Two Variations on the Topic of St. Yur’s Cathedral in Lviv (O. Novakivskyi – I. Kalynets – M. Sosenko)

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyse Ihor Kalynets’s reception of paintings by Lviv artists Oleksa Novakivskyi ‘Yur. The Poem of the World War’ and Modest Sosenko’s ‘St. Yur’s (George’s) Church in Lviv’. The paintings of both artists and their perception by Ihor Kalynets (poems «‘Yur’ by O. Novakivskyi» and «’Yur’ by M. Sosenko») have a lot in common. The painters’ gaze is directed from the bottom up, into the distance, into the future, which is due to the location of the buildings and the angle of observation. However, summarising the observations on Ihor Kalynets’s variations on the topic of the most famous church in Lviv, we should note the prevalence of the distinctive over the common. Oleksa Novakivskyi’s painting provoked the poet’s reflections, which are dominated by the motifs of purity, aspiration and steadfastness, struggle and victory, while Modest Sosenko’s painting evoked a sense of sadness, melancholy and autumnal transparency. The canvas of Lviv artists depict the same object from the same angle, but in different moods. Considering the multivariate artistic perception of the artists, in his works Ihor Kalynets conveys the ‘impression of impressions’ that the artists had while contemplating the majestic building, so these poems contain the features of impressionism. On the other hand, in his ekphrase poems, the poet accumulates the ideological and artistic achievements of three types of art at once: painting (in particular, iconography), literature and architecture. The interaction of these art forms can be summarized on the basis of receptive ‘heredity’, so to speak, the passing of a receptive ‘baton’: the icon of St. Yuriy (George) the Serpent and the architectural masterpiece St. Yur’s Cathedral in Lviv → reception of the cathedral by Oleksa Novakivskyi and Modest Sosenko → the paintings by Oleksa Novakivskyi and Modest Sosenko → reception of those paintings by Ihor Kalynets → the poems «‘Yur’ by O. Novakivskyi» and «’Yur’ by M. Sosenko» → the reader’s reception of the poems. If we take into account that the first mentioning of the cathedral dates back to the thirteenth century (though since then the church has been destroyed and rebuilt), and the reception of the analysed poems continues in the twenty-first century, we have a receptive history of eight centuries.