NATURE AS A SOURCE OF MYTHOLOGICAL SYMBOLS IN THE STORY OF M. KOTSYUBYNSKYI “SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS”

Abstract

The article emphasizes the relevance of understanding the symbolic rhetoric of modernist literary visions at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in the context of modern worldview transformations, the search for new ideological and aesthetic guidelines aimed at preserving the traditional worldview paradigm, the formation of national identity within the limits of world cultural development. The importance of nature for the Ukrainian national existence, the appeal of Ukrainian modernists to the natural world as a place of living and divine power in the ideas of Ukrainians is substantiated. It was found that the M. Kotsyubynskyi’s story “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” is a modern myth of a natural, harmonious universe, where the cult of beauty and feelings reign. Only surrounded by picturesque and mysterious nature, Ivan and Marichka discover the depth of their spiritual life, develop their own individual principle, which is most fully revealed through love and creativity. The world of fantastic beliefs defines the whole life of the mountain people. In all its pagan fullness, nature became Ivan's first and only teacher. His love for Marichka, blessed by the water element, was born in the mountains. But it was the water, ambivalent by its nature, that caused Marichka’s death, absorbing her into a vortex of cold and darkness. Among the picturesque mountain landscapes, Ivanko fills his delicate, sensitive soul with music and love, collecting Marichcha's songs on the wooded hills. The completeness of the connections between man and nature is traced through a system of mytho-ritual actions, rites and fortune-telling, based on a pious attitude to the forces of nature (extraction of “living fire” – a living image of the Sun god). The understanding of a complete universe, where the natural, human and divine coexist, formed the sacral-magical atmosphere of the life of the Hutsuls, who, with the help of incantations and fortune-telling, became the creators of their own existence. Singled out and analyzed key natural symbols of water, fire, mountains, forest, earth, sky, etc., images of Ukrainian demonology, the system of mytho-ritual actions and fortune-telling, customs and superstitions of the Hutsuls gave an opportunity to understand the mythopoetic symbolism of M. Kotsyubynskyi, to define and realize the national identity on the background of the global cultural and mythological  context.