“Ukraine and Jesus Christ suffered the most severe torments in their life” Addressed lyrics by Oleksa Hai-Holovko

Abstract

The poetic legacy of Oleksa Hai-Holovko, a Ukrainian writer and diaspora activist, is presented in three volumes of selected works. His lyricism has been predominantly studied in the context of themes and motifs of Ukrainian-language poets in Canada (I. Nakashidze): love for Ukraine, nostalgia, the image of the steppe, and so forth. The addressed lyrics of the poet have not been thoroughly studied, so this article aims to analyze the features, motifs, and define the uniqueness of the portrayal of the subject and addressee in the writer’s dedicatory verses. The research is conducted using comparative-historical, semiotic methods, contextual analysis of the text, principles of receptive aesthetics with reference to the works by Ukrainian scholars regarding genealogical trends, and genre specificity of addressed lyricism (L. Bondar, Yu. Klymiuk, Yu. Kovaliv, V. Nazarets, L. Skoryna, M. Tkachuk). The novelty of the research lies in the examination of dedicatory poems by O. Hai-Holovko, in which through the prism of a specific addressee, the destiny of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in “commune-moscow slavery” is predominantly represented. The “Lyrical Portraits” by O. Hai-Holovko vary in genre modification: dedicatory poems to “Friends”, “Full-blooded Sheep”, “Taras Shevchenko”; letter-dedications “Letter to Mother”, “Letter to Yurii Smolych”; address-invocations “My People”, “To Valerian Revutsky”, “To Yurii Holovko”; dedication-epitaphs “To Fedor Odrachiv”, “To Vasyl Stefanyk” and so on. Dedicatory verses do not always reflect the genre in the title, in such poems, after the title, the addressees are indicated with a concise reference or indication of the event: “Ballad to the Warriors” for Yuriy Stefanyk, “Song” for V. Rusalskyi, “Do Not Grieve, My Great Friend” for Y. Pozichanyuk. The peculiarity of addressed lyrics by O. Hai-Holovko is autobiographism, with Ukraine being the overarching image, enslaved by the “commune”, the native people “bound by chains”, and “suppressed by non-glory”. By reinterpreting biblical-Christian motifs and images (“To Metropolitan Ilarion”, “To Bishop Boris on the Day of Departure to Edmonton”, “Burned”) the tragedy of his fate and the fate of the Ukrainian people in a totalitarian society is reproduced. The dedicatory poems by O. Hai-Holovko have significant importance in preserving and retransmitting individual, historical, and cultural memory. They serve as artistic documents of the crimes of the totalitarian regime (“To the Chekists”, “To Stalin”, “To moscow occupiers and their little russian janissaries”) and as important interpretative codes that allow the recipient to discern the importance and scale of the issues raised, hidden meanings, and mysteries of the human soul.