PERSONALISATION OF LOSSES AS AN ELEMENT OF FORMING THE NARRATIVE OF TESTIMONY AND MEMORY IN MAKSYM KRYVTSOV’S POETRY COLLECTION ‘VIRSHI Z BIINYTSI’

Abstract

The article examines the peculiarities of representing military experience in contemporary Ukrainian poetry and the formation of a narrative of testimony and memory. It analyses Maksym Kryvtsov’s poetry collection ‘Virshi z biinytsi,’ which interprets war not as statistics or a chronology of events, but as a collection of individual life stories. Particular attention is paid to the mechanisms of personalising losses by detailing personal information about each person who went through the crucible of war: their peaceful lives, biographical details, character traits, and the pre-war activities, which contrast with the tragic ending. The emphasis is on the lyrical hero, who, in poetry, acts as both a witness to events and a participant in them, while also recording them. This type of speech determines the special nature of the poetic word, which balances on the border between artistic convention and documentary style, a certain reportage, acquiring the characteristics of testimony. It has been established that fragmentary composition and the enumeration of names enhance the memorial dimension of the texts themselves, while biblical allusions, motifs, images, and symbols, and intertextual parallels in the analysed works expand the cultural and mythological context. Individual experience in poetry acquires a generalised meaning through the combination of personal and sacred dimensions. Accordingly, poetry emerges not only as a form of artistic reflection but also as an instrument for shaping national memory, so that the personalised story of each victim becomes part of a common narrative. Maksym Kryvtsov’s artistic text performs not only an aesthetic, but also an ethical, memorial function: naming names becomes a form of resistance to the depersonalisation and oblivion that inevitably accompany war, and poetry becomes an act of historical testimony and a way of preserving humanity in wartime, of ethical responsibility to the deceased. It has been proven that the author’s poetic strategy structures the narrative of testimony and memory, recording specific experiences, physical injuries, and details of the devastation caused by the war, transforming the text into artistic documentation. In this way, poetry appears not only as a way of understanding trauma but also as a mechanism for its cultural processing and transmission to subsequent generations.