Content area
Full Text
According to the 1963 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the term "stained glass" designates windows that are coloured as well as pictorial. Generally it refers "only to glass windows that have been coloured by such methods as the fusion of metallic oxides into the glass, the burning of pigment into the surface of white glass, or the joining of white with coloured pieces of glass." In short, stained-glass windows are translucent mosaics held together by lead. The earliest mention of windows that tell stories appears in an account about the reconstruction of the Rheims Cathedral under Bishop Adalberon, from 969 to 988. But the oldest extant ones date from the mideleventh century and are housed in the Augsburg Cathedral.1
The development of stained glass coincided approximately with the birth of the Gothic cathedral, and ever since then the art form has been associated with the mystical symbolism of light. On one level, it has served as a catechism on glass for the illiterate. On another, its sensuous qualities have inspired theologians and poets to view it as a contemplative medium for ascending from perceptible beauty to the imperceptible.2 Until the early twentieth century, the art of stained glass was purely a phenomenon of Latin Christendom.
The Lviv poet Ihor Kalynets (b. 1939) made his debut in the mid-1960s as a remarkably mature artist. Among his works from this period, one poem in particular stands out because of its mastery and unusual subject matter. Titled "Vitrazhi" (Stained Glass), it combines religious and historical motifs in a manner that, in hindsight, was inappropriate for a young author writing in Soviet Ukraine. Interestingly, "Vitrazhi" was first published in the Communist Youth League's journal of literature and current affairs, Ranok, on july 7, 1965. Subsequently it was included in Vohon Kupala (The Fires of St. John's Eve, 1966), the first and only collection that Kalynets managed to publish officially in Ukraine before 1991.3
"Vitrazhi" belongs to an entire series of works concerned with returning "to the sources," a theme that is especially prominent in Kalynets's first clandestine collection, Vidchynennia vertepu (The Opening of the Christmas Puppet Play)4 and in works written after his arrest in 1972.5 This theme also runs like a silver thread throughout the oeuvre of...