Expressionism

Expressionism is a Modernist movement of the early twentieth century (its flowering was in the 1910s and 1920s, above all in German-language culture) that strove for a sharpened, subjective expression of the human being's inner state — pain, horror, the cry of the soul before the chaos and catastrophes of the age. Expressionism renounces verisimilitude in favor of deformation, hyperbole, grotesque, and contrast; it is marked by tension, tragic pathos, and attention to the eternal, 'ultimate' questions of being. In world literature Expressionism is represented by the dramas of Georg Kaiser and by prose close to Franz Kafka. In Ukrainian literature the most powerful exponent of Expressionism was Vasyl Stefanyk: his terse, striking novellas (The Stone Cross, The News, Maria) convey with inhuman force the tragedy of the peasant, despair, and death. Expressionist features also mark the dramaturgy of Mykola Kulish and the prose of the 1920s.