MILLSTONE OF HEART: FROM OBSERVATIONS ON HRYHORII SKOVORODA’S METAPHORS

Abstract

Hryhoriy Skovoroda’s poems are the optimal form of discursive embodiment of ethical-religious and artistic concepts due to the capacity and ambiguity of their figurative language. The connotative space of the image of the stone in the collection “The Garden of Divine Songs” testifies to this. The stone is usually an attribute of death, despair, and hopelessness in the traditional Ukrainian culture. Several invariants of this image are found in Skovoroda’s poems. These are mountains, rock (petra, cephas), diamond (‘adamant’), and flint. The rocky peaks of the mountains are involved in Skovoroda’s literary world as the foundation of spiritual ascent. The motive of escape from dangers that await the traveler on the sea of life is associated with the pier invincible to the destructive action of waves. In the semiotic system of “The Garden” the stone symbolizes the manifestation of transcendent values in the world of human relationships, which can be a reliable basis for protection from life’s cataclysms and the creation of new values. The steadfastness of the stone as a reliable foundation of life does not prevent the motives of movement and change to be included in the connotational paradigm. The author’s semiotics expands through allusions to stories about the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar, interpreted by the prophet Daniel, about giving Jonah’s son Simon of Bethsaida a new name — Peter, being the evangelist’s translation of the Aramaic kēp̄ā ‘stone’, ‘rock’; the Gospel parable of a house built on stone; the use of the opening verse of the second chapter of the Book of Habakkuk for the epigraph to song 14. Finally, Christ himself is revealed in the image of a stone. Brought together in the antinomic world of Baroque metaphors and allegories of the “The Garden”, stone and fire stimulate the expansion of the associative boundaries of the receptive strategy of the reader, open to artistic search. The chain of invariants of the image of stone is introduced into the connotative orbit of the heart as a meeting place of man and God, transient and transcendent. The coming of God into the inner world of man, his heart, is metaphorically described as striking fire with a flint and a stone or grinding grain into flour by a millstone. Thus, the image of the stone becomes one of the most capacious elements of the literary code of the collection and its structural factors.