Художній дискурс поезії Олени Пчілки: до питання жанрової та образно-стильової еволюції

The paper outlines the difficult path of returning the versatile creative heritage of Olena Pchilka and particularly her work as the first Ukrainian female professional poet to the history of Ukrainian national culture. The research addresses such issues as genre and stylistic originality, tradition, innovation, and the evolution of Pchilka’s poetry, which have remained overlooked by researchers. Based on analytical, synthetic, selective, and systematic methods, as well as elements of biographical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical approaches, the paper explores Pchilka’s work. Additionally, it incorporates the concepts of «philosophy of the heart» and «philosophy of life» as far as they are related to poetry. The analysis confirmed that the dominant genres in Olena Pchilka’s poetry are those of the expressive group, that is reflection, letter, elegy, song lyrics, romance, psalm, appeal, etc. This refutes the opinion, commonly held in the history of Ukrainian literature, that Olena Pchilka’s poetry is dominated by epic lyrical genres rooted in a descriptive narrative. The unique figurative and stylistic picture of Olena Pchilka’s poetry is created by the in-depth psychologism of revealing the inner spiritual world of the lyrical character as well as philosophical, elegiac, and song-related features of the poems and the author’s strong versification skills. The mentioned characteristics dismiss criticisms that accuse Pchilka’s poetry of lacking artistry. The results of the analysis of Olena Pchilka’s «word in a poem», as viewed through the tasks set, attest to the poet’s fruitful use of the pictorial and expressive possibilities across a wide range of poetic genres. They also highlight the innovative and artistically valuable figurative and stylistic originality of the author’s voice. It can be concluded that Olena Pchilka’s poetry evolved in line with the general trends in Ukrainian poetry of the 2nd half of the 19th – the 1st quarter of the 20th century – a period marked by changing ideological and aesthetic guidelines triggering evolutionary processes in literary structures. As an integral aesthetic phenomenon, Olena Pchilka’s poetry deserves a separate monographic study, encompassing her entire poetic legacy within both national and global contexts.