8 terms
VAPLITE
VAPLITE (the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature) is a literary organization that operated in Kharkiv from 1926 to 1928 and united the most talented Ukrainian writers of the renaissance era around the idea of a highly professional, European-oriented national literature. Its ideological leader was Mykola Khvylovy, and its members included Pavlo Tychyna, Mykola Kulish, Yurii Yanovsky, Mykola Bazhan, Oles Dosvitnii, and Arkadii Liubchenko. VAPLITE opposed mass-ism and provincialism and defended quality, craftsmanship, and an orientation toward 'psychological Europe' (Khvylovy's slogan 'On to Europe!'). Under ideological pressure and accusations of 'nationalism' the organization was forced to dissolve itself in 1928. VAPLITE became a symbol of Ukrainian culture's struggle for creative freedom and national dignity, and most of its members were later destroyed in the era of the Executed Renaissance.
Vernacular
Vernacular comprises words, forms and phrases of lowered, everyday speech that lie on the border of the literary norm or beyond it and are marked by a shade of coarseness, familiarity or informality. Vernacular has neither the territorial limitation of a dialect nor the social closedness of jargon, but constitutes a nationwide lowered register of oral communication. In literature vernacular elements individualise a personage's speech, attest to their educational and social level, reproduce the atmosphere of everyday life, create a comic or character-building effect. The introduction of vernacular requires artistic motivation and a sense of measure. Vernacular borders on colloquial vocabulary, dialectisms and vulgarisms and is studied by stylistics and the culture of language in the aspect of stylistic differentiation and the normativity of speech.
Verse Epistle
The verse epistle (poslannia) is a lyric or lyric-publicistic work in the form of the poet's address to a particular person, a group of people, or an entire nation, expressing reflections, appeals, admonitions, or friendly feelings. The genre descends from the verse letters of the Roman Horace (the Epistle to the Pisos, known as the Ars Poetica). The epistle combines the intimate confidingness of a letter with publicistic passion. In Ukrainian literature the most famous example of the genre is Taras Shevchenko's epistle To the Dead, the Living, and the Unborn Countrymen of Mine in Ukraine and Not in Ukraine, a sharp, impassioned work addressed to his compatriots with a call for national awakening, unity, and labor for the sake of Ukraine. The epistle form was also used by Ivan Franko and Panteleimon Kulish.
Verse Novel
The verse novel is a synthetic lyric-epic genre that combines the epic breadth of a novelistic plot with the lyric element of verse language, authorial digressions, and heightened emotionality. This form allows one both to unfold the fates of characters and to express directly the authorial voice, reflections, and judgments. The European model of the genre is Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. In Ukrainian literature the verse novel acquired special weight: its summit is Lina Kostenko's Marusia Churai — a historical verse novel about the legendary song-maker of the era of the Khmelnytsky uprising, in which personal drama is joined to the fate of the nation and the language rises to philosophical heights. Close to the genre are also the great narrative poems of Taras Shevchenko and modern verse novels that combine plotted narration with meditative lyric and publicistic pathos.
Versification
Versification is the system of organising poetic speech through the rhythmic commensurability of lines, the feature that distinguishes verse from prose. Ukrainian versification evolved from the folk-song and duma tradition through the syllabic verse of the Baroque (Velychkovsky, Skovoroda) to the syllabo-tonic system, whose foundations were laid by Ivan Kotliarevsky's Eneida and which was developed by Taras Shevchenko, and further to the tonic and free forms of the twentieth century (Tychyna, Antonych, Bazhan). The scholarly study of versification — prosody — examines metre, rhythm, rhyme, stanza structure and the intonational-syntactic order. A versification type is defined by which linguistic units are counted to build rhythm: syllables, stresses, or their combination.
Vertep (Folk Puppet Drama)
The vertep is a Ukrainian folk puppet theater on Christmas themes that arose in the 17th–18th centuries among wandering clerics and students of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The vertep box had two tiers: on the upper one a religious drama about the birth of Christ, King Herod, and the massacre of the infants was played; on the lower one, a secular, comedic part with folk types (the Zaporozhian Cossack, the Old Man and Old Woman, the Gypsy, the soldier, the priest). The vertep combined the sacred and the comic, book drama and the folk element. Vertep texts were studied by Ivan Franko, Mykola Petrov, and Yosyp Fedas. The vertep tradition, interrupted in Soviet times, has been actively revived since the 1990s. Vertep dramaturgy influenced the formation of Ukrainian drama — from interludes to the theater of Les Kurbas.
Vesnianka
The vesnianka (also hayivka or hahilka) is a ritual song of the spring cycle by which a community summoned spring, warmth, and the awakening of nature. Vesniankas were performed mainly by the young — girls led round-dances by the church or on the meadow, combining song with rhythmic movement, games, and playlets ('The Crooked Dance,' 'The Poppy,' 'The Millet'). The songs echo agrarian and love motifs and the magic of fertility. The genre belongs to the oldest strata of Slavic folklore. Vesniankas inspired professional artists: Mykola Lysenko created choral arrangements of them, and the image of the spring-summoning song became a recurring one in the poetry of Lesia Ukrainka and Pavlo Tychyna (the collection 'Clarinets of the Sun'). They were collected by Volodymyr Hnatiuk and Filaret Kolessa.
Vulgarism
A vulgarism is a coarse, crude or abusive word or expression that lies beyond the literary norm and violates established notions of the propriety of speech. In everyday communication vulgarisms testify to a low culture of language, yet in literature they may fulfil a stylistic function: they individualise a personage's speech, attest to their social milieu, psychological state or emotional excitement, create a lowered, comic or exposing effect. The introduction of a vulgarism must always be artistically motivated, for its unwarranted use destroys the aesthetic quality of the text. Vulgarisms border on colloquialism, jargon and abusive vocabulary and are studied by stylistics in the aspect of the correlation of the normative and the non-normative, the "high" and the "low" in the language of a literary work.
