UKRAINIAN-POLISH DIALOGUE OF LITERATURES AS A WAY OF OVERCOMING THE CIVILIZATION CRISIS
Authors:   Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine, Astafiev Oleksandr 
Published: December 2023

In the article on the broad background of Ukrainian and Polish literatures of the twentieth century the problem of the crisis of modern culture and the need for dialogue have been clarified. The greatest philosophers Oswald Spengler, Arthur Schopenhaur, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mykola Berdyaev, Albert Camus, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, and others wrote about the crisis of culture and the destructive role of the human-machine connection in it. Modernism, in particular, the Young Poland Group, came out of distrust of the cult of reason. The article deals with the works of modernists at the reception of Lesya Ukrainka and Ivan Franko, analyzes the manifestations, programs and discussions of Young Poland, and shows its impact on the Young Muse group in Lviv. The apologetics of the “machine age” in the literature is related to the work of Italian (Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Corado Govoni, Ardengo Soffici, Giovanni Panini, etc.), Russian (Igor Severianin, Vadim Shershenevich, Vladimir Mayakovskiy, Velemyr Khlebnikov, Vasiliy Kamenskih, David Burliuk) ), Ukrainian (Mikhail Semenko, Geo Shkurupiy, Oleksa Slysarenko, Dmytro Buzko, Leonid Skrypnyk), and Polish (Bruno Jasensky, Stanislav Mladozhenets, Titus Chizhevsky, August Zamoisky, Stanislav Ignacy Vitkevich, Leon Khvistek, Anatol Stern) futurists. Constructivism developed in parallel to the “industrial age”: in Ukraine - Valerian Polishchuk, Leonid Chernov-Maloshenko, Raisa Troyanker, Mike Jogansen; in Poland - Vladislav Stzeminski, Katarzyna Kobro-Stzeminska, Meczyslaw Schuka, Jan Golus, Meczyslaw Schulz and others. Symptoms of the crisis of culture and disintegration of social communication are noticeable in surrealism, neo-romanticism, expressionism, existentialism, theater of the absurd and more. The First, and later the Second World Wars, questioned the belief in the identity of European cultures. Extremely rapid development of communication tools and communication media has opened the prospects for a dialogue of literatures. It is not about their unification, which is reduced to the functioning of the product on the market. Culture is a large polyphonic space. It can distinguish the “voices” of different cultural figures, whose significance does not depend on either age or nationality. The article emphasizes that the dialogue of literatures offers the exchange of cultural values between peoples, as well as the spiritual rapprochement of large and small cultural regions, which have their unique features. As Edward Kaspersky rightly points out, dialogue is not only a matter of humanitarian contacts of the great cultures, but also of the way in which an individual takes part in their spiritual world. The dialogue of literatures helps to organically borrow the best from the treasury of neighbors (i.e., recent editions in Poland of works by Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, Mykhailo Kotsyubynsky, Yuri Andrukhovych, Oksana Zabuzhko; editions in Ukraine of books by Stanislav Trembetsky, Lev Venglinskiy, Tomash Padura, Yaroslav Ivashkevich, Leopold Staff, Boleslaw Lesmian, and others - in the series “Library of Polish Literature”), prompts the reader to rethink “foreign” literature. Today, the principle of dialogue of literatures is a real opportunity to overcome the deep contradictions of the civilization crisis and to overcome the environmental catastrophe and the nuclear threat. The dialogue of literatures is able to preserve cultural differences in all their richness and diversity and to establish mutual understanding and cultural contacts between peoples.