Novak S. Creative Activities of Volodymyr Birchak of the 20 - 40ies of the 20th century in Ukrainian Literary Process

The dissertation is a complex investigation of the creative activities of Volodymyr Birchak (1881 - 1952) - a writer, literary critic, publicist, and community figure. For the first time in the Ukrainian literary criticism the ideological and aesthetic paradigm of V.Birchak's published heritage of the 20 - 40ies of the 20th century as well as its thematic directionand the writer's individual style has been studied. Some unknown pseudonyms of V.Birchak have been deciphered. A great layer of unpublished letters and archival materials of the writer has been brought to the scientific circulation. The analysis of V.Birchak's prose discourse in Ukrainian literary context carried out in the dissertation makes it possible to arrive at the conclusion about many-sidedness of the writer's talent as well as about the necessity of further investigation of his literary heritage. It has been grounded in the thesis that in the 20 - 40ies of the 20th century V.Birchak proved to be a mature writer and highly qualified specialist in literature. A sound proof of that are first of all his short historical novels "Vasyl'ko Rostyslavych" (1923), "Volodar Rostyslavych" (1930, in 1941 edition - "The Great Victory"); "Proty Zakonu" ("Against the Law") (1936); "Na Novykh Zemlyakh" ("On the New Lands") (1938), "The Career" (1940), and two collections of short stories "Prytchi" ("The Parables") (1931) and "Zolota Skrypka" ("The Golden Violin") (1937). While working at the thesis the author has come to the сonclusion that the state-building ideas in the time of the greatest mobilization of spiritual forces of the Ukrainian nation were the basis of V.Birchak's outlook. The creative activity of the writer testifies to his sequence in the realization of the ideas of reconstruction. In his works the literary artist pays much attention to the life of an intellectual, a strong personality, seeing in him motive power in the society. Trying to ruin triteness and stereotypes, the writer diminishes the role of descriptions, and hisworks are characterized by principal non-ethnographism but by turning to the mysteries of subconsciousness.