«THE WORLD WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AS IT WAS BEFORE». ETHICAL COMMITMENT TO THE OTHER IN SERHIY ZHADAN’S TEXTS

Abstract

The author of the article focuses her attention on Serhiy Zhadan’s both poetic and prose texts from 2014–2015, including his poetic collections called «Life of Maria» (2015), «Templars» (2016) and «Drohobycz» (published only in Polish translation – Warsaw, 2018), which show poet’s attitude to warfare in East Ukraine occupied by Russia and where the ontological and ethical problem of the Other is clearly outlined. The poet writes about five irreversible changes caused by the war: a change of vocabulary, a change of intonation, a change of colours, a change of «the centre of gravity of the text», and a change of hero, author and reader. The auto-thematic lyrical subject assimilates the Other not in Levinasian way: as being «against me alone», as expansive «identity with otherness» or as passive suffering that is «an anarchic trace of God», but as an ethnic commitment. For Cain’s «ontological» answer to God’s question «Where is your brother?», Zhadan searches ethical explanations: he does not perceive the Other as «terrain without morality» (Zygmunt Bauman), but as ethical intersubject relations not «to» the Other (instead, separately), but «for» the Other (together, jointly). The research emphasizes the philosophical, anthropological, psychological and ethical dimensions of the intersubjective relationships of the lyrical subject of Serhiy Zhadan’s texts, as well as the poet himself and a reader, with the Other as a philosophical and anthropological category and the most personified human «self». The key categories in the stream of hermeneutic appropriation of the Other for the author of «Life of Maria» are, in particular, literary personalities of «brother» or «chaplain», and every person the war met him with – poet’s texts about the war constitute his personal, authentic diary, the finale of which he may not have time to write. The ethical promise to the Other, embodied by the poet in his texts written before February 24, 2022, has now been fulfilled and finished – the question remains unanswered what his future texts will be, how his poetic language will change and what new interpretive reading the literary critics will have to learn.