ІСТОРИКО-ЛІТЕРАТУРНІ ПРАЦІ ЛЕОНІДА БІЛЕЦЬКОГО: РІЗНОВЕКТОРНІСТЬ НАУКОВИХ ЗАЦІКАВЛЕНЬ УЧЕНОГО

Abstract

The article analyses the historical and literary works of the famous Ukrainian liter-ary critic Leonid Biletskyi (1882-1955), written by him in the diaspora. They are both of various genres (textbook, literary portrait of a writer or scientist, preface), and colourful thematically: Ukrainian folk art, individual writers or characteristics of the achieve-ments of Ukrainian scientists. This work is addressed to diff erent audiences – school, academic, and the general public with the aim of popularizing Ukrainian literature and its best assets. L. Biletsky constantly emphasizes the idea of the inclusion of native writing in the world context, uses a set of methodologies that complement each other – biographical, cultural-historical, comparative. However, the philological one is funda-mental for him, which allows to characterize literary phenomena as self-suffi cient aes-thetic phenomena. Also, the scientist successfully combines historical and literary mate-rial with theoretical, considering the genre nature of the work, the specifi cs of literary trends, in particular, modernism. He, like his predecessors, begins the author’s course of the history of Ukrainian literature with folk poetry, involving a large mass of informa-tion about the anthropological, ethnographic, and national features of Ukrainians. In various genre texts about Ukrainian writers, L. Biletskyi explores the origins of their talent, place and role in the history of Ukrainian literature, peculiarities of style, genre system. In the portraits of famous Ukrainian fi gures, he emphasises their service to the Ukrainian idea, the originality of their contribution to science.