The work is devoted to the cosmological conceptual system, verbalized in Ukrainian and Belgian symbolist poetry. The poetic vocabulary of both investigated traditions reflects basic ideas and images of mythical cosmogony, structure of space and time, anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and other personifications of the universe and its parts, especially higher (astral, divine), medial (terrestrial, human) and lower (underground, water, demonic) levels of cosmos. This structure reflects an archaic mythical three-level division of space that is a universal (archetypical) cosmological concept.
The symbol, differently verbalized in the texts of symbolist poetry, is interpreted as a mythological sign, reflecting the pre-rational worldview where associations of images strongly prevailed over the logical links between ideas. The poetic thought revives this way of thinking creating new texts of neo-mythology. Words and word combinations as well as verbalizing symbols represent key concepts of magic and mythical image of the universe.
The symbolic language of poetry transformed the language of myth according to the individual stylistic manner of each author, national poetic tradition as well as the individual interpretation of universal and ethno-national conceptual archetypes etc. Verbalized concepts consist of individual, national and universal components.
The main result of this research is the identification of basic mytho-conceptual systems that were substrata for the poetic cosmology in every national symbolic tradition. Ancient Ukrainian pre-Christian ‘paganism’ of the Kyivan Rus’ was the basis for the Ukrainian symbolist cosmological concepts whereas Ancient Greek and Roman mythology was a substratum for the Belgian symbolist cosmological concepts. Therefore, the conceptual system of mytho-poeic cosmology was inherited from the folklore in Ukrainian symbolist poetry but was taken from literary sources in Belgian symbolist poetry. There were concepts, representing ‘national archetypes’ (according to N. V.Slukhai’s theory) for the Ukrainian authors that were not relevant for the Belgian symbolists. The research has shown that the poetic myth, reflected in the worldview of symbolist poetry (especially in its basic, cosmological conceptual system), is a literary reconstitution of pre-Christian mythology, for the Ukrainian poets, and a literary interpretation of the Greco-Roman mythical world, for Belgian poets.
The texts of Ukrainian Modernism (and especially those of Symbolists) are generating different ways of verbalization of national ideals and national revolutionary ideas. They are oriented in the pagan Past (interpreted in a specific way by each author) and in the Future where the Nation should be created to perform the national ideals and the European values. The key concepts of national Ukrainian symbolist poetry are generating not only elements of pagan worldview but also Christian imagery (especially the cosmologic and apocalyptic concepts of Creation and End of Times), several concepts of Ancient Greek mythology, as well as some symbolic concepts of the historical past and some contemporary (for the time of creation of symbolist texts) patterns of revolutionary texts. We find in these tendencies of Ukrainian symbolist texts the dialectics of universal and idеo-ethnic.
The pre-Christian structures of conceptual worldview were not so relevant for the Belgian symbolist literary creation as they were for Ukrainian symbolists in the actualization of pre-historical pagan mythology. For the Belgian Symbolists this role were performed by the new artistic interpretation of the key concepts of Ancient Greek and Roman worldview as an ideological basis for the contemporary European civilization. In the Belgian symbolist texts we find the cosmologically marked scheme of the passage from the negatively marked conceptual sphere DOWN WORLD to the positively marked or neutrally connoted conceptual sphere UPPER WORLD that is the realization of the Animist conceptualization SKY = GOOD LUCK.
Basic conceptual oppositions (LIGHT–DARKNESS, TOP–BOTTOM, PAST–FUTURE, LIFE–DEATH) and conceptual formulas of the text (the sequence of first concepts, verbalized in the text) are used for the interpretation of the poetic texts of Ukrainian and Belgian symbolists. These approaches has demonstrated peculiarities not only of the archaic mythical worldview (where cosmogonic basic elements were nuclear) but also those of the more developed Christianized worldview (where concepts of moral life, like GOOD–DEMON, GOOD–EVIL, are verbalized a lot)
