Zhylenko I. Existential Visions in Small Prose of Emigrant Writers of the 1920's

Abstract

The article deals with the existential visions of the period of literary emigration in 1919–1939 according to the stories of the Ukrainian writer Oles Babij and the Russian ont Alexei Tolstoy.

Within the new paradigm – existentialism – the authors showed the person through images of anxiety, despair, and longing. The negative impact of war (in O. Babij's story «Bandit») and emigration (in O. Tolstoy’work  «On the Island of Hulk») on the formation of human consciousness is claimed here. Attention is drawn to the psychological aspects, symbolism, and details which are the markers of discomfort and the alienation of the heroes of both stories. The works trace the modes of the existential aesthetics: the boundary situation, the absurdity of existence, the concept of loneliness, etc.

It is emphasized that similar existential motives, found out in small prose of the emigrant writers O. Tolstoy and O. Babij, appeared in the works of European writers A. Camus, J. P. Sartre almost twenty years later.