ARTISTIC CREATIVITY OF FATHER KYRYLO SELETSKYI IN THE CONTEXT OF SPIRITUAL-EDUCATIONAL AND AESTHETIC SEARCHES AND LINGUO-MENTAL CHALLENGES

Abstract

The article is devoted to the language creation of Father Kyrylo Seletskyi - a clergyman of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, founder of two monastic congregations, an advocate of the spiritual and national Order in Galicia, a sower of “healthy grain for our people”, a stalwart supporter of the Ukrainian word. K. Seletskyi’s literary works serve as an excellent illustration for understanding a complex and often contradictory process of the Ukrainian literary language formation in Galicia, an insight into a folk polyphony of dialectal words of that epoch, dialectical interaction of the living language and Church Slavonic at all levels. Not only does the dialectal variability of many lexemes give a colorful expression to the characters’ speech, but also illustrates the evolutionary stages of development of the Transnistrian branch of the Ukrainian language. The author emphasizes that in K. Seletskyi’s artistic discourses, the Church Slav onic language as a historically and culturally important segment of the Ukrainian language becomes a special text- and style-building category, organically intertwines with its living canvas. Numerous Church Slavonicisms explicate the semantic specifi city of the text and its general sacral-didactic intention through grammatical, lexical and phonetical adaptation to dialectal speech. Literary theological-educational, informative-moralizing texts are full of religious vocabulary, which gives the impression of a spiritual cliché, yet they (the texts) remain inherently Ukrainian and do not create any barriers in the process of perception, as they retain a clearly articulated Ukrainian-language basis. The author concludes that the Church Slavonic language-style played a special role in the process of the modern Ukrainian literary language formation - the role of its spiritual variant.