Relationships with God in the Poetry of Mykola Vinhranovskyi

The article attempts to consider sacred motifs in the poetry of M. Vinhranovskyi. Although atheistic motifs are present in the author’s early poems, he later leaves them behind and edits openly atheistic lines. His poetry is characterized by a sense of universal unity, one of the manifestations of which is the peculiar use of the category of quantity, the pairing of the same word in the singular and plural, which can be interpreted with the involvement of religious discourse (since the unity of the individual and the multiple is the quality of God, as indicated by various religious traditions). The spelling of the word “God“ in the early and later poems of M. Vinhranovskyi is considered, texts with sacred motifs are indicated. New perspectives on this issue were made possible by the study of the author’s unpublished manuscripts, which are kept in the National Museum of Literature of Ukraine: some of them contain explicitly religious imagery and subjects, as discussed in the article. The testimony of the poet’s contemporaries about his relationship with God is given. An attempt is made to show that the testimony of M. Vinhranovskyi’s interposition in religious discourse gives grounds for deploying the interpretation of his poetry within this discourse, in particular – in the aspect of the combination of the singular and plural at the linguistic level, as well as in the sense of a general unity as a manifestation of the sense of God’s all-presence, also evidenced by various religious traditions.