The Score of the Lyrical Narrative: Musical Poetics in the Poems of the Almanac “Musaget”

This article explores the musical poetics embedded in the works of the Ukrainian Symbolist poets affiliated with the Kyiv literary and artistic group “Musaget” (1919), considering these through the framework of aesthetic transformations characteristic of the modernist era. The study aims to identify and interpret the mechanisms through which musical elements – such as rhythm, interval, harmony, pause, tempo, and dynamics – are integrated into lyrical narratives, functioning as suggestive codes of meaning. The sound poetics are examined in relation to the semantic structures within the texts of Pavlo Tychyna, Dmytro Zahul, Volodymyr Yaroshenko, Mykhailo Zhuk, Klym Polishchuk, Mykola Tereshchenko, Pavlo Fylypovych, and Volodymyr Kobyliansky. The analysis traces how musical intervals, rhythmic contrasts, syntactic fragmentation, alliteration, sound imagery, and parcellation serve to represent new ontological states – ruptures, losses, and transcendental quests. Central to this analysis is the improvisatory structure of the poem, conceived as an analogue to symphonic thinking, with the score-based organization of content and polyphonic imagery allowing the lyrical text to function as an acoustic space for existential experience. Drawing from poems in the “Musaget” almanac, the study demonstrates how lyrical musicality serves as a means of shaping the worldview and semantic field of the era. In doing so, the paper highlights the manner in which musical narratives offer deeper insights into the polyphonic nature of Ukrainian modernism. It concludes that in the modernist poetry of “Musaget”, music functions not merely as a thematic element or object of representation but as a structural paradigm of meaning-making – one that transcends linguistic systems to inhabit an intermedial space of symbolic existence. Ultimately, the Musaget approach represents an intermedial model of poetic expression, in which the lyrical “I” is not a singular center of consciousness, but rather a multiplicity of acoustic positions.