Ukrainian National Identity Through the Prism of a Big City Vitality: Conceptualising New York’s Cultural Landscape

Abstract

From the early XXth century Ukrainian poets have transformed New York, a city of dreams, cultures and history, into an integral concept of poetic meanings. Being inspired by its urban vitality, they have created a whole range of poems on city's architecture, people and aura. Thus, New York itself turned into a text valuable for its cultural expression, as the poets talk about such features of the city as subway, bridges, skyscrapers, advertisements, and refer to many place names (Brooklyn, Broadway, Times Square, Wall Street, etc.), which shape city's cultural landscape and become verbal representations of the basic concepts of the Ukrainian mentality. The research shows that the main concepts which constitute the New York City cultural landscape as represented in the Ukrainian poems of the XXth-XXIst centuries are HELL / DEATH, MACHINE WORLD, WEALTH / DECORATIONS, POVERTY / IGNORANCE, LAND OF IMMIGRANTS, SOLITUDE. In other words, within the conducted research New York is viewed as a prism for the revelation of the Ukrainian national identity, and historical issues crucial for the Ukrainians in a diachronic perspective (XXth-XXIst centuries).