INTELLECTUAL UTOPIA OF YURII SHEREKH

Abstract

The paper examines the literary-critical views of Yurii Sherekh of the Artistic Ukrainian Movement’s (MUR) period, clarifes his understanding of ‘visnykivstvo’ and ‘Kyiv neoclassicism’ as literary phenomena, the content and significance of the theory of ‘national organic style’, and the idea of antaeism. The worldview and aesthetic positions of Yurii Sherekh are considered in the context of ideological and literary discussions of the late 1940s. The research involved the literary-critical and historical literary studies written by Yurii Sherekh in the postwar period and interpreted their textual connections with the works by Yurii Sherekh himself and by his intellectual associates and opponents. Yurii Sherekh’s idea of the ‘national organic style’ was not only one of the stages of the literary researcher’s worldview evolution, but also a certain result of the development of Ukrainian literary-critical thought in the mid-20th century. This idea grew out of the literary experience of the 1920s and was associated with the process of updating the national artistic tradition and adopting Western Europe literature’s achievements in the 1940s. The approval of the idea of ‘national-organic style’ in the ideological and aesthetic concepts of Yurii Sherekh was accompanied by the rejection of the ‘Vistnyk’s’ and ‘neoclassical’ traditions. The analysis of the main points of Yurii Sherekh’s polemic with Dmytro Dontsov as a symbolic representative of the “Vistnyk’s” ideology and Volodymyr Derzhavyn as the main supporter of the ‘neoclassicism’ theory reveals some inconsistency of Yurii Sherekh’s definitions of neoclassicism. Yurii Sherekh’s idea of antaeism was a certain Ukrainian equivalent of European existentialism, rooted in the history and philosophy of Ukrainian resistance.
 The paradox of Yuri Sherekh’s theory was in combining the desire for modernity with the return to tradition, while the dogmatism of his ‘national organic’ approach to certain phenomena and works somewhat ideologized his assessments and views. There are reasons to tell about the conventionality of Yurii Sherekh’s division of the Ukrainian mid-20th century writers into ‘organists’ and ‘Europeists’, who visualized, on his opinion, two main directions of Ukrainian literature’s development. In fact, the various types of ‘Europeanism’ and ‘organicity’ were inevitably intertwined.