The Noble Escapism of Maksym Rylsky

Abstract

This article justifies Maksym Rylsky’s escapism as a deepening of being rather than a retreat from reality. Disinclined to participate in the vainglory and noisy, speculative manipulations of the Bol shevik regime and “proletarian literature”, the poet found himself in nature-philosophical lyric and in the worldview of the “natural man”, animated by joyful hedonism, Skovorodian philosophy, and Rousseauism, enriched by intellectual passion and the harmony of kalokagathia. Rylsky realized his vocation within a noble paradigm of Neoclassicism oriented toward a high ontology of culture,
Apollonian order in aesthetics, and a cardiocentric (Dionysian) mental vitality, as evidenced by his creative practice. He affirmed the continuing relevance of ancient, neo-European, and Ukrainian traditions–not only in contemporary literature but “here and now”—as inexhaustible sources for Anacreontic, Petrarchan, Parnassian, and world classical experience. Simultaneously, like other neoclassicists, Rylsky preserved a distinctive synthetic idiolect: he was acutely sensitive to the drama of his era, prescient of looming catastrophes, and resistant to them through criteria of artistic truth. While committed to strict stanzaic forms, he did not treat them as immutable canons; maintaining a sense of proportion, he adapted them without violating versification. Rylsky’s lyric emerges as a variant of Neoclassicism in which introverted immersion in a nature-philosophical microcosm returns the poet to the spacetime of spiritual being, revealing the world as a whole in its idiographic diversity. Escapism was his existential choice in the 1920s.