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Paper short abstract:

The paper is focused on communicative practices and folk narratives that describe the Russian war against Ukraine. The analysis is based on oneiric narratives with the motifs of prophetic dreams about the unfolding war that express local and national identity and are efforts to structure the future.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will explore the question: how does the unfinished war history enter lives of Ukrainians and what traces does it leave in personal histories? The author will dwell on the peculiarities of the vernacular in expressing human existentialism during the war.

The main focus is on folklore samples that allow us to describe the uncertainty of the existence of a hero/storyteller who find themself in a crisis. We will explore the influence of WWI & WWII stories on collective history that becomes the basis for today Ukrainians to model their present and their future. The author will analyze modern oneiric narratives, images and symbols that form folk concepts of death and life and formulate the narrative of "destruction".

More questions to explore are: how a "prophetic" dream about the war was transformed into a personal narrative? What is the connection of the dream symbolic codes to the narrator/listener's interpretation of their later life? Based on discourse analysis, the meaning of cultural heritage and "background" mythological and folklore knowledge will be traced through verbalized personal narratives.

The author believes that oneiric and personal narratives in the war everyday routine perform not only informational, communicative, and identification functions, but also an important compensatory function necessary to overcome trauma at an uncertain time.