The Stories of Others in Mariana Savka’s Poetry

The article is focused on the questions of constructing the lyrical subject in Mariana Savka’s poetry from the perspective of the Self / the Other interaction. The lyrical subject speaks about her private experience as much as the private is a starting point for conceptualization of national cultural and historical experience in 1990s generation poetry. The analysis is based on Jan Assmann’s differentiation between cultural and communicative memory that are two ways of inscribing the subject into the collective cultural and historical spaces; besides, there are also two ways to describe the interaction between the subject and the Others. In Savka’s poetry, the construction of the subject is a self-narrativization; on the other hand, the Self / the Other interaction can be conceptualized as the Self develops through the attachment of the stories of Others to the narrative of the Self. Accordingly, in Savka’s poetry, the stories of the Others are included in the matrix of cultural memory as intermedial plots or in the matrix of communicative memory as family stories and memories. An intermedial plot is a possibility for Savka’s lyric subject to conceptualize herself through the projection of an art piece and to attach one more story to the narration of the Self. The corporeal, private experience of the Self is a frame for reflection on the experience of the Other – this is a way in which communicative memory in Savka’s poetry is constructed. Ancestral memory is preserved in family narratives, mainly female ones; nevertheless, in Savka’s poetry, the life story of the hero may not correlate with historical dynamics and may not be the matrix for other plots. This female experience is read through the categories of motherhood, body, language, and daily life.