Making Verse in a Precarious Language: Poetry in Late 19th-Century Ukrainian Culture between Silence and Music, Present and Future

Achilli, Alessandro

2024-01-01

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Abstract

In this article, I analyze instances of Ukrainian poetry written between Taras Shevchenko's death and the establishment of modernism that deal with the theme of the precarity of Ukrainian literature as a consequence of the lack of a Ukrainian nation in those times. On the basis of examples drawn from the works of Pantelejmon Kulish, Lesja Ukrajinka, Mychajlo Staryc'kyj, Borys Hrinchenko, Volodymyr Samijlenko, Volodymyr Shashkevych, and Ivan Franko, I aim to show how Ukrainian poets of the second half of the 19th century tended to imagine the Ukrainian community as belonging to the past and/or the future, while its presence and its agency in the present are made impossible by imperial subjugation, hence making communication, including literary, impossible or powerless. In the final part of my article, I also reflect on the complex nexus between aesthetic judgment and the re-evaluation of Ukrainian literary history.