Overview

The Reader introduces Anglophone audiences to the original theoretical writings and poetry produced in Ukraine from the 1910s through the emergence of the totalitarian state under Stalin in the mid-1930s. It captures the vibrancy of a cultural moment when modernism and the avant-garde became the leading forms of artistic, literary, and intellectual expression. Far from being a peripheral phenomenon, Ukrainian modernism evolved in a dynamic dialogue with both European and Russian counterparts while maintaining its own national and ideological distinctiveness. The Reader demonstrates how Formalist theory and avant-garde literary practice shaped poetic creation and, in turn, how these aesthetic innovations engaged with broader projects of Soviet modernization and nation-building. By bringing together key critical and poetic works that reveal the tension between national aspirations and avant-garde currents in Ukrainian culture, the book redefines Ukrainian modernism as a movement uniting theoretical innovation, artistic experimentation, and political engagement. It invites readers to recognize how, forged in the crucible of the early Soviet decades, literature emerged not only as a reflection but also as a maker of modernity.

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Reviews

“This is a ground breaking collection of articles, manifestos and poems that will be instrumental to bring about the long needed reconfiguration of Slavic Studies. Ukrainian modernism was more modern than other modernisms because it originated at the crossroads of many cultures (Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Jewish), it combined a national agenda with a socialist one, and it foreshadowed intellectual debates about hermeneutics and reception theory that would surface in Western Europe only in the 1960s. This reader presents important literary theorists, influential futurists, and innovative poets many of whom perished under Stalinist rule. A substantial introduction provides the necessary context for the presented texts. This collection is an indispensable handbook for all those interested in the Ukrainian dimension of modernist thinking and writing.” — Ulrich Schmid, Professor of Eastern European Studies at the University of St.Gallen (Switzerland) ""This book brings into sharp focus a brilliant generation of critics and theorists who transformed literary studies while negotiating the pressures of empire, revolution, and cultural Russification <...> Set firmly within the vibrant literary and cultural life of the period, the anthology reveals that figures writing in Ukrainian journals and institutions did more than simply “receive” Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, or Trotsky; they also tested these thinkers’ ideas against their own experience of a multilingual, socially stratified, and politically volatile literary field <...> This reveals a shared Eastern European horizon in which theory was inseparable from cultural policy, avant-garde experimentation, and mass literacy campaigns. By analyzing the materiality of form together with the sociology of literature and the psychology of artistic creation and reception, Ukrainian critics reframed questions of form and content through class ideology <...> By making this dense, multilingual debate accessible in English and annotating it with great philological care, the editors restore Ukrainian theoretical writing to its rightful place as a central laboratory of European modernism. This reader demonstrates that the “periphery” was in fact one of the most fertile sites for rethinking what literature is, what it does, and how it should be studied, and it will be indispensable for anyone interested in modernism, Slavic and East European studies, or the global history of literary theory."" — Michał Mrugalski, Institute of Slavic and Hungarian Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin “This wide-ranging anthology makes a major contribution to our knowledge and understanding of Ukrainian literary modernism. The translations, along with the contextualising introductions, present an invaluable and much-needed resource for Slavists and comparatists alike.” — Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London “Halyna Babak, Yuliya Ilchuk and Andrei Ustinov have enriched Ukrainian and Slavic literary studies with an indispensable instrument for the study of the intellectual and poetic detonation that illumined Ukrainian culture from the early twentieth century to the mid-1930s. Lucid introductory essays precede, and show the relationships between, the period’s theoretical and critical texts, its literary manifestos, and its multifarious poetry. This Reader reveals the vigour and variety of Ukrainian modernism before repressions and executions extinguished its promise; it reflects on Ukrainian modernism’s commonalities with, and distinctiveness from, its European counterparts; it shows Ukrainian modernism participating in the construction of a modern, confident, multi-ethnic Ukrainian nation. Ukrainian Literary Modernism is a book singularly apposite at a time when that nation’s survival is threatened by a resurgent imperialism.” — Marko Pavlyshyn, Emeritus Professor of Ukrainian Studies, Monash University

Author Information

Halyna Babak is a Ukrainian scholar whose research explores the intellectual history, literary theory, and literary production of 20th-century Ukraine within the broader context of Soviet and East European political and cultural history. Her first monograph The Atlantis of Soviet National Modernism [Natsmodernism]: The Formal Method in Ukraine (1920sEarly 1930s) (2021, co-authored with A. Dmitriev), offers the first comprehensive interpretation of the role of Ukrainian Formalism in nation-building during the 1920s as part of the broader project of Soviet modernization. Yuliya Ilchuk is a Ukrainian scholar and translator whose research focuses on cultural exchange, interaction, and ""borrowing"" between Russia and Ukraine. Her award-winning book, Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity (2021), reinterprets the writer's identity and his literary works as ambivalent and hybrid. Her recent projects engage with memory studies in post-1991 Ukraine, shifting scholarly attention from collective remembrance to the cultural dimensions of forgetting. Also, she actively translates both modernist and contemporary Ukrainian poetry in tandem with Amelia Glaser. Andrei Ustinov received his PhD from Stanford University and is currently a Fellow at the Center for Open Studies. His scholarship examines European cultural history, highlighting the interplay between literary theory and artistic practice in modernist and avant-garde movements. He has authored and edited several books, including the comprehensive study Russian Literary Avant-Garde in Paris (with Leonid Livak), and has published widely on poetic experimentation. His current work centers on the rediscovery of texts and contexts of Ukrainian modernism.

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