The Main Values in the Narratives about Resettlement from the Flooded Areas

Author

Koval-Fuchylo Iryna

a Ph.D. in Philology, senior research fellow at Ukrainian and Foreign Folklore Studies Department of the Maksym Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the NAS of Ukraine. ORCID: 0000-0003-4048-914

The Main Values in the Narratives about Resettlement from the Flooded Areas

Abstract

The reconstruction of the hierarchy of values in the world-view of people who have experienced the resettlement, is fulfilled in the article. The main material of the study includes the authoress’s interviews, recorded in 2012–2014, 2019 in Poltava, Kirovograd, Cherkasy, Khmelnytskyi, Kyiv Oblasts. The analysed texts give grounds to build the following hierarchy of values: land, house, community, cemetery.

The situation of forced resettlement has dealt a devastating blow to the inviolability, stability of the world, which is a fundamental value in traditional society. At the same time, this situation from the time distance makes it possible to trace what is of greater or less value for people, what and how they have tried to preserve in extreme conditions of resettlement, how they present their experience today. It is possible to distinguish language units at different levels in the analysed memoirs (morpheme, lexical, syntactic, textual, genre), which have axiological semantics, the so‑called axiological markers.

There is a regularity at the lexical level: the denser nominative coverage of a particular territory is the more mastered, native is this locus. In the studied texts the different density of the spatial nomination of these two contextually oppositional loci is striking. Thus, an eloquent sign is the presence of numerous microtoponyms in stories about the lost territory and the almost complete absence of such nominations in the description of the new settlement place.

Considerable attention of the narrators is focused on the process of their house destruction. The high value of this spatial object is evidenced, among other things, by the nomination of destruction: to break, to smooth, to destroy, to raze to the ground. Lexical and morpheme repetitions increase an influence on the listener, convey the semantics of loss.

A positive assessment of the rural community of the resettled village before the resettlement and in the process of adaptation, building at a new site is a typical place of memories. In addition to the positive characteristics, the high appreciation of the resettlement community from the flooded village is evidenced by the desire to preserve the name of their village on the site of the settlement, which is mentioned in the memoirs. The value of the community is also evidenced by the autonominations of the people, present in the memoirs: resettlers, refugees, Bakota people, pidsiniany.

The flooding of graves is especially dangerous in the traditional world-view, because it provokes the curse of dead ancestors. The transfer of cemeteries is perceived by the peasants very painfully. This phenomenon is unnatural, contradicts the basic world-view concepts of the universe, alarms and frightens people because of the possible anger of their deceased.

In addition to these lost values the narrators also mention the loss of clean Dnipro water, lost health, time, because the ordering of their household takes constantly a lot of time and efforts on a new place.

Keywords

values, memories, resettlement, axiological markers, nomination.

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