Pamphlet

The pamphlet is a sharp publicistic-satirical work of an exposing character, directed against a particular social-political system, ideology, social phenomenon, or specific person; it is distinguished by an impassioned, polemical tone, withering irony, and open tendentiousness. Unlike the feuilleton, the pamphlet is larger in scale, more ideologically pointed, and often touches on fundamental questions of social life. The genre has an ancient tradition of political polemic (the pamphlets of the Reformation era, Jonathan Swift). In Ukrainian literature an outstanding pamphleteer was Mykola Khvylovy, whose pamphlets of the 1920s — Quo Vadis?, Thoughts Against the Current — became a manifesto of the nation's cultural self-assertion and its decisive orientation toward Europe. The publicistic sharpness of the pamphlet also marked the early polemical prose of Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka.