Leonid Biletskyi as Historian of Ukrainian Literature

Abstract

The paper deals with historical and literary concepts in the works of the Ukrainian scholar from diaspora Leonid Biletskyi based on the extensive material of his studies on the Ukrainian literature. Using philological, comparative historical and genetic methods the author of the paper analyzes these concepts in the light of Biletskyi’s methodology of studying the ideological and aesthetic phenomena of a national literature that includes revealing characteristic features, specifi c principles and views on the existence and development of the literary process. This method allows outlining specifi city of Leonid Biletskyi as a historian of the national literature, noticeable in his textbook “The History of Ukrainian Literature”, being a kind of encyclopedia of the national cultural and historical spirituality of Ukrainians, as well as in a series of the ‘portrait stories’ presenting many writers of the old, new and contemporary literature. The paper reveals and systematizes historical and literary approaches of the scholar to studying literary and artistic phenomena, processes and certain works. The literary critic evaluated every ideological and aesthetic phenomenon of the national literature based on the general literary criteria. His analysis started from the form (genre, style, stylistics), as, according to the researcher, the form renders the development of the literary process, in which only the core of the author’s artistic thinking – a man and his being – remains unchanged. At the same time Leonid Biletskyi grounded his estimation of the writer’s works and creativity not only on the development of the national literature, but also on the changes in social consciousness of the time. Thus, as a historian of literature, he managed to combine in his scholarly thinking the subjectivity and objective development of the literary process. The historical concepts of Leonid Biletskyi haven’t been studied suffi ciently yet. The present paper off ers the fi rst review and systematization of them and aims at revealing the special views of the emigration scholar on the development of the Ukrainian literature.