Freedom of Spirit and Fatality of Embodiment: Intellectual Controversies of Valerian Pidmohyl’ny’s Prose

Abstract

The article focuses on the analysis of philosophic and existentialist collisions of Valerian Pidmohylny’s prose. He appeared to be the most consistent urbanist in the Ukrainian prose of the 1920s, as in Tretia Revolutsia (The Third Revolution) and Misto (The City) he showed two scenarios of the relationship between representatives of rustic and urban culture. The main theme of the novel is the brutal city occupation, its submission, and desecration. This path of fair revenge is anyway desperate for both winners and losers. The novel encompasses the process of a village-born person’s understanding and adoption of the elitist city culture and the way how a “black-earth” adds to the artistic values creation. In Misto, the factors that provided meaning to the existence were culture, creative work, and writing. However, the characters of Nevelychka Drama (A Little Touch of Drama) appear to be in the situation when the modernist belief in the art’s ability to change the world is lost, when no universal values define people’s behavior, and a moral choice does not agree with any authorities. Another Pidmohylny’s work, Povist bez Nazvy (The Untitled Novel), is one of the few direct fixations of traumatic experience of the early 1930s. Povist bez Nazvy focuses on the final questions of the human existence, when everything built over the foundations of being and cornerstones has lost its meaning and value. The hero of the novel feels like a homeless person, rootless, exhausted, and devastated by unbearable challenges. The last work of Pidmohylny is associated with reflections on the possibilities to escape the epoch and existence, which – recalling a sarcastic complaint of its hero – had better not coincide with the great convulsions of the beginning of the 20th century. Hashish was a temporary escape that ended up in even more catastrophic returning to the cage. Pashchenko, a rational person, took care of a rescue ampoule with poison beforehand – it guaranteed the permanent disappearance. Horodovsky almost tried the variant of a traceless disappearance in the throng, a ceaseless and homeless movement through new paths.