The Great Dream about an Incubator and Golden Chickens. Oleksandr Astafi ev, Dialog literatur. Navchalnyi posibnyk, Vydavnycho-polihrafi chnyi centr “Kyivskyi universytet”, Kyiv 2018, 140 pp.

Abstract

The review emphasises that the new textbook by Oleksandr Astafiev, Dialogue of Literatures, on the one hand seems to be based on the experience of normative poetic theories of Aristotle, Horace, as well as professors of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy – Feofan Prokopovich, Mitrofan Dovgalevsky, Pavel Kanyuchka – and, on the other hand, takes into account the content of numerous formulated poetics (from the Ukrainian school in Polish romanticism to literary manifestos and works of art of the 20–30s, 60–90s). In the context of the debate over the status of current literary history (David Perkins), a natural question arises: is it possible to create a textbook for creative youth that supports their talents, instills in them the norms of creating artistic values, and multiplies the “golden chicken conveyor”? The author models the experience of the Ukrainian school in Polish romanticism, which supported the spiritual tradition of the Ukrainian and Polish peoples and preserved our cultural memory. What is needed here is the “golden mean”, when art products should be focused not on the pop-culture industry and multimedia “cocktails” but on overcoming the asymmetry between the ideal form of our spiritual existence and reality itself.