Executed Renaissance

The Executed Renaissance is the conventional name for the brilliant generation of Ukrainian writers, artists, and cultural figures of the 1920s and early 1930s, which raised the national culture to a European level and was almost entirely physically destroyed by the Stalinist totalitarian regime. The metaphor was first used by the literary scholar Yurii Lavrinenko (1948) and was fixed as a name by the anthology he compiled, Rozstriliane Vidrodzhennia (Paris, 1959), whose title was proposed by Jerzy Giedroyc. This cultural explosion embraced all movements — from Neoclassicism to Futurism — and gave the prose of Mykola Khvylovy and Valerian Pidmohylny, the drama and theater of Mykola Kulish and Les Kurbas, and the poetry of Pavlo Tychyna, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, and Volodymyr Svidzinsky. A symbol of the tragedy became the mass shootings in the Sandarmokh tract (1937), where hundreds of representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia were killed. The Executed Renaissance is at once the summit and the deepest wound of twentieth-century Ukrainian culture.