National culture as a strategy for self-preservation of personality: Yuri Shevelov and the World War II

Abstract

The urgency of the topic is due to the increased interest of modern society to the existence of a particular individual in the dehumanizing geopolitical and hybrid conflicts. Culture is an existential source of restoration of a human personal resource. The methods developed in it to protect against various threats to the world are specified in the practices and discourses of national cultures. The latter give their bearers hope for the preservation of life in the circumstances of cardinal socio-historical changes that threaten the collapse of the individual and the whole national community. The subject of study in the article is the phenomenon of the personality of the intellectual-humanitarian in the circumstances of World War II. According to S. Krymsky, personality is seen as the result of moral efforts that raise a person above the individual physical threshold to the level of responsible existence and harmony with the spirit. The objective of the study is to outline the importance of the national cultural environment in the crystallization of the personality of the Ukrainian writer and cultural agent, American and Ukrainian academic philologist Yuri Shevelov (1908–2002) in Ukraine during the Second World War. The first book of his memoirs «I — myself — to me… (and all around)» — «In Ukraine» provided material for reflection. This text has several reprints and is well known to interested readers. However, his leitmotif — national culture as the daily salvation of the intellectual in historical and geopolitical cataclysms — still remains uncomprehend. This is the novelty of the proposed work. Its theoretical and methodological basis is the phenomenology of culture of S. Krymsky. On the other hand, the history of survival and preservation of Yuri Shevelov as an intellectual personality is inseparable from the history of his everyday life. This explains the appeal to the studies of everyday history. As a result of the research caused by the interest in the life of Yu. Shevelov during the Second World War, the main factors of his personal project in the dynamics of the Ukrainian national and cultural discourse were characterized. The issue of modern Ukrainian culture as one of the key criteria for understanding non-national cultural phenomena needs further coverage. The article is presented in two parts. The second part deals with the semantic and value aspects of personal and national self-determination of Yu. Shevelyov in the conflicts of the II World War as well as Yuri Shevelyov’s experience of war in his intellectual biography.