HOMER AS A TEXT IN LINA KOSTENKO’S LYRIC POETRY: INTERPRETATION AND TRANSFORMATION

Abstract

The article analyses Lina Kostenko’s poetic works united by the topos of the “Homeric text,” understood as the figure of the ancient Greek poet and his oeuvre as an object of artistic reception. The study of Kostenko’s interpretation is driven by the need to comprehend the author’s reading of Homer and his works as a stage in developing Ukrainian classicist heritage – a tradition of borrowing and transforming the legacy of ancient Greeks and Romans within Ukrainian literature. The study aims to identify the main trends in Kostenko’s reading of the “Homeric text,” to clarify its functions in her works, and to analyse the complexmotifs expressed through its lens.Kostenko’s interpretation is characterised by using Homer’s name as a synonym for “antiquity” (e.g., in Miss Truth). The legendary details of his biography serve as a poetic lens for reflecting on time, fame, and eternity in the portrait of an artist from another era (“Toward Evening He Steps into the Street…”). In Kostenko’s poetry, Homer appears both as the author whose works shape the reader’s national identity (as in Kartashynsky Estuary and The Gypsy Muse), and as a component of historical knowledge (Scythian Odyssey).Kostenko weaves the motifs and imagery of Homer’s Odyssey into the ballad-poem Scythian Odyssey as part of the intertext used to characterise the protagonist’s worldview, personal experience, and collective memory. Using a comparative approach, the article argues that regardless of the context, the “Homeric text” in Kostenko’s work becomes an intertext within poetic visions of Ukrainian history, a tool for universalising Ukrainian experience, and a means of articulating the poet’s anthropocentric worldview. Her reception of Homeric topoi highlights the dialogic nature of her idiolect.