KOVAL-FUCHYLO IRYNA 2025 №3

KOVAL-FUCHYLO IRYNA

a Ph.D. in Philology, a senior research fellow at the Ukrainian and Foreign Folkloristics Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID : https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4048-9114

The purpose of the work is to analyze the concept of home in the resettlement narrative, which is considered as a set of recorded memories, as well as worldviews about resettlement from the flooded area. The source base of the study is formed with the authoress’s records of interviews with resettled people, their neighbors, descendants in 2012–2021, as well as published memories in books dedicated to flooded villages. The relevance of the work consists in the constant interest of researchers in key concepts of autobiographical narratives, such as land, home, road, which are each time updated in a new way in stories about a certain historical event. The novelty of the work is in the analysis of the concept of home in the resettlement narrative. The method of semantic text analysis is applied in the article, and the method of linguistic semantics of the word is used to study the nomination. The interviewing method is used to record the source material. Here, an approach to the language of the text is significant, as a cognitive system through which one can reveal the value orientations of the folk worldview and understand their semantics. The concepts of home, land, church, and cemetery are the most important in the resettlement narrative. Both a concrete reality and also a deep semantics that acquires a symbolic level is behind each of these subject concepts. In the semantic field, the concept of home conveys the idea of forced resettlement, the concept of land conveys the idea of the most severe loss, the concept of cemetery – the idea of the impossibility of complete resettlement, and the concept of church – the idea of community unity.

The fact of forced resettlement is a determining factor in the creation of the resettlement narrative. This coercion causes the emergence of the idea of loss, which is embodied in stories about the forced destruction of a house, the difficulties of building a new home in the hard demographic, financial and living conditions of post-war Ukraine, and also actualizes the motif of mutual assistance and community cohesion in stories about the communal work (toloka) during mass construction.

The concept of a house in the resettlement narrative is formed around two main architectural objects: a house in the native village, which must be destroyed, and a house that must be built on a designated site. Much more attention is paid to the first building, which had to be destroyed by oneself. People were embarrassed by destroying the house which was so difficultly built in the post-war period. The necessity of destruction also contradicted the worldview, according to which the hut is not just a place to live, it is a sacred center, where all family rites of passage and calendar holidays have taken place.

The new house, which still had to be built, is associated in memories with the search for scarce building materials, hard work, the need to live in unsuitable buildings, for example, in a pantry or in one room, while the construction of other premises is continued. Communal work has become the only way to cope with such a challenge. This is a joint work, mutual assistance, which the narrators often and willingly mention as the only way to escape in those difficult conditions. Numerous verbs to denote construction activity, the nomination of types of work, the list of building materials, descriptions of the stages of work give the motif of toloka dynamics, convey the enthusiasm and joy of joint work to the listener. The verbs are used in the active voice, which emphasizes the active position of the community, when they made the decision and implemented it in practice themselves. The use of verbs in the present tense emphasizes the narrator’s personal involvement in the described event, as well as the personal impression of the experience.

Keywords: autobiographical memories, folklore concept, concept of home, resettlement narrative.

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