The Narrator (Author) and the Hero in T. Shevchenko’s Poem The Funeral Feast •

Abstract

The study deals with the images of the narrator / author and the prophet – the lyrical character in T. Shevchenko’s poem The Funeral Feast [Tryzna]. The purpose of the study is to comprehend the author’s conception and to reveal the whole range of the ways of expressing the author’s “self ”.In this poem, the lyrical subject is variable. He functions as the author proper as well as the narrating author and the lyrical “I”, sometimes getting the features of the lyrical character. At the same time, the narrator and the character have in common the motif of prophetical service, prophetical mission.The sense structure of the image of the prophet presents in Shevchenko’s poem a synthesis of traditional and original senses. Shevchenko combines the social with the philosophic and the ethical, the universal artistic with the individual ontological. A prophet is not just an artistic image but also a modus of social existence of the writer in his ambition through his works to promote God’s laws of society and personality on the earth as a continuation of life itself.Instead of abstract philosophic speculations and complete negation, the poet creates a special modus of his view of life and attitude towards people. This modus is love; however, it is not love in a simplified, trivial and commonplace meaning but in a deeper, religious-ontological comprehensive sense.The Funeral Feast appears to have the main elements of the motif-symbolic complex of romantic literature: the estrangement of the hero longing for heavenly harmony, prayerful yearning for the heaven he keeps memories of, selectness, loneliness, and orphanhood in earthly captivity, the motifs of the lost heaven, of death as rest and death as meeting. The hero is represented as a creative personality that finds itself in a tragic contradiction with the world.One of the significant semantic oppositions is that of the word and silence. In Shevchenko’s poem, this problem is considered in terms of a transition from silent act to action word. The work on The Funeral Feast actually reveals the insolvability of the contradiction between the prophet’s two guises (“the meek prophet” – “the severe prophet”), thus forming a complex dualistic image.In Shevchenko’s creative development, The Funeral Feast was an important step in comprehending the theme of the poet and his prophetic vocation, it marks a significant stage of the author’s spiritual and creative establishment. The poet in his higher mission is understood in the poem as a personality of a national and supernational, seraphic scale, which determines his role and place in society and in the world. The lyrical-epic nature of the genre made it possible to refer the self-expression of the author’s lyrical “I” to the objectification and personification of the lyrical character. The lyrical subject includes various forms of expressing the author’s consciousness, while the hero conceptualizes the perfect model of a creative personality in his / her prophetic essence.