FRANKO’S POETIC CYCLE “MOURNING SONGS”: ASPECTS OF POETICS

Abstract

Franko’s poetic cycle “Mourning Songs” became the third in his collection “From the Heights and Lowlands” (1893), however, this cycle was not included in the first edition of the collection in 1887. Nine lyrical poems of the cycle “Mourning Songs” mainly belong to the genre of reflective-meditative lyrics, in which the author (lyrical subject) reflects on social structure, ontological and existential problems. The articulation of the mental state of the lyrical hero, his inner suffering, loneliness, social vacuum, feeling of being unwanted in the world are important motives here. Franko purposely doesn’t arrange poems in chronological order but instead develops the inner plotline of the cycle with the following motives: guilt for the mournful mood of his muse, inner rebellion against social evil, apocalyptic vision of destroying the old world order, declaration of his solidarity with the humiliated, obsession with the idea of service, emotional despair, resignation and passive reconciliation with one’s own misfortune, statement of one’s social credo, the experience of loneliness and marginality, optimistic vision of the earthly paradise against the background of prison-like gloom. As a result, eschatological motives appear: the domination of evil on earth inevitably will lead to its destruction for the sake of a new life and restoration of just law and order. In mood and stylistically, Franko’s jail poetry corresponds to the prison lyrics by Taras Shevchenko. Each of the nine poems in the cycle has been considered in terms of poetics, genre, imagery, literary means, versification, as well as intertextual parallels at the level of reminiscences and allusions. The researcher paid attention to the character of the lyrical hero, the internal plot of the cycle, chronotopic organization, leitmotifs, folklore structures. The philosophical meditations of the cycle “Mourning Songs”, perceived in the context of Franko’s biography, reflect the parallelism of the lyrical hero’s existence and the author’s psychobiography of the period marked by the first two arrests.