Literaturnyi iarmarok

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Chapter Five presents the almanac's defining feature, its unique editorials---the intermedia. It identifies the two primary functions of this genre---subversion through humor and the expansion of parameters for intellectual and artistic discourse through mystification---and proceeds to examine the intermedia texts. Chapter Six examines those literary works that best express the ethos of Literaturnyi iarmarok, demonstrating the cross-pollination of literary influences amongst the authors and the works themselves. The dissertation thus traces the artistic journey of a unique group of artists, rooted in both native traditions and pan-European modernism, and describes its culminating moment expressed as the Literaturnyi iarmarok.This dissertation examines the almanac Literaturnyi iarmarok (The Literary Fair), twelve volumes of which appeared in 1928--29, and the group of cultural figures associated with it. Despite its relatively small size, it is among the most significant Ukrainian literary publications of the modern era. It is analyzed as the culmination of an intensely creative literary decade---"The Twenties" (approximately 1919--1930)---during which the European modernist tradition in Ukrainian culture reached its height and after which a qualitatively new set of aesthetic principles was introduced. The destruction of this pluralistic tradition was brutal and almost absolute, leaving little in the way of intellectual and artistic tools for succeeding generations to interpret it. And yet its exponents recognized its special status, placing at its center the Renascence movement known as VAPLITE. While not the only productive cultural group of the twenties, for its followers and the dominant critical tradition in the emigration (with a distinct echo in Ukraine itself) it became the embodiment of the unique character of this decade.Chapter One examines the political and cultural genealogy of Literaturnyi iarmarok. Chapter Two traces the key developments of the decade from the standpoint of the public sphere and the opportunity it allowed for intellectual debate. Chapter Three looks at the concept of iarmarok, the physical design (artwork) and shows the overall artistic direction of the publication to be squarely in the mainstream of current pan-European trends. Chapter Four discusses the almanac's literary contributors, the ideology underlying the periodical and its theoretical foundations.

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