JURIJ TARNAVS¿KYJ: UNA FIGURA DELL¿EMIGRAZIONE UCRAINA NEGLI STATI UNITI. ANALISI DELLA PRODUZIONE POETICA DAL 1956 AL 1970.

The purpose of this study is to examine the poetical output of the Ukrainian émigré poet and co-founder of the Ukrainian émigrè literary group known as the “New York Group” - Jurij Tarnavs‘kyj. In particular, I focus on Tarnavs’kyj’s poetic evolution from modernism to post-modernism during the two decades embracing the New York Group’s historical adventure (1956-1970), while taking into account the transition from the existentialist overtones of his poetic debut, Žyttja v misti (1956), to the grotesque and anti-humanistic atmospheres of Poeziji pro niščo (1970). In this respect, I concentrate on the spectrum ‘concreteness of the ego scriptor versus abstraction’ and ‘confidence in human freedom versus acknowledgment of necessity as the main ethical category in human life’ as a measure of such a transition. Zyttja v misti and Poeziji pro nischo are, respectively, the starting and the ending point of this process, whereas the other collections are analyzed as its intermediate stages, each of them having its own semantic and stylistic peculiarities. In Chapter I outline Tarnavs’kyj’s intellectual biography, paying special attention to those cultural interests (mainly existentialism and visual arts) that are relevant for my further discussion of his oeuvre. The chapter contains unpublished materials from the New York Group Papers at Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. In Chapter II I outline the New York Group’s emergence and formation, which I tried to disentangle by means of his members’ unpublished letters and editing activities. In particular, I tried to demonstrate through archival documents how heterogeneous the group’s theoretical positions were, as they oscillated between B. Rubčak’s more self-conscious attitude towards literary and critical issues and Tarnavskyj’s refusal of any collective manifestos. In Chapter III I analyze Tarnavs’kyj’s poetic debut Zhyttja v misti (1956) and the unpublished poems that were composed during the same period (1953-1955). In particular, I single out some textual and conceptual analogies between Tarnavs’kyj’s work and Sartre’s (viz. The Nausea, Existentialism is a Humanism and Being and Nothingness), organizing my discussion around three main areas: subject/object relations (Sartre's être pour soi/en soi), subject/other subjects relations (Sartre's être pour autrui) and the dialectics between possibility (human freedom) and contingency. I hereby suggest that the most renown poem in the collection, Dumky pro moju smert, represents a watershed within Tarnavs’kyj’s ouevre, conflating typically existentialistic motifs and post-existentialistic ones (or rather, anti-existentialistic), with the latter helping the poet’s work proceeding towards new forms of expression. In Chapter IV my analysis is devoted to Idealizovana biohrafija (1964), Spomyny (1964) and Bez Espaniji (1967) which I consider as different stages in the process of abstraction and dispersion in the outside world of the lyrical subject. Here I also discuss the structure of space as mirroring the decentering of the subject. In particular, the collection Bez Espaniji marks the emergence of a new symbolic geography. The Tarnawskian attempt to reshape his own cosmology results in what I define a cubist ‘de-hierarchization’ of all the basic spatial relations as they are represented in the poem (high/low; near/far; laterality/proximity), while laying groundwork for a de facto ontological equivalence between the individual and the external objects. In Chapter V I focus on Ankety (1969) suggesting that the construction of the space/object relationship and its ontological treatment reveals an orientation towards refusing the Sartrean postulate about man’s being “condemned to be free”. In particular, I try to demonstrate how Tarnavs’kyj creates a peculiar kind of object conflating qualities in acto and in potentia, i.e. an object which exists independently from empirical reality. I also point to some similarities - as well as to some dissimilarities - between the poet’s method of representing everyday reality by objectifying it and such ‘phenomenological’ strains of literature as the Nouveau Roman. In Chapter VI I consider the communion between verbal and visual arts in Poeziji pro nischo (1970) by means of the aesthetic concepts of “ekphrasis” and “iconic projection“. I suggest that Tarnavs’kyj’s representation of reality sub specie pittorica is an attempt at ossifying it in an artificial dimension in which – as it mostly happens in Ankety – the category of necessity is much more powerful than that of possibility. The influence exerted by Ankety is also noticeable in the overall orientation towards the visual – rather than tactile, or aural – qualities of the objects represented in the collection. In positing a verbal-visual communion between Tarnawvskyj’s poetry and the techniques of an ideal avant-garde koiné, In Chapter VII I argue that a peculiar ‘poetics of negation’ informs such aspects of his late poetry as the subject-object functional inversion and grotesque perspective inversion (the description of events from unexpected points of view). What I propose to argue here is that within this subverted universe, the anthropocentric perspective is deprived of its traditional hegemony, whereas objects overflow, invading the space and functions usually ascribed to human agents. Thus, the linguistic disappearance of a traditional lyrical subject results in both the humanization of objects and the symbolic ‘dismembering’ of the subject, whose ontological Lebensraum is annexed to the realm of objectuality.