Premiss of Viktor Petrov’s Concept of Groundlessness

Abstract

Literature can interact with reality in many possible ways, and one of them is ‘derealization of reality’. The term was introduced by Viktor Petrov (V. Domontovych) at the end of the 1940s; yet the first reflections on this phenomenon in the discourse of the Ukrainian literature appeared in 1913 within Mykola Yevshan’s articles on the specificity of Lesia Ukrainka’s creative work. Real Ukrainian life of that time did not provide a proper material for the philosophical perspectives of her poetry; it didn’t allow implementing the modernist aesthetics which were gradually developing in Europe and timidly penetrating into Ukrainian culture. To a certain extent Lesia Ukrainka’s situation may be compared to indispensability of the choice facing Gogol, who was compelled to write in Russian. This was, first of all, the consequence of the low status of the Ukrainian language in Russian Empire. In the study “Apotheosis of Groundlessness” (1905) Lev Shestov announced a new phase of philosophical understanding of reality. He related a process of cognition with a subject of cognition, i. e. with entire destiny of a human being. In his concepts of ‘derealization of reality’ and ‘groundlessness’ Viktor Petrov came close to Shestov’s existentialist ideas applied to the negativity and skepticism as the life strategies. Petrov, in a similar way to that of Hryhorii Skovoroda, insisted on the absolute autonomy of a person; he asserted one’s right to the critical perception of the world and even skeptical attitude towards it.The polysemy of the term ‘groundlessness’ allows using it in diverse contexts: from philosophical (Skovoroda, Swedenborg, Shestov) and mystical (Gogol, Balzac) to analytical and prognostic (V. Domontovych’s novel “Without Ground”), let alone the primitive meaning this term acquired in the literature of socialist realism.