У статті досліджуються літературно-критичні погляди Юрія Шереха періоду Мистецького українського руху (МУРу), з’ясовується його розуміння феноменів «вісниківства» та неокласицизму, зміст і значення
теорії «національно-органічного стилю», ідеї антеїзму. Світоглядні й
естетичні позиції Ю. Шереха аналізуються в контексті ідеологічних і літературних дискусій кінця 1940-х років.
The paper examines the literary-critical views of Yurii Sherekh of the Artistic Ukrainian
Movement’s (MUR) period, clarifies his understanding of ‘visnykivstvo’ and ‘Kyiv
neoclassicism’ as literary phenomena, the content and significance of the theory of ‘national
organic style’, and the idea of antaeism. The worldview and aesthetic positions of Yurii
Sherekh are considered in the context of ideological and literary discussions of the late
1940s. The research involved the literary-critical and historical literary studies written by
Yurii Sherekh in the postwar period and interpreted their textual connections with the
works by Yurii Sherekh himself and by his intellectual associates and opponents.
Yurii Sherekh’s idea of the ‘national organic style’ was not only one of the stages of the
literary researcher’s worldview evolution, but also a certain result of the development of
Ukrainian literary-critical thought in the mid-20th century. This idea grew out of the literary
experience of the 1920s and was associated with the process of updating the national artistic
tradition and adopting Western Europe literature’s achievements in the 1940s. The approval
of the idea of ‘national-organic style’ in the ideological and aesthetic concepts of Yurii
Sherekh was accompanied by the rejection of the ‘Vistnyk’s’ and ‘neoclassical’ traditions. The
analysis of the main points of Yurii Sherekh’s polemic with Dmytro Dontsov as a symbolic
representative of the “Vistnyk’s” ideology and Volodymyr Derzhavyn as the main supporter
of the ‘neoclassicism’ theory reveals some inconsistency of Yurii Sherekh’s definitions of
neoclassicism. Yurii Sherekh’s idea of antaeism was a certain Ukrainian equivalent of European
existentialism, rooted in the history and philosophy of Ukrainian resistance.
The paradox of Yuri Sherekh’s theory was in combining the desire for modernity with
the return to tradition, while the dogmatism of his ‘national organic’ approach to certain
phenomena and works somewhat ideologized his assessments and views. There are reasons
to tell about the conventionality of Yurii Sherekh’s division of the Ukrainian mid-20th
century writers into ‘organists’ and ‘Europeists’, who visualized, on his opinion, two main
directions of Ukrainian literature’s development. In fact, the various types of ‘Europeanism’
and ‘organicity’ were inevitably intertwined.
