ELEMENTAL SYMBOLISM AS EXISTENTIAL CATEGORIES IN THE POETRY COLLECTION OPEN FRACTURE OF THE VOICE BY KATERYNA KALYTKO

Abstract

The article retraces the symbolism of the four elements (fire, water, earth, and air) as existential categories in the poetic collection The Open Fracture of the Voice by Kateryna Kalytko. The study aims to examine how the primary ontological codes of being, encoded through elemental imagery, undergo transformation under the conditions of wartime trauma. Rather than treating the elements as isolated poetic images, the study approaches them as an interconnected network of existential categories that encode liminal experience (the threshold states between life and death, creation and destruction, memory and oblivion, war and love, past and present, present and future).
The study’s methodological framework emerges from a synthesis of philosophical hermeneutics, structural-semiotic analysis, and the phenomenology of existential experience. Its philosophical-ontological dimension is rooted in the ancient conception of the elements as primordial foundations of being, spanning Plato’s notion of a geometrically harmonious cosmos, Aristotle’s model of the spatial hierarchy and locativity of elements, and Nietzsche’s interpretation of worldly dissonance as a rupture in their fundamental interaction. The structural-semiotic dimension draws on the theoretical frameworks of Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Throughout the analysis, sustained parallels are established with mythological worldview, pagan cosmology, the biblical symbolic code, and ancient Slavic elemental symbolism.
The research reveals that throughout the collection the elements preserve the memory of their archetypal ambivalence while undergoing deep deformation under the pressure of militarized chaos, the destructive dimension progressively overwhelming the restorative. Earth is stripped of its fertility and rendered corporeally vulnerable; fire loses its purifying capacity; air is transformed into a medium of anxiety, laden with militarized debris and saturated with the sounds of war; water tends toward dissolution and disappearance, persisting as something toxic, cold, and wounding. The sustained tension between the elements’ archetypal wholeness and their traumatically disfigured state constitutes the distinctive tonality of the collection and accounts for the depth of its philosophical resonance.