Ukrainian Literary Modernism of the 1910smid-1930s, Vol II: A Critical Reader [Kõva köide]

This is a ground breaking collection of articles, manifestos and poems that will be instrumental to bring about the long needed reconfiguration of Slavic Studies. Ukrainian modernism was more modern than other modernisms because it originated at the crossroads of many cultures (Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Jewish), it combined a national agenda with a socialist one, and it foreshadowed intellectual debates about hermeneutics and reception theory that would surface in Western Europe only in the 1960s. This reader presents important literary theorists, influential futurists, and innovative poets many of whom perished under Stalinist rule. A substantial introduction provides the necessary context for the presented texts. This collection is an indispensable handbook for all those interested in the Ukrainian dimension of modernist thinking and writing.

Ulrich Schmid, Professor of Eastern European Studies at the University of St.Gallen (Switzerland)







"This book brings into sharp focus a brilliant generation of critics and theorists who transformed literary studies while negotiating the pressures of empire, revolution, and cultural Russification <...> Set firmly within the vibrant literary and cultural life of the period, the anthology reveals that figures writing in Ukrainian journals and institutions did more than simply receive Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, or Trotsky; they also tested these thinkers ideas against their own experience of a multilingual, socially stratified, and politically volatile literary field <...> This reveals a shared Eastern European horizon in which theory was inseparable from cultural policy, avant-garde experimentation, and mass literacy campaigns. By analyzing the materiality of form together with the sociology of literature and the psychology of artistic creation and reception, Ukrainian critics reframed questions of form and content through class ideology <...> By making this dense, multilingual debate accessible in English and annotating it with great philological care, the editors restore Ukrainian theoretical writing to its rightful place as a central laboratory of European modernism. This reader demonstrates that the periphery was in fact one of the most fertile sites for rethinking what literature is, what it does, and how it should be studied, and it will be indispensable for anyone interested in modernism, Slavic and East European studies, or the global history of literary theory."

Micha Mrugalski, Institute of Slavic and Hungarian Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin







This wide-ranging anthology makes a major contribution to our knowledge and understanding of Ukrainian literary modernism. The translations, along with the contextualising introductions, present an invaluable and much-needed resource for Slavists and comparatists alike.

Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London







Halyna Babak, Yuliya Ilchuk and Andrei Ustinov have enriched Ukrainian and Slavic literary studies with an indispensable instrument for the study of the intellectual and poetic detonation that illumined Ukrainian culture from the early twentieth century to the mid-1930s. Lucid introductory essays precede, and show the relationships between, the periods theoretical and critical texts, its literary manifestos, and its multifarious poetry. This Reader reveals the vigour and variety of Ukrainian modernism before repressions and executions extinguished its promise; it reflects on Ukrainian modernisms commonalities with, and distinctiveness from, its European counterparts; it shows Ukrainian modernism participating in the construction of a modern, confident, multi-ethnic Ukrainian nation. Ukrainian Literary Modernism is a book singularly apposite at a time when that nations survival is threatened by a resurgent imperialism.

Marko Pavlyshyn, Emeritus Professor of Ukrainian Studies, Monash University