Ukrainian Avant-Garde Prose in the 1920s

Abstract

Current Soviet literary reassessments have done much to revise our picture of the 1920s. Experimental or avant-garde writing — a prominent feature of the decade’s latter years — has, as yet, hardly been touched by this process. The virtual elimination of this current from all histories published after the 1930s, and the refusal to grant it serious scholarly attention, distort our understanding of the dynamics that operated in Ukrainian literature during these years. Far from being peripheral, as is often suggested, this current was, in fact, quite central both to literary politics and formal-aesthetic developments. Indeed, in the literary wars of the day it had ambitions of hegemony.