“I love to love everything…” Hryhorii Falkovych’s poetry for children

Abstract

Hryhorii Falkovych is one of the most famous and unique children’s poets of our time. His work successfully combines Ukrainian and Jewish cultures, touches on important moral issues, presents them in an interesting and accessible form for children, and demonstrates a number of idiosyncratic features. Despite the wide popularity of the author and the high artistic value of his lyrics, it remains little researched. A comprehensive study of the poet’s work is of great importance for literary science, since Falkovych’s poems vividly represent children’s literature of the 21st century, and without understanding this artistic work, it is impossible to form a complete picture of modern poetry for the youngest readers. The article is aimed at researching the themes and poetics of the writer’s lyrical works. The scientific novelty is that for the first time the key images and artistic means of Falkovich’s lyrics are analyzed in detail. The work on the material of specific poems shows how the author skillfully uses a subtle sense of children’s psychology. The lines of the considered poems prove that the author not only entertains his audience, but also unobtrusively educates them, and in his approach aesthetics always prevail over ethics. Falkovych’s poetry focuses on important moral and philosophical issues: finding oneself and choosing a life goal, generosity and friendliness, kindness and selflessness, family relationships, attitudes toward animals, the culture of one’s own people, and universal human values. The pedagogy of the artist’s lyrics for children lacks direct didactics and is full of humor and good-natured irony. The reader’s attention is also drawn to the author’s occasionalisms, play with words and sounds, interesting images and unexpected situations that arise on the contrast between a child’s and an adult’s perception of the world. Great importance is attached to children’s fantasy, which is laid in the basis of the trope of amazement, which is most often used by the writer and with the help of which he imitates the view of the world through children’s eyes. The study concludes that the peculiarity of Falkovych’s lyrics for children lies primarily in the fact that the author does not resort to superior mentoring and prefers play at all levels of the text, including phonetic, word-forming, lexical, figurative and plot.