Abstract

Bohdan Ihor Antonych was one of the most remarkable modernist Ukrainian poets of the twentieth century. He left an extraordinary lite rary legacy with just a handful of books of published poetry despite his premature death at the age of twenty-eight in 1937. He was a poet, literary critic, translator, and journalist. From the outset of his literary career, in the context of western Ukrainian literature, his poetry had a diff erent sound and texture to it. Antonych’s literary interests were unconventional for his milieu: he concerned himself with the metaphysical, philosophical, and metapoetic issues. The power of his accomplishment is that he restored the human need, suppressed by centuries of colonization, for metaphysical, non-political meditation on the meaning of life, eternity and art, rather than -- as it was in a previous Ukrainian literary canon -- in the name of national interests, where literature had to play a didactic role designed to amplify the patriotic feelings of a reader. Antonych mastered the poetic language of antithesis and paradoxes, and by using it he rises from the level of personal experience to that of a universal archetype.