THE SPIRITUAL STOICISM OF STEPAN BUDNY (TO THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE AUTHOR’S BIRTHDAY)

Abstract

The article analyzes the creative output of Stepan Budny through the prism of the genre-stylistic originality of his works and their significance in the literary process of the Ternopil region in the middle of the 20th century. In particular, the main features of the writer's poetic creativity were traced, which made it possible to outline the humanistic content of his works, and this at the same time makes it possible to talk about him as a forerunner of the sixties, since youthful maximalism, spiritual stoicism, intelligent voluntarism, and life-affirming vitaism are present in his artistic texts, bringing him closer to the sixties poets Lina Kostenko, V. Symonenko, V. Stus, M. Vingranovsky, D. Pavlychkо etc. It was found that the poetry of Stepan Budny was written in neo-romantic poetics: vulnerable heart, proud nature, dreamy soul, high morality – the main virtues of the lyrical hero of the poetry collections ‘Man Goes to the Sun’, ‘Poetry’, ‘Son of the Earth’. It is proved: the author of the collection ‘A Man Goes to the Sun’, poeticizing the intellectual, spiritual and physical beauty of a person, chose the sun as a central philosophical image – multi-meaningful and symbolic. In the poetic texts of the artist, the simple, everyday world of the Podil village appears, at the same time complex historically and spiritually: the unique writing style of Stepan Budny is grounded in neo-romantic images, motifs, the ‘chivalric model’ of the lyrical hero. As a ‘young descendant of Prometheus’, the author revived the desire for freedom in various forms: national, social, and personal, in his youthful urges to the ideal, beauty, and will. Speaking on his own behalf, he continued the literary traditions of H. Skovoroda, T. Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, P. Tychyna, V. Simonenko, and others (love of man and life, sense of national dignity, vitaistic optimism, philosophical generalizations, solar motifs, atheism and cordocentrism).