The national nature of Vitaism and Vasily Barvinsky

Abstract

The article raises the problem of one of the dimensions of national modernism in the first half of the twentieth century – Vitaism, which is manifested not only in literature, but also other forms of art, in particular, music. The synthetic nature of Vitaism, the platform of which was outlined by M. Khvylovy, answered the aesthetic requests of the development of the new Ukrainian culture at that time and proved to be in agreement with many of its representatives. Acting in correspondence with the artists of the Dnieper Ukraine, professing the ideas of the uniqueness and unity of Ukrainianness, V. Barvinsky showed vivid and vibrant vitaistic tendencies in his work The nation-building idea gathers and absorbs all the life processes of the artist, revealing deep mental roots as the basis of vitaism - the heart animation of life. The fusion of ethnogenetic origin (through intense folklorizm) with a historical tradition (broad national and European temporal perspective) occurs at the composer under the denominator of cordocentric lyrical, however, active romanticism. Numerous vectors of neo- (baroque, classicism, romanticism) as one of the centrifugal axes of V. Barvinsky's style, opens a new round of vision and renewal of tradition. Along with the bright, solid pages of the composer's music, there is also a tangible tragedy. Responsible "heart-universe" does not avoid darkness, because light and darkness are in the only indivisible heart of a person, who is responsible for the dark first, too, grasping the antithetical and contradictory life. The main method of the artist is the desire for synaesthetic fusion in the sound matter of play, plasticity, color, symbol and movement (light rhythm). Conceptual modeling based on such a synthesis gives unique Ukrainian pictures of our own poetic image of the world. The rationalism of Vitaism was manifested in the high education and professionalism of the artist, who called for responsibility for the need to build a serious national cultural school, which served as a voluminous critical journalistic and scientific-pedagogical activity. Barvinsky, as one of the central figures of Galician musical culture of the first half of the twentieth century, reveals an original and unique synthesis of the tendencies of numerous artistic and aesthetic directions of the day. However, the optic ideological axis and active romanticism that shape the composer's stylistic dominance, vital conceptualism in the artistic modeling of the artist's world, make V. Barvinsky one of the brightest representatives of Vitaism.