Psychological Parallelism

Psychological parallelism is an artistic device characteristic of folk lyric, in which an image of nature is juxtaposed with a person's emotional state or a life event: 'As we loved each other, like a kernel in a nut, / Now we have parted, like mist through the forest!' (a song attributed by tradition to the legendary Marusia Churai); Ivan Franko's poem 'Red kalyna, why do you bend in the meadow…' from the collection Withered Leaves is built on the same two-part parallelism. The natural picture and human feeling appear as parallel rows joined by an inner correspondence. The device is grounded in a primal animistic worldview, in which nature and the human being are conceived as a single whole. The theory of psychological parallelism was developed by Alexander Veselovsky in his work 'Psychological Parallelism and Its Forms in the Reflections of Poetic Style,' which distinguished binary, single-membered, and formal parallelism. The device is the basis of the imagery of Ukrainian lyric songs and ballads; it was consciously adopted by the Romantic poets and later by Pavlo Tychyna.