SOURCES OF OUR HEROISM (spiritual and military resilience in Ukrainian folk dumas and modernity)

Abstract

The source of heroism of the Ukrainian people is considered in the article based on the material of the Ukrainian folk’s dumas. Attention is focused on the spiritual and military stability of the epic heroes of dumas, which are expressions of the national worldview, based on the perception of the land as sacred, which was handed down by ancestors and bequeathed to descendants to preserve it, on loyalty to Ukraine, the Cossack noble society, as an archetypal collective Great Family, on the desire of the military stratum for freedom and the habitual rejection of any violence and superiority over oneself. It is emphasized that this is what explains the exceptional attention and respect of the human personality and patriotism among Ukrainians, the need to preserve repeated established positive cycles of the Ukrainian’s spiritual and everyday life in order to ensure the durability, continuity and continuity of the nation’s ethnic consciousness. Therefore, the heroes of dumas are models of spiritual and military stability, who brought up and passed on the idea of resistance and struggle, hardened the national spirit of millions of Ukrainians, including the warriors-knights in the Russian-Ukrainian war of 2022. On this basis, we will reveal the meaning of the idea of the Family (Reed), which was transformed in the Ukrainian duma the concepts of «nation», «state». Therefore, the warrior (сossack, knight) in the duma epic is not only the one who defends his native land from the conquering enemy in battle with a saber or a pistol. A warrior is one who opposes any untruth, evil, violence, which is perpetrated by his nation, destroys it as a Great Spiritual and Ideological Race. Inheritance from ancestors, which was formed into a perfect national character, determined that supporting cosmological spiritual heart, which is embedded in Ukrainian knights to this day.