Koval H. Poetic universum of the calendar and ritual folklore of Ukrainians

The monograph provides a comprehensive research of the «poetic universum» of calendar and ritual songs which are an organic part of the Ukrainian ethnic culture. It concentrates on folk tradition and its artistic perception. The monograph considers memory, which is a source of imagination, formed by recollections and fixed in space, gesture and image. Syncretic picture is outlined by the traditional senses – verbal language, mimics, choreography and music. The emphasis is put on the aestheticism of traditions, rituals (visualization of ritual ceremonials), social and regulating role of singing. This work represents temporal picture of calendar and ritual poetry and space that becomes a certain matrix for the functioning of images, symbols and certain rules of world model creation. The monograph reveals synthesizing function of architectonic by means of folk song analysis as a universal artistic whole. The works became highly artistic and emotional due to poetic expressive means (epithet, simile, hyperbole, metaphor, symbols). Stylistic and compositional marking is revealed through expressiveness, formulaicity, poetic parallelism, repetitions and refrains. The monograph offers scientific and theoretic interpretation of calendar and ritual folklore, which due to its amount and high artistic value should become the basis for the Ukrainian culture, particularly, in the era of digital technology. The research in question is one of the first in Ukrainian folklore studies, which provides a comprehensive coverage of the annual calendar «poetic universum». It includes valuable information about tradition with its stable and variable components, different space and time manifestations preserved in folk memory. These and many other artistic means were thoroughly analyzed owing to the preserved unique folklore and ethnographic collection of the Ukrainian nation. General overview of the printed, archive and field sources has shown that calendar and ritual folk songs have been present in different regions of Ukraine from ancient times till present.