«A SHORT STORY FOR YOU» BY IHOR KOSTETSKY: TOWARDS THE GENESIS OF THE AUTHOR'S STYLE

Abstract

Kostetsky’s literary consciousness belongs to his era of the historical avant-garde, from there comes his individual poetics, which is completely logically consistent with the general poetics of the large-scale and all-encompassing grand style of the 20th century – expressionism. The formalism of avant-garde art, as a theory and the sum of numerous practices of the first half of the century, the writer organically combined with the humanism of Ukrainian literature and arts of the Red Renaissance of the 1920s. In emigration, the writer continued to develop and improve what had been started by the great Ukrainian writers of the previous generation. In addition, Kostetsky was very well versed in world literature and art, clearly aware of the logic of the movement from prehistoric syncretism to the most modern synthetism in the arts of the «atomic age». The writer’s fascination with the works of Stefan George, Ezra Pound, Thomas S. Eliot, D. Joyce, K. Edschmidt and many other Western writers who created new standards and large-scale proposals for their era, were logically and naturally involved in his own creative discourse. Together with his wife Elisabeth Kotmeier, he founded the publishing house «On the Mountain» in Germany, where he published books that corresponded to his understanding of synthetic, complexly organized literature, which uniquely combined the most daring formalistic experiment with an optimistic view of the present and the future; a principle that Mykola Khvylovy defined with the somewhat bizarre term «romanticism of vitaism». This construct combined in an organic synthesis a life-affirming optimism, no matter how unsettled the surrounding conditions, with the most modern technical arsenal of literary and artistic practices accumulated over half a century.