Koriak’s Cultural Critique

According to the author of the article, the content and directions of literary criticism of Volodymyr Koriak (1889–1937) were determined by the idea of proletarian culture. Its basic principle was the struggle between the bourgeois and proletarian world, formulated in the philosophy of Marxism. However, this concept was not sufficient to build the concept of Ukrainian proletarian literature. In 1920s the most problematic for the critics was the choice of the criteria for identifying the literary text as a proletarian one. They had to take into account such non-textual factors as the author’s biography, national cultural forms, historical influences of Europeanism, colonialism, anti-colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, etc. Koriak’s works reflect the conflicts and compromises that the concept of Ukrainian proletarian literature underwent during 1919 – 1934. Especially complicated were such topics as the history of Ukrainian Marxist-proletarian thought, the ‘Borotbyst’ narrative, the issues of proletarian style and bourgeois cultural influences. The Ukrainian ‘narodnytstvo’ became a major part of Koriak’s critique. As a result, the bourgeois legacy (namely modernism, ‘narodnytstvo’, ‘national literature’) in Koriak’s literary-critical discourse received a particular negative evaluation. Koriak’s literary work testifi es to the fact that the proletarian-Marxist criticism of his contemporaries is featured by the coexistence of the three schemes of constructing proletarian literature: proletarian literature as terra nova; proletarian literature as a continuation of the socialist ideas of the pre-October literary works; proletarian literature as a transformation of the past (bourgeois) qualities and their recombination with new proletarian ones.