UNIVERSAL MYTHOLOGICAL, WORLDVIEW AND AESTHETIC CODES IN WAR POETRY: THE SITUATION OF THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR

War is a socio-cultural phenomenon and it has pronounced ambivalent properties. War promotes national consolidation and creativity based on a national worldview. Poetry asserts national unity and helps create a new-shared worldview here. The article analyzes the myth as a fundamental way of human existence in culture. During global existential challenges such as war, mythmaking becomes visible and increases its ideological influence. Poetry creates a powerful existential narrative, it resonates strongly with readers and models a picture of the world relevant to war. It combines logical, pragmatic and rational views on the war situation with the mythological structuring of the world. Poets use familiar mythological and religious systems: Christian, Slavic and Ancient. There are also basic mythological and aesthetic elements in poetry: mythological space and mythological time, chthonic and cosmological mythology, images of the world tree, mythological hero, snake/dragon, and death. The Ukrainian warrior-defender and the events of the Russian-Ukrainian war are mythologized. In poetry and culture, they are the opposition between good and evil, truth and falsehood, cosmos and chaos. In poetic plots, the boundary between mythological-religious, divine and everyday, modern is partially blurred. Mythological plots and religious images fit into the events of the war, the experiences of the hero of the poem, the author and the readers. The methodological basis of the research is the ideas of Mircea Eliade, in particular the concept of «hierophany», and Joseph Campbell’s theory about the monomyth and the path of the mythological hero.