Literary Landscape

The landscape in literature is an artistic description of nature, of a locality, of the surroundings, which fulfills diverse functions in a work: it creates the background of the action, conveys mood, reveals the inner state of a character (psychological parallelism), expresses the authorial idea, and has a symbolic significance. Landscape may be static and dynamic, realistic and symbolic, urban and rural. Often nature in literature is humanized, becomes a participant in the events, and mirrors or sets off the experiences of the heroes. Ukrainian literature is extraordinarily rich in masterful landscapes: the spiritualized descriptions of Ukrainian nature in the poetry of Taras Shevchenko (A Cherry Orchard by the House), the impressionist mood-landscapes of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, and the mythopoetic images of the Carpathian forest in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and of the Volhynian forest in The Forest Song. Landscape not only adorns a work but also carries a deep semantic and emotional charge, being an important means of artistic expressiveness and of revealing the author's vision of the world.