The 'Minor Renaissance' of Ukrainian Literature in The 1940s
Immediately after World War II, in the second half of the 1940s, Ukrainian literature outside of Soviet Ukraine experienced an unusually intensive period of development in the displaced persons' camps in western Germany and Austria. These camps, which had become home to over 200,000 Ukrainian war refugees, including a significant number of writers and literary scholars, represented a hub of fervent cultural activity, so much so that the period 1945-1949 is often referred to by scholars as the 'minor renaissance' of Ukrainian literature. Thrown together from various regions of Ukraine, writers managed to replay on a small scale the activity of the 1920s. They convened congresses, organized literary associations, and published almanacs, journals, and books. A key role in the period's most important literary organization, MUR, was played by the linguist, scholar, and literary critic, George Yurii Shevelov and the novelist Ulas Samchuk. Other most notable members of MUR included the dramatist, prose writer, essayist, and publisher Ihor Kostetsky; the writer and scholar Viktor Petrov (V. Domontovych), the politically ambivalent Yurii Kosach, and the poet Vasyl Barka. This 'minor renaissance' of Ukrainian literature came to an end in the early 1950s as the majority of the authors emigrated to North America and continued their literary work there.
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“Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.”
—James Connolly (1870–1916)