The Poet, Time and Memoryin the Verses of Lidija Dimkovska

Abstract

Lidija Dimkovska (1971), with her distinctive artistic expression, represents an highly acknowledged name in the critical context of contemporary Macedonian poetry and prose. This article aims to focus its interpretative attention to semantic reflection on some of the most important motifs that are performed in her poetry book Boundary Situation (2021). One of the key thematic categories in Dimkovska’s verses is memory, conceived as a spiritual simulacrum of Home. Hence, memory becomes the intersection point of the temporal and spatial actualization of existence. The interpretative point of view, evoking speculative complexes from the philosophical and existentialist categorical repertoire, commences from the premise of the border as a metaphor for the forms of the existential dichotomy and ambivalence of human being. Correspondingly, the motif of the border will be considered from the perspective of an inherent ontological state and predetermination of the human being understood within the causal interdependence between time and space and the psychological and existential connection between history and memory. Through this interpretative transcendence into the semantic universes of the poems of Lidija Dimkovska, will be shed light on a multitude of thematic depths, such as the issues of Home and the restorative and sentimental power of subjective memory. Furthermore, the article will confirm the discursive modus in which Dimkovska performs the actualization of her lyrical subject, through whose voice the poet reflects on the questions of the fragility of the human being in the collision between the past and the present, the aspects of dehumanization, the state of spiritual and material statelessness, the state of the double belonging in temporal and spatial constellations of consciousness, and also the phenomenon of the human being in the maelstrom of history. Consequently, the interpretation suggests the thesis of Lidija Dymkovska’s poems as a deep artistic actualization of the idea of the human as a being predetermined by time and space, but also of the idea of the human being as the Home of Memory and Memory as the Home of Being. For this reason, through her verses, Dimkovska, as a poet who decides on diverse thematic levels to articulate the polysemic existentialist metaphor of the boundary situation, proclaims and affirms the idea that the essential determination of the raison d`être of the poet’s being as a being of memory and time is precisely his attempt to prudently actualize the existential challenges of the spirit, as the only presupposition for recreating the aesthetic and ethical being of the world through the gnoseological recognition of the sublime ideals of human existence.