The study on the history of Ukrainian migrant workers in different countries has become popular in the last twenty years, when the modern Ukrainian emigration, which is known as the fourth wave, reached hitherto unprecedented scale. However, Ukrainian Science still lacked a comprehensive work on folk tradition, especially poetry of Ukrainian migrant workers.
More and more contemporary Ukrainian folklorists have recently turned to new research objects, in particular those which vividly interpret Ukrainian traditional culture. Such interest is aroused by the corpus of poetry by Ukrainian migrant workers in Italy. This is a unique “folk chronicle” which was written by those who suffered from being far away from home. Such prolific poetic activity appears to be a bright feature of the Ukrainian community on the Apennine peninsula. The given phenomenon was first represented on the pages of the Christian journal Do Svitla (To the Light), where poetry by folk authors reflected a realistic and unknown aspect of work migration of the Ukrainians in the late 20th and early 21st cc.
Olena Hinda's monograph consists of such parts: Introduction, Five Chapters, Conclusions, Bibliography, Indexes and Illustrations. The poetry by Ukrainian migrant workers are regarded as a “folk chronicle” about a dramatic page of Ukrainian history, namely emigration of many women who left their country in order to work abroad and help their families. The author examines socio-cultural context of the given poetic works and determines their connections with Ukrainian folk songs on emigration. The monograph researches into the plot and motive paradigm of poetic texts, their genre integrity and genre types as well as intertextual manifestations.
The first and second chapters are quite well written – “Methodological and theoretical aspects of research into the poetry by Ukrainian migrant workers in Italy” and “Socio-cultural contexts of emigration of the fourth wave and poetic works by Ukrainian migrant workers in Italy” in which O. Hinda focuses on the justification methodological paradigm of research migrant creativity that led to an analysis of the category "folklore" in the context of current scientific discussions and analyzes the history of Ukrainian migrant workers in Italy, Ukrainian Studies space and Ukrainian press in the country, the history of magazine Do Svitla (To the Light), and finally the original folk artifact – corpus of migrant poetry.
In the third chapter – “Ukrainian folk songs on emigration and the poetry by contemporary migrant workers: the contrast of plot and motive paradigms” – the author compares the plot and motive matrixes of emigrant songs and poetry by migrant workers. Ten parts of this chapter analyze the transformation constants of folk-song motifs in contemporary migrant poetry.
The next two sections of the monograph devoted to analysis of poetry by migrant workers. In particular, in the fourth chapter (“The corpus of poetry by Ukrainian migrant workers in Italy through the prism of genre analysis: the integrity of genres VS their variety”) refers to the study of genealogic signs of migrant poetry, synthesis of folklore and literary genre in them and genre “preferences” of folk poets. The fifth chapter of the work (“The poetry by Ukrainian migrant workers through the prism of intertextuality”) concerns on the three main issues – the paradigm of titles, pervasive dialogical nature in the poetry by migrant workers, correlation between poems and the usage of Italian vocabulary, i.e. the “foreign” word.
Evidently, all the above-mentioned facts prove that poetic works by the Ukrainian community in Italy is a unique ethno-cultural phenomenon which, first of all, reflects dramatic history of Ukrainian migrant workers in the Apennine peninsula in the late 20th-early 21st cc. The poetry under analysis affirms that every author rather did not reveal his/her own individual character, but represented the ideas of those who had the same experience and worked abroad at least for some time. That is why every poem should be examined in the context of the whole corpus of poetry and emigrants’ socio-cultural context. This context shaped the culture of the whole community of migrant workers, which gradually transformed into the culture of new diaspora with its orientation towards traditional values of the source culture as intellectual and spiritual milestones. Therefore, despite inferential and quite explainable presence of author’s subjective ideas, the poetic works under study altogether can be viewed as a phenomenon and value of collective nature. They appear to be not only the system of separate aesthetic documental evidences of many different authors, but also a syncretic artifact which reflects mental, ethno-cultural and national features of the Ukrainians. For this reason the poetic works by present-day community of migrant workers in Italy has to become a part of the Ukrainian cultural space and definitely deserves further research.
The monograph is designed for folklorists, literary critics, historians, culture studies scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, teachers and students of the humanities, Ukrainian culture and history lovers.