Existentialism (in literature)

Existentialism is a philosophical-literary movement of the mid-twentieth century that placed at its center the problem of the individual person's existence — his freedom, choice, and responsibility in an absurd world deprived of any pre-given meaning. Existentialist literature explores boundary situations — solitude, anxiety, the fear of death, the necessity of creating the meaning of one's own being. Its leading figures are the Frenchmen Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) and Albert Camus (The Stranger, The Plague, the essay The Myth of Sisyphus). In Ukrainian literature existential problems — the freedom of the individual, choice in inhuman circumstances, dignity in the face of death — sound in Ivan Bahriany's novel The Garden of Gethsemane, in the poetry of Vasyl Stus, whose work and life became the embodiment of the existential choice of unbreakability, and in modern prose that reflects on the experience of totalitarianism and war.