“When love stubbornly insists on being in a poem”: Pavlo Movchan the love-erotic

Abstract

The relevance of the article is due to the focus on new aspects of the work of the classic of Ukrainian literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Pavlo Movchan (born in 1939) — the love and erotic motifs, which significantly complement the understanding of his poetic world. The subject of the research was determined by the specifics of P. Movchan’s intimate lyrics and their role in the poet’s work and in Ukrainian literature. The research problems of the article are focused on the inseparable connection of love and erotic motives with the complex of dominant motives of the poet’s work, on their significant role in the artist’s work, on the glorification of love as the apotheosis of an existence, and the loss of love is perceived as the loss of the meaning of life. To solve the research problems, biographical, psychoanalytic, comparative, hermeneutic and formal (philological) research methods were used.

Research results. The poet glorifies love as the pinnacle of the lyrical subject’s existence. Memories about love and the idealized image of his beloved pass through all his work. Various obstacles arise on the way of love, which prompts us to perceive it as sweet torment, and this makes P. Movchan related to many poets of the past and present. With the passage of time, the feelings do not fade away, they crystallize more and more. The lyrical subject comes to the realization of the irreparability of the loss, the perception of the beloved as being of greatest value, which he can no longer be brought back in his life, but can still be enjoyed through memories, dreams, visions, etc.

Love for the lyrical subject is an inseparable spiritual and bodily unity, so eroticism, sexuality, sexual intercourse are integral components of his love lyrics. The poet conveys this in such a metaphorical, veiled form that it was not understood or recited by the censors of the Soviet era, who aimed to combat any manifestation of eroticism, which was then called “pornography”. The sanctity of spiritual and bodily unity for the poet is manifested in the fact that his loved ones most often receive the name Mary, being associated from time to time with the image of the Mother of God. Love and erotic inspiration in the poet’s poems are given to symbolic images of a serpent, apples, strawberries, cobwebs, etc. Love in the poetic world of P. Movchan is a brief moment in the immense stream of thousands of years of the history of inanimate and living matter and energy, but it is the most precious, the most valuable moment that gives meaning to human existence.