The Impact of Myth Consciousness on the Formation of the National Political and Cultural Space: “Ukraine is not Russia”

Abstract

The articles researches the concept of political culture as a system of inherited political notions expressed in symbolic forms and generalizes the differences between the political culture of Ukrainians and Russians. It stresses that the cultural identity of Ukraine is established on one of its basic tendencies – penchant for archaization of all symbolic forms; it researches the place of the heroic political myth in this process; it analyzes sacral projections of the political in the myth through which the subject-and-object order of the Ukrainian politics world is explained. Thus, the pattern of the heroic monomyth (a structured ontological range of symbols) serves as a program of political reality (as a structured order of political objects). The symbols of the heroic monomyth have sacral significance because they present an idea of political order, stability, forecastability of politics (the latter is lacking in the crisis context of development) when there is unwillingness of a part of citizens to bear responsibility for prospects of future development of events in the country in the conditions of long-term uncertainty. The article researches peculiarities of the how the structure-image of the hero builds the constitution of political reality in Ukraine and Russia.