KYIV AND KHARKIV IN THE INTERWAR TWENTIES: CULTURAL DISCONNECTS BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNISM VERSUS AVANT-GARDE AND PROLETARIAN LITERATURE

The paper focuses on the previously unexplored ideological and artistic opposition between Kyiv and Kharkiv in the 1920s–1930s as two distinct literary and artistic loci. The former functioned as a center of modernism and the preservation of tradition, while the latter was characterized by the development of futurism and proletarian literature. Special attention is paid to the dynamics of Kyiv’s image in the poetic works of the neoclassicists. Methodologically, the study is conducted through comparative, historical, and cultural perspectives. It demonstrates the features of the creative opposition between the cultural and artistic trends of the two cities. The transformation of Kyiv’s image in the poetry of the neoclassicists is analyzed in the context of temporal differences between modernism, on the one hand, and avant-garde along with proletarian literature, on the other. The examples of Kyiv and Kharkiv demonstrate how this opposition is articulated in the poetry of the avant-garde and Kyiv neoclassicism, and how these movements express different temporal orientations. Until the early 1930s, Kyiv remained a city-symbol of tradition, a center where the long past and the recent—still independent and state-owned—nourished the creativity of the neoclassicists. It stood in contrast to proletarian and avant-garde writing, which largely ignored this past. Kharkiv, in turn, became the city-symbol of these new creative trends. The opposition of Kyiv and Kharkiv correlated with two different types of cultural modernization in Ukraine. In particular, it was manifested in Kyiv’s nurturing of language tradition (primarily among the neoclassicists) and the avant-garde deformation of this language custom of fine writing—in the works by Mykola Khvylyovyi (one of the frontmen of proletarian literature) or the futurists as exponents of avant-garde searches in Ukrainian literature.