The monograph is a complex analysis of the 20th century dramatic human existence coded by the system of folklore concepts which reflect the significant historic epoch of WWI and WWII. The work contains a detailed review and analysis of a big collection of primary sources that embrace song and prose texts in various genres of Ukrainian folk art and their regional variants. The bulk of these texts were recorded in the field environment during the two world wars and within the first post-war years, while the second part consists of contemporary records made by the author mainly in the course of more than ten folklore and ethnographic expeditions throughout Western and Central Ukraine. Some of the studied materials originate from a number of Ukrainian and Polish state archives, from printed academic collections, rare regional folklore publications and wartime periodicals. Memoires, field diaries, record transcripts of oral autobiographical narratives also make a significant element of the studied materials.
For the first time the Ukrainian folklore studies are offered a method of researching historical folklore via concepts which verbalize experiences, practices and folk perceptions of the two world wars and their consequences – Ukrainian national liberation struggles of the first three decades of the 20th century, the Great Terror and the Holodomor (Famine-Genocide) of 1932–1933, Famine of 1946–1947, post-war deportations and the 1940–1950 Resistance movement. Based on the synthesis of works by scholars in the areas of folklore studies, ethno linguistics, oral history and semiotics, the author has developed and substantiated theoretical and methodological principles of the notion “folklore concept” which is the instrument for decoding multi-layer senses of folklore language and understanding oral folk text as one of the forms of conceptualizing history and existence. The developed original method of extracting a concept from the structure of motivema-motif index enables a researcher to outline the field of common knowledge about man as a subject of history and creator of culture. The selected methodological approach made it possible to distinguish four significant interrelated groups of concepts: 1) universal (war, prayer, death); 2) personage (enemy, mother); 3) emotive (sorrow, sadness, joy, fear); 4) spatial (home, captivity, grave, Ukraine). The four thematic chapters present a detailed insight into these 12 concepts and their peculiar characteristics. The author has structurally analyzed the texts actively functioning in the contemporary oral tradition and existing in the form of lyric and epic songs, family narratives, legends, memorate stories about the biggest wars.
