Bohdan Boichuk’s Childhood Reveries: A Migrant’s Nostalgia, or, Documenting Pain in Poetry

Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal

Maria G. Rewakowicz¹ 

[1] Rutgers University—New Brunswick Department of German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures;

关键词: war and poetry;    childhood memories;    migrant displacement;    bohdan boichuk;    gaston bachelard;    ukraine;    poet;    poetry;   

DOI  :  10.18523/kmhj150392.2018-5.133-142

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

This paper examines Bohdan Boichuk’s poetry by looking into the role his childhood memories played in forming his poetic imagination. Displaced by World War II, the poet displays a unique capacity to transcend his traumatic experiences by engaging in creative writing. Eyewitnessing war atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis does not destroy his belief in the healing power of poetry; on the contrary, it makes him appreciate poetry as the only existentially worthy enterprise. Invoking Gaston Bachelard’s classic work The Poetics of Reveries: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, I argue that Boichuk’s vivid childhood memories, however painful they might be, helped him poetically recreate and reimagine fateful moments of his migrant life.

【 授权许可】

Unknown