Ukrainian Symbolism and the Problem of Modernism

Abstract

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the word symbolism appeared in the Ukrainian literary process with regularity. Allusions to European symbolists, especially the French (i.e., Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine) were quite prevalent. Not infrequently, the term decadence also came into play. Curiously, neither expression entered the lexicon of criticism as a period designator, and today the era from approximately 1900 to 1914 is commonly known as Modernism. The symbolist nature of Ukrainian Modernism survives in our literary consciousness, but more as intuition than as demonstrated fact.