SPIRITUAL AND CULTURAL DISCOURSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE LITERARY RECEPTION OF SERHII ZHADAN (BASED ON THE POETRY COLLECTION “THE TEMPLARS”)

The paper examines the poetic reception of the Middle Ages, which became a metaphor for Ukraine’s disturbing present in S. Zhadan’s collection “The Templars” (2016), containing “39 poems about the war that no one declared.” An immanent and contextual analysis of the collection shows that the Middle Ages—understood as the period after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire—serve the poet as an image of troubled times brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

The spiritual and cu...