The Art of Balance. Maksym Rylsky and His Time

This book is a biography of one of the most outstanding Ukrainian poets of the 20th century. It is about a descendant of a noble Ukrainian family, in which the struggle of two souls, Ukrainian and Polish, continued from generation to generation, the son of "that Thaddeus", a pupil of the Kyiv Old Community, a bright representative of the neoclassical group of five.

However, the young artist went to the "purity and simplicity" of neoclassicism, having experienced a period of admiration for the "dark towers" of symbolism, sinful temptations, "magic poison". The art of balance was established after the experience of opium visions, narcotic paradises, and the aestheticization of evil.

Searching for new values in a world forsaken by God, the poet equally appreciates Homer and Baudelaire, antiquity, and decadence. A separate storyline of the book is the story of Maksym Rylsky's coexistence with the Soviet regime, the analysis of his texts with a double bottom, cipher texts that convey for us the tragic collisions of the era of great terror. In the most difficult times, he remained faithful to his favorite muse, the religion of beauty and harmony.

Vira Aheieva is a professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy National University. Shevchenko Prize laureate.

The author of the books "Behind the Scenes of the Empire", "Martians on Khreschatyk", "Women's Space: the feminist discourse of Ukrainian Modernism", "Poetics of Paradox: intellectual prose of Viktor Petrov-Domontovych", "Apology of Modernity: outline of the 20th Century", "Roads and Middle Cross", "The Pattern on the Stone. Mykola Bazhan: a biography of a (non-)Soviet poet" and others.