The Code of the Incantation in Kateryna Kalytko’s Collection People With Verbs

Over the last decade, a significant vector of Ukrainian literature was the reception of the traumatic stress caused by the Russian-Ukrainian war. The works of Kateryna Kalytko, representing intensive metamodern explorations in contemporary poetry, occupy a significant place in this trend. The article interprets the poet’s idiostyle based on the collection People with Verbs (2022). This study focuses on the analysis of folklore archetypes in the author’s poetry, motifs, and verbal structures, whose origins are rooted in ancient Ukrainian incantational traditions. It also covers the interpretation of the poet’s meditative experience with the magic of language, its role in strengthening the spiritual axiology of a person suffering from terrorist aggression, and the establishment of a stoical worldview despite the fragility of life. This article aims to establish the concept of ‘incantation’ as a unifying system within the metaphorical world of the poetry collection People with Verbs. The term ‘incantation’ is interpreted as the functioning of verbal constructions aimed at healing from trauma, and the composition of incantatory metaphorical texts, inspired by the belief in the magical power of words. The paper applies such methods as comparative, structural, semiotic, anthropological, and hermeneutical analysis, as well as elements of the psychological school of literary studies. The study proves the actualization of the sacred worldview pre-system in the artistic thinking of contemporary Ukrainian poets, as illustrated by Kateryna Kalytko’s collection People with Verbs. It focuses on the author’s reflections and meditations during the war, appeals to suggestive speech preserved by genetic memory, and the use of its structures as a form of defence and resistance. The binary time-spatial model of the poet is marked by the cult of night, which corresponds to the ritual and spiritual practice in the field of the mystical. Kateryna Kalytko intensively operates with pagan archetypes and signs, and resorts to the use of proper names, emphasizing that even their pronunciation has a protective energy. The figurative system of corporeality, which is in line with the tradition of incantations, is indicative of the poetics of the collection. It concerns the specific markings (eyes, head, lips, muscles, lungs, heart, spine, knees, joints, throat, intestines, entrails, veins, etc.) that are part of the metaphorical structures of the incantatory nature. There are parallels with the healing modus of folk spells, firstly, the poetess tries to stop the bloodshed and protect the defenders with her words. In the spirit of the ethnocultural tradition, Kateryna Kalytko endows certain lexical signs with the function of verbal amulets (earth, roots, river, boat, stones, wood, forest, house, fire, wind, bird, feather, beast, iron, ash, crystal, etc.) At the same time, the poet’s metaphor is an objectification of the extrasensory perception of the act of speaking. The focus of Kateryna Kalytko’s artistic studio is the articulatory apparatus, the miracle of the birth of sound and voice, as evidenced by a number of tropes, whose centre is the word “throat”. The poet also tries to comprehend the changes in phonetics, vocabulary, morphology, and stylistics caused by the war. Kateryna Kalytko’s poetic search is correlated with the philosophical interpretation of the phenomenon of language by M. Heidegger, H.-G. Gadamer, and K. Jasperas. For the author, in accordance with the realities of war, the well-known statement “language is home” is transformed into the metaphor “language is a shelter”. Thus, in Kateryna Kalytko’s idiostyle, one can guess the pathos of whisperers, fortune tellers, healers, and molfars who resist evil with words. At the same time, the image of the author-medium is complemented by the hypostases of a witness of the Russian-Ukrainian war and a philologist.