THE PROBLEM OF FINITENESS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE IN UKRAINIAN FOLKLORE

The article analyzes the existential problems of life, death and immortality in Ukrainian folklore (based on Ukrainian fairy tales). In the corpus of Ukrainian folk tales there are widely used topics, which in European philosophy and literature are called "tragic foundations of human existence" - awareness of the inevitability of death in the earthly existence of man, the search for forms of individual immortality. In Ukrainian fairy tales there is a dual attitude of the individual to the inevitability of his own death. On the one hand, there is the motive of reconciliation with the fate of human destiny, and in order to relieve the painful feeling of one's own finitude, the instruction on the higher meaning of the existence of death is forced. Death is justified because it appears as the prevention of the absurdity of infinite human existence or as an obstacle to the debauchery of the whims and dangerous wishes of the individual, or ultimately as the punishment of people for violating the commandments of the Supreme Spiritual Creature. In other words, death appears in a number of fairy tales as the expression of the highest world justice. At the same time, death mostly appears in fairy tales as an objectified pagan idea of Death as a concrete living creature with its whims, sympathies and weaknesses. The problem of finding ways to achieve immortality is traced in Ukrainian fairy tales in two ways. Most often, this search unfolds in the plane of the victory of the hero of the fairy tale over death, or through the imprisonment of death, or through the marriage of the hero to a divine being. This is a very common motive in the tales around the world. Less common is the motive of achieving immortality through the moral self-improvement of the hero, his compliance to the moral commandments of God. This is already a reflection in fairy tales of the influence of Christianity on the spiritual world of the ancestors of modern Ukrainians.