Борьба генераций в эстетической концепции Миколы Евшана

Abstract

The beginning of the 20th century in Ukrainian culture is characterized by a confrontation of generations, the essence of which so clearly expressed a literary critic Mykola Yevshan. Being the author of numerous articles about new phenomena in Ukrainian literature, Yevshan placed the idea of art renewal at the center of his aesthetic concept. The critic reflected his ideas on the essence of artistic creativity in a series of works on the pages of the journal “Ukrainska Khata”, which gave the name to the line of writers grouped around the issue. The paper examines the works of Yevshan “Issues of creativity”, “The struggle of generations and Ukrainian Literature”, “The social and artistic element in creativity”. In these literary critical articles, Yevshan opposes his concept of creativity with the ideology of ‘narodnichestvo’, one of the brightest exponents of which at that time was a literary critic Serhiy Yefremov. Yevshan was close to the ideas of F. Nietzsche, S. Freud, I. G. Fichte and many other trends of his time. Therefore, Yevshan’s aesthetic concept is based on the idea of exclusivity of the creator's personality, the essence of creativity, in his opinion, is to “educate the individual, give direction to all its activities” and the change of generations is a necessary condition for the development of art. The paper concludes that the issue of the struggle of generations, taking a central place in Yevshan’s aesthetic concept, became the starting point for his rethinking of the essence of art and its role in human life.