1. Modernism, postmodernism, avant-garde in Ukrainian and world
literature: sources of origin, features of formation, characteristic features.
Modernism (from the French - modern, the latest) is the general name of
new literary and artistic movements of the end of the 19th - beginning of the 19th
century. 20th century of a non-realistic direction, which arose as a denial of
traditional forms and aesthetics of old realism, they are characterized by
formalism, experimentation, and a tendency towards conventional means. The
philosophical basis of "modernism" is the subjective-idealistic philosophy of
Nietzsche and Bergson, at the center of which is the understanding of life as
something that is eternally moving and which cannot be grasped with the help of
the mind, but only through intuition, personal experience. In contrast to the
rationalism of its predecessors, the main means of knowing reality is creative
intuition, initiation into the transcendent (according to the philosophy of I. Kant,
that which lies beyond the limits of consciousness and knowledge, that is, cannot
be known) essence of being.
The highest knowledge was not declared to be science, but poetry, given
its phenomenal ability to spiritualize the world, to penetrate into the most intimate
depths of being. M. as an artistic system owes its emergence to decadence (escape
from real life, rejection of social problems). The emergence of decadence defined
an important period in the cultural history of all of Europe. It was a time when
the processes of social decline crossed the center of the human soul, forming a
corresponding perception of modernity. There have been extremely profound
changes in people's attitudes and well-being. No wonder they were recorded by
great poets who were distinguished by intuitive sensitivity to what Hegel called
"the state of the world." They were the first to express the coming decline in the
language of lyrics.
Modernism as a concrete-historical phenomenon was formed in France,
based on the experience of "accursed poets" (S. Baudelaire, Lautremont, A.
Rimbaud, P. Verlaine), soon spread in other European literatures ("Young
Belgium", "Young Vienna", "Young Poland", "silver age" in Russia, etc.), was
most fully realized in the works of S. Mallarme, J. Moreas, E. Verharn, C.
Swibern, O. Wilde, M. Maeterlinck, R.-M. Rilke, S. Przybyszewski, G. von
Hofmannsthal, O. Blok, D. Merezhkovsky, V. Bryusov, and others, prone to the
manifestation of "aristocracy of the spirit", primarily neo-romantics and
symbolists. The closest to the aesthetic concept of modernism turned out to be
the foundations of baroque and romanticism, evidenced by offshoots that offered
a new interpretation of stylistic trends (neo-romanticism, neo-baroque, etc.)
spread alongside symbolism
General features of modernism: 1. Special attention to the inner world of
the individual. 2. Giving preference to creative intuition. 3. Tendency to
mysticism, attention to psychology and the subconscious. 4. The search for new
formal means in art (symbolism, myth-making, metalanguage). 5. The desire to
discover eternal ideas that can transform the world according to the laws of beauty
and art.
In the Ukrainian literature of this time, 2 schools were clearly defined - the
"traditional" one, focused on the preservation of the nation. summer traditions in
the reproduction of life, while at the same time absorbing elements of the new (B.
Grinchenko, S. Vasylchenko, A. Teslenko, etc.), and "new", oriented to the latest
European years. process, development of the modernist style, derivation of
Ukrainian. summer to a new level of development. The "new school", according
to I. Franko's definition, the "young generation" strove to "depict the uniqueness
of Ukrainian life in a completely modern way. people". The "New School"
established the reorientation of literature to new forms and means of
representation: from naturalism to impressionism and psychological neorealism.
The writers' attention is focused on philosophical and ethical issues, on acute
psychological analysis of individual characters, the sphere of subconscious, social
and mass psychology. These features are characteristic of all types of literature:
prose, drama, poetry.
Thus, Ukrainian literature was part of the global movement of renewal,
modernization of the content and form of artistic creativity, artistic understanding
and modeling of life.
There are three stages or so-called three waves in the development of
Ukrainian modernism.
● The first stage is the 1990s - 10s of the 20th centuries. - early Ukrainian
modernism. Representatives — I. Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, Olga Kobylyanska,
M. Kotsyubynskyi, V. Stefanyk, M. Yatskiv, M. Cheremshina, G. Hotkevich, A.
Krymskyi. A striking feature of this stage (the first wave) was the desire for a
new quality of realistic direction. At the beginning of the 20th century in
Ukrainian literature, concepts related to new trends in literature were already
distinguished. Lesya Ukrainka wrote in 1903: "Symbolism or decadence - you
can't say that, because they are not the same thing." Gradually, the first wave of
modernism passed into the second. These are the 20s of the 20th century, when a
new creative generation continued to develop modernist principles.
● The second wave of modernism - mature modernism - lasted one and a
half to two decades and was more complete than the first. These were no longer
individual bright personalities, but a whole generation that marked the "shot
Renaissance". In the post-war years, there was an attempt to revive Ukrainian
literature outside the Ukrainian SSR — within the framework of the Ukrainian
Artistic Movement (MUR) in Germany