Based on the material of the literary-critical, philosophical, political and journalistic essays of the thinker of all periods of his creativity, for the first time the literary heritage was analyzed as a definite national-philosophical and semantic integrity, as a national-existential phenomenon in the history of Ukrainian literary criticism of the 20th century. The most important hermeneutical and methodological ideas of D. Dontsov (national centrism, idealism, voluntarism, heroism) were clarified and interpreted; the national and philosophical specificity of Dontsov's understanding of the creativity of I. Kotlyarevsky, N. Gogol, T. Shevchenko, I. Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, V. Stefanik, M. Cheremshina, N. Khvylevy, O. Teligi, as well as other representatives of ancient and classical literature, narodniks, modernists, vestnikovites, Soviet writers, was examined; the artistic-axiological paradigm of the thinker and the historical and literary concepts clarified by him have been interpreted in the work.
D. Dontsov is primarily a political philosopher, and therefore nationalist hermeneutics becomes for him the main way of understanding cultural, including literary phenomena and patterns that directly affect the political life of the nation. The debatable experience of D. Dontsov is based on essential principles: national centrism, idealism, voluntarism, heroism. Attention is focused on the fact that D. Dontsov's creative activity in the ontological and existential understanding is deeply rooted in the life of the nation, is based on nationalism as a form of culture, has an expressive national-creative character, is aimed at affirmation of the national identity on the basis of the Ukrainian idea and under colonizing pressure finds its interpretative expression in the interpretation of literary texts as a spiritual-worldview system of values of a writer.
Western neo-romanticism is regarded as a national-modern literary trend, firmly entrenched in the knightly, and simultaneously heroic, mystical, artistic tradition of ancient literature, in the works of T. Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka. Its philosophical and aesthetic basis is the nationalist world view, the heroic, courageous philosophy of tragic optimism, the philosophy of life as a struggle. The main features of neo-romanticism were: national centrism, subjectivity, voluntarism, heroism, activism, dynamism, religiosity, idealism, occidentalism, irrationalism, belligerence, freedom-loving, bigotry, nobility (perfection) of style and so on.
