The Poetry by Mykhailo Orest: Ideas and Figurative Structure

The paper explores the structure of Mykhailo Orest’s poetry, delving into its main elements such as concepts of time, forest, silence, and word, as well as the motives of eschatologism and reincarnation. It focuses on the ideological and aesthetic originality of Orest’s poetry, examining his views on the nature of language and the essence of art. The distinctive feature of Orest’s poetry is a metaphor of time that comprises various philosophical meanings, including the eschatological understanding of time as “the world of the night,” the era of “the departure of God,” and “the end of things” as opposed to the concept of “the eternal day.” Orest’s eschatological poetics is rooted in medieval imagery and biblical metaphors. His poetic vision of the Apocalypse combines motives and images of diverse meanings and origins. Orest’s pantheism is seen as growing from romantic aesthetics, primarily the works of German romantics. The poet’s pantheistic ideas find expressive reflection through the cult of the forest, the symbolism of trees, particularly the archetype of the world tree. They are also related to the myth of birth and death, interpreted in Orest’s poetry, and the motive of metamorphosis. Medieval mythology takes a special place in Orest’s poetic world. In particular, the poet reinterprets the myths of Grail, Parsifal, Lohengrin, and Tannhäuser. The creative thought of Mykhailo Orest was constantly in search — a romantic inclination towards the irrational to a conscious interest in the world of things and the establishment of a complex system of relationship with it.