The Ukrainian Avant-Garde and Its Roots: The Poetics of Mykola (Nik) Bazhan

In his nomination of Mykola Bazhan for the 1970 Nobel Prize,1 Omeljan Pritsak, the founder of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, proposes Bazhan’s early period—his most controversial and stylistically diverse—as crucial for understanding the nature of his poetic talent. It is the works of Bazhan’s first literary decade, ranging from his debut publication in 1923 to a panegyric for Stalin in 1932, that secured him a place in Ukrainian Soviet literature.2 Pritsak especially singles out Bazhan’s second poetry collection, The Sculpted Shadow, and