THE WAYS OF SHEVCHENKO’S POEMS RECEPTION

Abstract

The author of the article makes an attempt to consider the hermeneutic principles according to which the reader should approach the reception of Taras Shevchenko’s poetic works. He makes an excursus into the early history of the perception of T. Shevchenko’s poems and considers the responses of such readers and critics as H. Kvitka-Osnovianenko, V. Belinskyi, M. Kostomarov, P. Kulish, M. Drahomanov. This allows him to trace how certain socio-cultural predispositions of critics determined the perception of T. Shevchenko’s poetry. He also notes that already in the early reception of T. Shevchenko’s poems, two leading tendencies are outlined. One draws attention to their «truthfulness» and the other to their poetics. «Truthfulness» should be understood as the fact that T. Shevchenko’s poetry creates a figurative world according to certain rules that nature gives it through the author. Figurative expressiveness, compositional accuracy, semantic depth are the signs of «truthfulness» of T. Shevchenko’s poetry. It is essential to emphasize the self-importance of T. Shevchenko’s poetry, which was not a reflection of the author’s reality, but in which the specific structures of existence «manifested» themselves in a specific figurative form. And already being «manifested» in the figurative text, these structures somehow appealed to the surrounding reality, expressing and clarifying its individual fragments or situations. There are two leading trends in the art of understanding. The first one is that the reader should reduce his subjective factor to the possible minimum and turn his attention to understanding the work in its cultural-historical and author-biographical contexts. Another one indicates the temporality of understanding the text; the reader cannot perceive the work from the standpoint of the author’s time or some «universal» time. His understanding is always determined by his own time, which presupposes his socio-cultural situation, the state of language, the reader’s life biography. The reader must balance these two tendencies in his own interpretation. There are two important tendencies in the variety of possible approaches to reading the «Kobzar»: to study the language of texts and the existential and ontological situations that arise in them. Keywords: poetry, reception, hermeneutics, poetics, aesthetics, existence.