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ENG: Vera Ageeva: An Apology for Modernism, A Sketch of the 20th Century

This is an intellectual journey through the Ukrainian 20th century. Vira Ageyeva views modernism not merely as a literary style, but as a grand project of emancipation. It is a story of how Ukrainians broke free from provincialism and ethnographic isolation to speak the language of world culture.

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Main lines of research:Women’s Rebellion and Modernism: The author focuses on the figures of Lesya Ukrainka and Olha Kobylianska. She portrays them as the first true European-minded women who introduced psychological depth, feminism, and philosophical depth into literature, rejecting the stereotypes of the “unfortunate peasant woman.”
Kyiv as the Center of the World: The book masterfully captures the atmosphere of Kyiv in the 1920s. It was a time of incredible energy, coffeehouses, passionate debates, and creative collectives, where Mykola Khvylovy and Viktor Domontovych were shaping a new urban culture.
The Struggle Against “Provincialism”: Ageyeva’s central idea is that modernism was a means of self-affirmation for us. It was an attempt to prove that the Ukrainian language and culture are capable of describing the most complex states of the human soul and scientific theories.
Tragedy and Continuity: In describing “The Executed Renaissance,” the author focuses not only on the horror of the repressions, but also on how powerful that intellectual explosion was—so much so that even decades of Soviet censorship could not completely erase it.

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Ukrainian Literature