THE ANTHROPOCENTRIC VISION OF THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE: LINA KOSTENKO’S POETIC RECONSTRUCTION OF A TRANSITIONAL CULTURAL EPOCH

Abstract

This article examines the authorial strategy of artistic modelling of a specific historical and cultural epoch through the prism of the biographies of its emblematic figures. The analysis focuses on the poetic works of Lina Kostenko, whose intertext incorporates precedent artistic personae of the fin-de-siècle. The cultural image of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the fin de siècle as a time of aesthetic rupture and the search for a new artistic language capable of articulating profound shifts in worldview and religious consciousness – is reconstructed through poetic projections of the lives and creative paths of such writers as Knut Hamsun (“The Tall Norwegian…”), Arthur Rimbaud (“A Boy Arrived from Charleville”), Guillaume Apollinaire (“Marie’s Shadow”), Marcel Proust (“Smoke”), and such artists as Edgar Degas (“A Dialogue in the Paris Salon”), Vincent van Gogh (“Van Gogh”), and Paul Gauguin (“Exotica”). The study’s methodology is based on historical-literary, biographical, and hermeneutic approaches. The scholarly novelty lies in interpreting Lina Kostenko’s poems as integral fragments of a reconstructed fin-de-siècle cultural landscape and analysing them through an anthropocentric lens. The study concludes that the biographical facts and creative trajectories of these artists function as a cultural intertext in L. Kostenko’s poetry and form the foundation of her anthropocentric artistic worldview. Regardless of the chosen interpretive strategy – whether an expanded biographical narrative, an emphasis on a revealing or controversial moment in the artist’s creative life, or an episodic symbolic reference – the analysed poems reveal conceptual markers characteristic of the fin-de-siècle worldview and aesthetic situation. Among these are the figure of the accursed poet; the primacy of inner experience with its psychological breakdowns and heightened sensitivity; radical subjectivity; corporeal sensuality; the city as a symbol of a ruptured or newly emerging reality from which escape becomes the only viable option; and artistic experimentation with creative forms.