Ivan Ohiienko, as a historical and creative personality from among those who formed the idea of Ukrainianness at the beginning of the 20th century, during the active national liberation struggles, in contrast to the harmful utopian ideas of Bolshevism, needs special attention in the stormy present. The toolkit of literary postmodernism provides rich opportunities for rereading previously written works. In the case of the philosophical mysteries of Ivan Ohienko, we are talking about those texts that were not noticed by critics at the time of publication and did not receive a thorough ideo-logical and textual analysis. Therefore, the approach proposed in the current study is partly compensatory regarding the proper appreciation of Metropolitan Hilarion’s works. Therefore, the article attempts to reread Ivan Ohienko’s mystery «The Birth of Man. Good and Evil in the world» in view of those semiotic, structural and poetic markers that enable the modern reception of ideological markers in the direction of the postmodern worldview paradigm, dominant for the modern reader. The integra-tion of the text into the modern philosophical, cultural, historical discourse based on the technique of careful reading is a winning solution in an eff ort to reasonably give the author’s philosophical mysteries a new life, but not using far-fetched journalistic generalizations, torn from the fabric of the text itself. The proposed method of text analysis, based on the technique of close reading, made it possible to identify numer-ous features that fully or partially correspond to the creative searches of modern post-modern authors, namely: the idea of the relativity of truth, the fullness of human life with suff ering, the idea of the futility of trying to know the world, the futility of scien-tifi c knowledge of the world, the harmful infl uence of the crowd on creative individu-alism, the abandonment of man in this world, the lack of a clear distinction between good and evil, truth and wrong, in particular due to the appropriation of the right to produce the truth (often it belongs to the crowd or a representative of the crowd), etc. In the spirit of deconstructivism, the author involuntarily constructed replicas of the forces of Evil more convincingly than the fi nal plot decision in favor of the dominant and fi nal victory of Good. At least the situation in the world today proves that, unlike the plot of the mystery, Evil has not lost the fi nal battle for the soul of Man, but is still winning in an unequal existential struggle. The use of this type of text analysis can be useful for re-reading the texts of other literary fi gures, important in the paradigm of culture-creating and nation-creating Ukrainian continuum.
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