Figurative language of Ukrainian poetry written during the period of full-scale military aggression of the Russian Federation

Abstract

The relevance of the research lies in the need to understand the representation of the phenomenon of war in modern Ukrainian poetry. The scientific novelty of the research results is due to the identification of the means of image creation, with the help of which the wartime poetry reflects the reaction to the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation and the processes of overcoming the traumatic experience and dismantling of colonial worldview structures and narratives. The heroes of modern poetic works are soldiers, volunteers, refugees, and representatives of different age categories and religious beliefs, while the leitmotif of creativity is, on the one hand, pain, fear, and tragedy, and on the other hand, the feat of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and ordinary Ukrainians, their common aspiration to defeat the aggressor. The purpose of the article is to characterize the figurative and expressive means of modern poetry about war, its symbolism, and lexical-semantic content. The research used structural-semantic and contextual analysis methods and interpretive and descriptive methods. The mechanism of identifying imagery became the associative level of works. As a result of the research the figurative and lexical features of the poems that appeared in the public domain during the full-scale aggression of the Russian Federation are singled out. The stylistic functions of epithets, similes, and metaphors of war, which actualize the emotional evaluations and concrete-sensual associations of the author and the reader, are outlined. The symbolic world of war poetry is characterized, and the corresponding concepts that it is constructed from are highlighted: “home”, “light”, “city”, “sky”, “darkness” (“night”), “winter”, “February”, etc. The methods of structural-semantic and contextual analysis, interpretive and descriptive methods are used. As part of figurative and expressive means, in new contexts, words acquire lexical meanings that only partially coincide with those recorded in dictionaries. Individually authored epithets, metaphors, similes, and other tropes contain associations with the realities of wartime, as well as chronicles of news reports; poets who are in the ranks of the armed forces, paint pictures of military actions, which they witnessed and participated in, poeticize the theme of brotherhood. The figurative system of poetic works is characterized by occasionality, and expressiveness is a means of artistic communication and performs aesthetic, cognitive, and communicative functions. Poems about the war rise to new conceptual meanings and, of course, have already become an integral part of the national liberation struggle of Ukrainians.