Vasyl Gerasimyuk’s poetic historiography.

Abstract

The article focuses on the historical and philosophical works of Vasyl Gerasimyuk from his book of poems and poems Blood and Legion (2014): the poem-parable Where are the Hutsuls?, the on-screen poem-mystery Dream on the Subway, The Docks?. The beginning of the world, verified by numerous artifacts of the time of Dovbush, the time of the poet’s grandfather Vasyl Yakibchuk and his UPA brothers – this is the space that the poet considers as vanishing.

Reading the poetic works of Vasyl Gerasimyuk is like whirling around in a fascinating circle of grand historical-philosophical action, in which history and present, past and future are tightly intertwined. His poetic world is mysterious – wonderful and terrifying at the same time, because that’s what Ukrainian history and modernity look like.

The lyrical subject of the poem-parabola Where are the Hutsuls? acquires a state of insight. He is in a time of quiet reflection on the state of things. One can speak of his stoicism, of the real nourishment of the spirit, which, perhaps, borders on the doomed calm before the perfect and inevitable.

In the poem-mystery Dream on the Subway, as in any onyx space, the imaginative java is intertwined with everyday reality in an emphatically phantasmagoric way. The key motives of the poem are the following: feelings of deep guilt, greatness and subsequent decline. The poet is at the epicenter of the mysterious cosmos, responding to his voices and relaying them into a single, solid text of astonishment and appeal.

The poem-suite While? is another attempt to look back at the tragic twentieth century. The author finds his own conceptual and meaningful allegories (mowing, grass) that bind the individual to his family and his entire nation. For him in the poem, the key is to comprehend the atrophism of the national cosmos.