Philosophical and Aesthetic Principles of Mykhailo Rudnytsky’s Literary Criticism

Abstract

The article presents the aesthetic and ideological concept of liberal criticism, which was
expressed by a leading Galician critic, literary scholar, journalist and cultural figure of the interwar
period Mykhailo Rudnytsky. His main scientific works were interpreted as a kind of postulate of
“worldlessness” and “liberal criticism” focused on Western European intellectual models. Much of
Rudnytsky’s publications were written in the ideological vein of a resonant discussion, provoked
by the critic and formulated by him under the slogan “Should a writer have a worldview?”. In this
discussion, M. Rudnytsky argued that it is not important for a writer to have a worldview. The main
thing is the aesthetic criterion, which should also be decisive in the literary-critical evaluation of
the writer’s work. This thesis was quite ambiguous and controversial, as it sharply contradicted the
general tendencies of the Galician society of that time. So the discussion provoked a polemical wave.
The literary liberalism focused on issues of pure art, the search of Beauty, a kind of aesthetic ideal,
non-involvement in politics, the predominance of form and style over content and ideas – founded in
the Galician cultural environment of the interwar period more resistance than support. In anticipation
of war, amid economic and political instability, in conditions of statelessness, the rejection of any
ideology in Ukrainian society was interpreted as an ethical danger, ideological and political nihilism.
Article focused also on the scientific and aesthetic problems of Rudnytsky’s literary-critical scientific
creativity, the specific eclectic stylistics of his works, the influence of the aesthetics and ideology
of the Moloda Muza (Young Muse) group and modernism of 19 century on his philosophy and
literary theory, the common and different in scientific theories of Mykhailo Rudnytsky and the Polish
critic and literary theorist Ostap Ortwin, the cultural europocentrism of literary-critical assessments
of Mykhailo Rudnytsky, reception of his works and ideological position in the Ukrainian Galician
cultural space of the interwar period.