LITERARY STUDIES OF THE CREATIVITY OF ROMAN BABOVAL IN THE RESEARCH OF THE NEW YORK GROUP
Authors: Karabowicz Tadeusz 
Published: December 2019

The article is devoted to the scientific interests of Ukrainian literary critics by the work of the Ukrainian poet Roman Baboval, against the backdrop of wider studies of the New York Group. Therefore, features of ontological models of creativity of a well-known representative of Ukrainian diaspora poetry are highlighted. The aspect of the genre and style dynamics of the poet’s creative resources is considered. Characterized by the evolution of the work of Roman Baboval against the background of the New York group in different dimensions of the artistic systems that the poet found- ed. It is proposed to provide the creative phenomenon of Roman Baboval, a poet of the second half of the 20th century, an axiomatic aspect in Ukrainian diaspora literature, but against the backdrop of scientific literary rethinking. Roman Babowal – Ukrainian Belgian poet, a member of the New York Group and author of many books of poetry in Ukrainian and French, among them “The Deceit of Milk,” “Letters to Lovers,” and “Travelers of the Probable.” He also compiled and implemented on the Internet “A Virtual Anthology of the Poetry of the New York Group” Roman Babowal died on June 15 in Mintigny-le-Tilleul, Belgium. He is survived by his wife and daughter. The phenomenon of the New York Group com- prises two generations of Ukrainian émigré poets residing, despite the group’s name, on three continents (North America, South America and Europe). New York City, however, has always constituted a seminal point of reference and its name signified an innovative approach to Ukrainian poetry. Yet the significance of New York is not just symbolic. This is indeed the place where in the mid-1950s the group originated, imbuing the postwar Ukrainian literary émigré milieu with the avant-gardist spirit and fresh designs. The poets eagerly experimented with poetic forms, privileging vers libre and meta- phor as well as embraced such fashionable at the time artistic and philosophical trends as surrealism and existentialism. By the early 1960s all seven members of the New York Group (Bohdan Boychuk, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Zhenia Vasyl’kivs’ka, Bohdan Rubchak, Patricia Kylyna, Emma Andijewska and Vira Vovk) published at least one poetry collection; in fact, a majority had by then two or even three books to their credit. In addition, the author focuses on the group’s initial, and most active, period—from the mid-1950s to 1971. There were also latecomers: Yuriy Kolomyiets, Oleh Kowerko, Marco Carynnyk, and Roman Babowal, all of whom joined the NYG in the late 1960s, and Maria Rewakowicz herself, who be- came part of the group during the time of its revival in the mid-1980s; these poets are mentioned only briefly and in pass- ing. At that early stage the poetic output of the group’s members formed a genuine aesthetic alternative to socialist realism, still much prevalent in Ukraine of the 1950s under the communist regime. This informal association of Ukrainian– émigré modernist poets—loosely connected with New York, in spite of the fact that their actual places of residence were sometimes as far as Munich or Rio de Janeiro—was not widely influential at the time that it was active. Today, however, the work of these poets is generally accepted as an important stage in the evolution of Ukrainian modernist literature.