The research is an attempt to explore his literary work integrally using the category of mythopoeia or the author’s myth. The roots of the mythic thinking are found in O. Lysheha’s biography: marginalized by the Soviet Union he (as some other writers of the times) creates his own center a kind of a possible world for which a longing for the primordial times, mythical Golden Age is important and defining.
This longing for primordial determines author’s interest in shamanism that becomes an important part of the mythopoeia. The shamanic undercurrents are seen as an ecstatic journey to the Sky (poems «Swan», «Mountain») or even Hell (poems «Raven», «Marten», partially «Doll» and «Fox»), ability of the lyric subject to see the souls or his own bones («Swan», short story «Lausanne»), a kind of specific illness (poems «Pohonya», «Doll») and also a constant usage of the images of birds showing the way and trees each of which seem to be at once concrete and symbolical.
The research depicts the variety of the mythemes and toposes. Some of the mythemes are as follows: mytheme of origins and world’s creation, of the fall, of metamorphoses and ecstatic journeying. The toposes of Lysheha’s poetry and prose are often showed as binary oppositions, for example «town», «metro»/«wood». The topos of the wood is related to the biblical idea of wilderness and has different meanings depending from the context.
Some aspects of the author’s myth had been analyzed too. The longing for the primordial times had been interpreted as a search for the Self archetype, in which Ego loses its separateness. Traveling and moving somewhere as one of the most wide-spread states of the lyric subject or the narrator of the prose is seen as a symbolical marker of the difficult process of individuation. Special attention had been paid to «the matriarchal consciousness» (E. Neumann) of the lyric subject of O. Lysheha’s poetry and to the Great Mother’s archetype in his writings.
The other important aspect is a Dialogue, which can be treated as a principle of the author’s worldview and one of the basic features of his poetic. Some of the poems from the poetic cycle «To Snow and Fire» were classified as «a monologue of the Other». In such poetic monologues O. Lysheha gives voice and an ability to express themselves to creatures which are usually silent in the anthropocentric world (poem «Horse», partially «Boar» and «Fox»). A lot of long epic poems can be treated as a stream of consciousness («Swan», «Doll», «Raven», «Marten» etc.). Poems, written as a classical dialogue, usually show the collision of two worldviews, ancient and modern, and while according to the first the space is treated as a sacred the second makes everything seem profane and looked at from the point of view of a user and consumerist («Mulberry»). The author’s poetic avoids traditional alliterations and meters but uses dialogue as a kind of instrumentation. The intonation as a global rise of some final questions of the poems, rhythm, as in E. Pound determined by the musical phrase not the metronome, approve O. Lysheha’s literary skill.
The reception of I. Franko and the Anglo-American poetry in O. Lysheha’s literary work is treated as a projection of the author’s own myth. I. Franko is shown as a shaman or someone who has unordinary abilities to see the unseen.
O. Lysheha’s translations demonstrate his profound understanding of the nature of the original texts. Translating «Сanto 45» by E. Pound he stresses the Chinese idea of productiveness in E. Pound’s poem while I. Kostetskyi puts an emphasis on the idea of capitalistic exploitation. As a translator of S. Plath O. Lysheha was interested in poems connected with some wild mystical toposes. If O. Zabuzhko’s choice and translation is rather feminocentric the Lysheha’s seems to be concerned with nature and mystery. Accurately recreating the meanings of the original text, he makes the author’s personification of the blackberries even more vivid and expressed. The topos described by S. Plath in the poem seems to be not only natural and lonely but also somehow primordial in O. Lysheha’s translation.
To conclude, the research work shows the special structures and toposes of the myth of the primordial times of O. Lysheha, its’ psychoanalytic and dialogical aspects. The reception of other writers is analyzed as a kind of projection of O. Lysheha’s own mythopoeia. The author’s myth is reach, based on the national tradition and at the same time it has the global value and meaning.
