Published in association with the Fakt Publishers (Kyiv), Його таємниця is a groundbreaking and innovative study of the literary legacy of the charismatic leader of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s, Mykola Khvylovy. A brilliant writer and essayist, Khvylovy also played a key role in the creation and life of Ukrainian literary and cultural organizations. One of the founders of the group Hart in 1923, he soon became dissatisfied with its toeing of the official line and left to establish the group Urbino and, later, the elitist Vaplite. He was the primary instigator and Literary Discussion of the 1920s (a pivotal event in Ukrainian intellectual history, one whose significance reaches far beyond issues of literary form and style) and a true leader of the Ukrainian cultural movement of the time. His suicide in 1933 was interpreted as a desperate act of protest against Stalin’s terror in Ukraine and the man-made famine-genocide of 1932-33.

Because of his personal charisma and the influence he exerted on his contemporaries as well as the complexity of his lyrical-ornamental texts, in the minds of most interpretors of his legacy, Khvylovy the writer was for many years overshadowed by Khvylovy the cultural leader. Leonid Pliushch’s revolutionary interpretation of Khvylovy’s prose, poems, and essays, shows him not as a political and cultural figure and sympathiser of the Communist ideology (albeit with a strongly Ukrainian national character), but as a master prose writer and a mystic who developed a sophisticated code of transcendental symbols and ideas closely linked to the mystical teaching of anthroposophy. On Khvylovy’s example, Pliushch re-interprets much of what has been assumed about the Ukrainian culture of the 1920s and uncovers mystical elements in the works of other Ukrainian and Russian ‘revolutionary’ writers.

With the introduction by Marko Robert Stech.

Leonid Pliushch

Його Таємниця або «прекрасна ложа» Xвильового

Екзод Тараса Шевченка