Idyll

The idyll is a short lyric-epic work depicting the carefree, harmonious life of a person in the lap of nature — mostly rural, pastoral life, an idealized calm and concord. The genre was inaugurated by the ancient Greek poet Theocritus with his bucolics and developed by the Roman Virgil in his Eclogues. The idyll contrasts the peaceful simplicity of country life with the vanity and vices of the city. In Ukrainian literature idyllic motifs are organically woven into the poetry of Taras Shevchenko — the image of a harmonious Ukrainian village (A Cherry Orchard by the House; And I Grew Up in a Foreign Land), where family peace and the beauty of nature appear as a lost paradise. Elements of the idyll are also present in the prose of Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko and in the landscape lyric of Maksym Rylsky and Volodymyr Sosiura.