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Mountains, Masks, Metre, Meaning: Taras Shevchenko's 'Kavkaz'

2005; Maney Publishing; Volume: 83; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/see.2005.0154

2222-4327

Rory Finnin,

Eastern European Communism and Reforms

'Kavkaz' ('The Caucasus'; 1845) has long been considered one of Taras Shevchenko's most 'anti-colonial' poems, and its strident rhetoric has found its way into contemporary Ukrainian political discourse. But it is also a 'poetic anti-narrative', the site of a struggle between competing poetic personae. After progressively unpacking the poem and navigating its polyphony by way of an examination of its 'metrical semantics', this article attempts to demonstrate how the text as a whole works along the lines of a dialectic to articulate a post-colonial ambivalence rather than promote nationalist politics.