Classicism

Classicism is an artistic movement in European literature and art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that took ancient classics as its model and proclaimed the cult of reason, harmony, and clarity and the observance of strict rules. The aesthetics of Classicism (codified in Nicolas Boileau's Art of Poetry) demanded the unities of action, time, and place in drama, a clear division of genres into 'high' (tragedy, ode, epic) and 'low' (comedy, fable, satire), and the dominance of duty over feeling. World models are the tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine and the comedies of Molière. In Ukrainian literature Classicism arose in a specific form: the leading genres were not the 'high' but the 'low' ones, above all the burlesque-travesty Eneida of Ivan Kotliarevsky, as well as fables, satires, and comedies in which the living folk language was affirmed.