Linguo-cultural Nature of the Concept “Native Land” in the Early Poetry of V. Stus

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the linguo-mental nature of the concept “native land” in the early poetic work of the well-known Ukrainian writer of the sixties V. Stus. The topicality of the theme, on the one hand, is determined by the linguo-conceptual and linguo- cultural approaches that are the key to understanding the cultural values of the people and make it possible to stratify the linguistic and cultural nature of individual concepts at different stages of language development and to establish the specifics of the linguistic personality, and, on the other, the research interest in the poetic heritage of V. Stus, an artist who became personification of his time. The collection “Winter Trees” was the material of the study, which presents an early, but important period of creativity of the poet, that remains little studied. The purpose of the article was to determine the linguo-cultural nature of the concept “native land”. The analysis showed the cognitive diversity of the concept, which is manifested by the branched system of verbalizers, including land, earth, Ukraine, state, etc., and its semantic-axiological characteristics. It is established that the artistic concept “native land” in Stus’s poetic texts is polysemantic and ambivalent, and its verbalisation demonstrated not only the general and ethnocultural understanding of the corresponding conceptualized image, but also the peculiarities of the author’s worldview. The presented research is actual as it activates scientific interest in other linguo-mental notions and not only in the work of V. Stus, which makes it possible to get deeper into the phenomenon of the Ukrainian linguistic personality.