Authors

Discussion

The central figure is the narrator in the Vasyl Stus’s poems, who is, in fact, the alter ego of the poet or at least a person valuable and worldview related to the poet. The narrator is an evolutionary person. His consciousness and thought culture evolve: from the exuberance of vitality and interest in social author-implementation first to a restrained and distrustful reception of the surrounding social trends, and then to a skeptical, grotesque and acutely critical perception of his surroundings  systems (collection "Palimpsests"). In the process of growing up, the narrator becomes more and more thoroughly a social person.

Vasyl Stus's narrator carefully, even meticulously observes and examines the system around him.The narrator slowly begins to experience not only cognitive dissonance, but also a real cognitive gap. This is due to the fact that the narrator, living on his "native land, bordered by anxieties", gradually begins to understand his own mental incompatibility with the surrounding system.

Reflecting on his fate, the narrator uses the figurative neologism “unprotected”. He feels own actual absence in the surrounding life, which he emphasizes with ironic-skeptic lines "does the world pass me / did I pass it". Looking into his inner state with this cognitive gap, the narrator resorts to the metaphors of "slice of pain", "congeries of pain", "candle of pain". In general, constructions with the form "pain", both used in the metaphorical and autological meaning of this word, are characteristic of the poetics of Vasyl Stus, which can be traced with frequency in the collection "Palimpsests".

Reflecting on the specifics of his life, he uses such tropes as "self-extinguishing" and "self-exile", and he defines his own life as "suffering" and "non-existence". Reviewing his fate, the narrator expresses a inference that sounds like a doom: "life failed". Moreover, he reaches this conclusion, according to his age self-identification, at "thirty years old."

The narrator's consciousness often operates with a semantically monodirectional vocabulary - the noun "death" and the neologism "self-death", the adjective "dead", the comparison "like a dead  kinsman", the same-root verbs "died", "dying", "you will die", "dying". The semantics of such vocabulary is deepened by the use of words and expressions such as "deceased", "coffin", "catafalque", "living dead". The narrator also resorts to the antithetical phrase "a banquet of death in the image of life". In this verbal way, Vasyl Stus's narrator characterizes both his non-place in the surrounding system and the essence, according to his concept, of the surrounding system itself.

The narrator rather purposefully, that he is a radically