In the 1920s, the “technique of the craft of writing” became one of the main tools for the modernization of Ukrainian national art and literature. This partly explains the tremendous interest of Ukrainian critics, literary historians, and theorists in Formal theory. The “Formal method,” along with the “Marxist method,” were the two main competing approaches to literary analysis in the 1920s. In 1922, the Ukrainian critic Volodymyr Koryak published the article titled “Form and Content” which provoked a subsequent polemics around the problem of the dialectics of “form” and “content.” This was the first significant discussion in Ukrainian literary criticism in the 1920s, and it marked the starting point of the phenomenon which is often called “Ukrainian formalism.”
The aim of our conference is to examine Ukrainian formalism and to address its legacy in contemporary Ukrainian literary studies. At the same time, the topic of “Ukrainian formalism” also ought to be considered in the wider framework of the development of Formal theory in other East European countries between World War I and World War II (the Polish and Czechoslovak cases). This could help us distinguish the specific national features in the theoretical perspectives and in ways of cultural thinking.
