Rethinking Tradition, Rejecting the Past: Ukrainian Poetry of the 1910s and 1920s in the Search for Europe

In my contribution, I analyze texts by Mykola Zerov, Mychajl’ Semenko, and Mykola Chvyl’ovyj, three leading Ukrainian writers of the 1910s and 1920s, that thematize Ukrainian literature of the first years of the twentieth century, criticizing its alleged backwardness and lack of artistic quality. With their rejection of recent tradition, Zerov, Semenko, and Chvyl’ovyj were pursuing an ambitious program of cultural renewal aimed at elevating Ukrainian poetry and prose to the same level as classical and contemporary European literature. A recurrent name in their poems and pieces of criticism is that of Mykola Voronyj, a key figure of early-twentieth-century Ukrainian culture, whose controversial reception sheds light on the extent to which Zerov and Semenko were eager to radically renew Ukrainian literature after its first modernization attempts, which they deemed unsatisfying.