Prague School of Ukrainian Poets

The Prague residents were influenced by Dmitry Dontsov , an ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism, who provided them with the opportunity to print on the pages of his journal Literary and Scientific Bulletin (1922-1933, from 1933 - Vestnik). They shared his attempts to form a new type of Ukrainian with clear national and state principles, with a will to live, as opposed to traditional, relaxed-sensual types of a national character (excessive emotionality, lyricism, sentimentality, etc.). However, the “Prague residents” did not share his power combination of romanticism and dogmatism, the high ideal and “creative violence” of the minority over the majority, which resembled the Bolshevik, and later the Nazi style (E. Malanyuk played an active role in opposing D. Dontsov’s views). In addition, Dontsov believed that the writer's function was to educate his nation, and Malanyuk opposed belittling the role of an artist, whose thinking proceeds “in his own, only known language”, to the level of a performer of official duty.

Defending the thesis “art is an eternal absolute, no matter what directions, therefore all laws on art are powerless”, E. Malanyuk simultaneously saw the real state of Ukrainian literature: among enslaved nations and poets “always bear the stigma of slavery”. His article “Thoughts on Art” not only recognized this tragic fact, but also outlined a way out of the fatal situation: “Only a free, healthy development of a nation in an Independent State is a condition for free and healthy poetry.” The views of E. Malanyuk formed the basis of the aesthetic concept of the “Prague School”. They didn’t act in it, but on the contrary, they emphasized questions of the writer’s responsibility for the fate of the nation, literature was recognized as equal and not subject to other areas of spiritual life (politics, religion, pedagogy, etc.).

The Prague residents created powerful force fields of “aristocracy of spirit” around them, became the center for the formation of a new type of Ukrainian who managed to intellectualize the sensual element of the Ukrainian mentality, disciplined it, introduced it into the solid shores of a promising form, and provided the Ukrainian movement with a clear direction. A striking document of such a qualitative change in culture and literature was their historiosophical lyrics.

History in the poetry of Prague takes on a deep rethinking and, in fact, ceases to be history as an objective reality, a past with clear spatial and temporal outlines. Such an attitude to history is designated as historiosophism, or meta-history. Historiosophism as a special type of philosophical, cultural, artistic thinking has an ancient origin, and in this sense the poets of the Prague School are the continuers of a unique intellectual tradition. The first attempts at a historiosophical understanding of reality were noticeable in antiquity ( Titus Lucretius Car , Tacitus ). Historiosophism gets a "second wind" in the era of romanticism and German idealism. In the philosophical developments of Herder , Fichte , Hegel , the historical significance acquires conceptual significance. Even in the hands of romantics, as the historian of philosophy Windelband writes, “historical research has ceased to be a collection of curiosities, and precisely because they summed up the philosophical scale of general development under it”.

Any comprehension of history as a universal scheme for the promotion or formation of various sociocultural, ethno-national, etc. phenomena involves, first of all, the definition of its subject. The historiosophical or metahistorical poetics of Prague recreates these value-semantic foundations associated with heroism, patriotism and national tradition. Since the nation is proclaimed by the citizens of Prague as the main “person” of history, it is clear that the latter is read or artistically reconstructed by them in the plane of national being as a single real space of existence.

The poetry of the Prague School had a wide resonance in emigration, and with the onset of democratic trends in Ukraine, it received numerous admirers at home. Undoubtedly, representatives of this literary phenomenon worthily replenished a number of Ukrainian literary classics, and not only as followers of the national tradition - the traditions of the Ukrainian heroic epic, Cossack folklore, the works of Shevchenko, Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, the militaristic songs of the Ukrainian Sich Sagittarius, but also as the last warrior poets - an ancient, special caste of people for whom the struggle was a poetic inspiration, and poetry - moments of authenticity on the field of honor. Also, Prague poets laid a special type of artistic language in the 20th century (historical, archaeological, religious, mythological, military vocabulary), which left a deep mark in Ukrainian poetry and enriched and enriched the following literary generations with its capabilities. In the context of ideological and aesthetic, philosophical, stylistic searches of Ukrainian literature of the 20th century, Prague residents remained original and organic in their native culture and in front of the perception of certain innovations, and those experiments that were characteristic of them only added to the inexhaustible possibilities of the Ukrainian art word.

• Prague school (neopr.) . "Electronic library of Ukraine" . Date of treatment May 26, 2014.