Christian Components of Maksym Rylskyi’s Poetry

Author

Prylepa Olesia

a Ph.D. in Art Studies, a junior research fellow of the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine). ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8438-1589

Christian Components of Maksym Rylskyi’s Poetry

Abstract

Poetical heritage of M. Rylskyi is considered from the point of view of the embodiment of the fundamentals of the Christian doctrine, first of all its Christological, Mariological and anthropological aspects. There has been no place for the spiritual essential principles of life and, of course, works based on the Christian worldview in the conditions of the ideology of atheism. Experiencing and being in internal conflict with the official doctrine have prompted M. Rylskyi to search for new poetic means of self-expression. Some creative forms of the embodiment of M. Rylskyi’s Christian worldview, appearing in his poetic heritage, are described in the article.

The spiritual world of M. Rylskyi poetry is full of biblical, first of all, evangelical imagery, containing both in open, generally accepted spiritual culture heritage, and in veiled forms hidden from the others. The theme of resurrection is one of the major topics in the works of M. Rylskyi. Although the Resurrection of Christ does not find direct elucidation in the poet’s heritage, the image of resurrection (as rebirth, renewal, the beginning of a qualitatively new life) appears periodically in his works. The text of the poetry almost always contains a prompting – the lexeme has been resurrected in various morphological forms.

M. Rylskyi has included the image-attributes of evangelical events into the context of his own works (the image of the Sun of the World) as one of the name-symbols of the Saviour in the Song about Donbas); the image of suffering Armenia wrapped with a crown of thorns evokes associations with the sufferings of the crucified Savior in the verse Armenia).

Mariological topics have worried the soul of M. Rylskyi constantly. In the times of the Soviet reality, in his poetry the Blessed Mother of God appears in intimate images-symbols: Burning Bush (the poem of the same name by M. Rylskyi); the image of a mother with a child in her arms appeals to the iconography of Hodigitria – the Mother of God with the baby Jesus (Mother, Sistine Madonna). Thus, in the poem Mother, the epithets immaculate, holy are symbol-attributes of the deified human essence, belonging to the Virgin Mary only in the conditions of earthly life.

In the series of frank, sincere poetry M. Rylskyi has shown the inner world of a person in the truth of sinful nature, given recipes of Christian wisdom in the fight against pride (Poet! Be Your Own Judge, Autumn has Smelled of Stale Tobacco).

The artistic expression of some of M. Rylskyi’s poetic works contains lexical forms rooted in the Christian culture of the Eastern Slavs and peculiar to Orthodox Church Slavonic hymnography. The use of some Orthodox prayer-formulas in the Ukrainian translation and in the form of hidden quotations can be observed in a number of the artist’s poetic works (for example, the dedication poetry To Ukraine). In the Ukrainian translation, the poet has also used direct quotations from Orthodox prayers, while preserving the lexical forms of the Church Slavonic primary source: in the poem To a Robbed House he uses the quote you have conquered death with death from the Paschal troparion of the 5th echos.

Anaphora is attractive for M. Rylskyi among the methods of construction of a verse widespread in Orthodox hymnography. The lexicon of M. Rylskyi anaphors has Church Slavic roots (anaphor-lexemes Blessed in The Word about the Native Mother, Glory in the poetry On My Own Birthday, etc.

All mentioned above indicates that M. Rylskyi has known liturgical traditions. Christian imagery in the conditions of the Soviet reality has continued to exist in new meaningful contexts of his poetry.

Keywords

poetry of Maksym Rylskyi, Christian imagery, Orthodox hymnography, quotation, Church Slavicisms.

References

1. AHIEYEVA, Vira. The Art of Balance. Maksym Rylskyi against the Background of the Epoch. Kyiv: Book, 2012, 392 pp. [in Ukrainian].
2. AHIEYEVA, Vira. Double‑Bottom Texts: What Can Be Read between the Lines in the Stalin‑Era Writers. In: Dmytro KRAPYVENKO, ed.‑In‑chief, The Ukrainian Week, Week.ua, 2019, June 30 [online]. Available from: https://tyzhden.ua/teksty-z-podvijnym-dnom/ [in Ukrainian].
3. BULGAKOV, Sergei, protoiereus. The Burning Bush. The Experience of Dogmatic Interpretation of Some Features in the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God. Paris, 1927, 288 pp. [in Russian].
4. RYLSKYI, Maksym. Verses and Poems. Compiled and prefaced by Vsevolod NEDILKO. Kyiv: Soviet School Education, 1990, 350 pp. [in Ukrainian].
5. Ruda, Tetiana. Facets of an OutstandingTalent: Maksym Rylskyi – A Poet, A Translator, A Scholar: A Monograph. Kyiv: IASFE Publishers, 2017, 144pp. [in Ukrainian].
6. YUDKIN-RIPUN, Іhor. Maksym Rylskyi’s Neoclassicism as a Ukrainian Cultural Phenomenon. In: Hanna SKRYPNYK, ed.‑in‑chief, Researches of the Fine Arts. Kyiv: NASU’s IASFE, 2015, no. 3 (51), pp. 80–87 [in Ukrainian].