’s Creative Space
Authors: Soloviova Yu. 
Published: July 2023

The scientific topicality. In the era of postmodernism with its relative system of values, an appeal to poetic texts, written in line with the tradition, takes on a special significance. After all, in such a case, we are talking about a high culture of perception of a literary text, interpretation of which causes the greatest difficulties and involves the ability to perceive the complex structure of content information, especially its internal organization, which is hidden. A particularly significant role is played by images that embody the nation’s cultural code to one degree or another and mark the figurative picture of the world in their own way. They outline the peculiarities of the mythopoetic picture.

The purpose of the article is to reveal how the motif of the road is expressed in the system of figurative-semantic and linguistic stylistic means of Vasyl Mysyk’s poetry, as well as to investigate the peculiarities of the functioning of visual motifs-culturemes at various stages of the formation of the author’s poetic development. An important task of the research is to analyze the road motif marking system through the creation of stereotypical verbal and visual poetic images.

The methodology. The author’s vision of the problem is based on the main principles of modern philological science: the methods of abstraction, analysis and synthesis have been used to study the “road motif” as a factor in the formation of the author’s mythopoetic picture of the world. It is shown how stereotypical visual imagery contributes to the creation of an ethical and aesthetic ideal in which the traditions of folk art and the principles of neoclassicism are organically combined.

The results. The conducted scientific research shows that the main features of the people’s mentality are expressed in the culturemes that we find in Vasyl Mysyk’s poetry. One of such culturemes is the road motif. In his mythopoetic ideas, the road plays one of the pivotal roles. In Vasyl Mysyk’s works, this motif is one of the leading ones and refers us to the mythological and folklore understanding of human life as a path that one should follow, preserving everything that is given by relatives and higher powers, as well as one’s own hopes and expectations. Within the framework of one destiny, this is a path, a track, a road, a way. In the sociocultural dimension, this is the “beaten path”, the “Milky Way”. Not only the path (road, way) itself is important for Mysyk, it is no less important for him what the eye observes, overcoming time and space, i.e., the roadside. The road combines the indivisibility of temporal (past — future) and spatial (ground — sky, bottom– top) coordinates.

The scientific novelty. The scientific novelty is that the marking of the road motif in Vasyl Mysyk’s figurative picture of the world has been considered for the first time.

The conclusions. The results of the research can be used in the study of the Ukrainian literary process of the XX century, in the study of the formation of the author’s picture of the world, in the analysis of archetypal components of visual imagery in the works of contemporary artists.