The Concept of Forced Silence in Hryhoriy Chubai’s Poetry

Abstract

The article is focused on the concept of silence in the poetry of Hryhoriy Chubai, which is fundamentally important for the Ukrainian poetic underground of the late 1960s and 1970s. This concept has many axiological and semantic dimensions that vary even in the texts of one author. The phenomenon of the unvoiced is substantial for surrealistic and hermetic poetics, and is predisposed to the philosophical particularities of underground Ukrainian poetry. It is also connected to “internal emigration” as a constructive strategy of the author, resisting the cultural and ideological abuse of totalitarianism. However, the main dimension of our analysis is a forced silence of the lyrical subject that faces the atrophy of the poetic word and the disappearance of its magical potency. The poetry is functionally close to prayer, since it structures the world, establishes a bond between earth and heaven, body and soul, past and present. When the human voice is deadened, Chubai’s world loses a sacred beginning, thus reluctant silence is associated with ungodliness and philistinism. This state is connected with the destruction of cosmic unity and an invasion of absolute otherness – chaos, death, and oblivion. In Chubai’s verse such decay is symbolically associated with Soviet topoi, while the possibility of resistance lies in the spheres of national language, culture, and memory, which oppose silence and pave the way to a sacred word.