Their contributions are indeed monumental, but Ukrainian cultural identity has also been shaped by a broader array of voices. In the shadows of canonical giants stand writers, critics, and artists whose work captured the complexities of nationhood, exile, and cultural resistance.
Figures such as Yevhen Malaniuk, Yuriy Shevelov, and others remind us that the Ukrainian literary tradition is not monolithic but richly textured.
Yevhen Malaniuk (1897–1968) was a soldier of the Ukrainian People's Republic and later a prolific poet in exile, where after the failure of Ukraine’s first attempt at independence (1917–1921), Malaniuk developed a literary aesthetic that refused sentimentalism or the peasant “soul” archetype dominant in 19th-century Ukrainian literature.
His work wrestled with questions of identity, dignity, and civilizational purpose. Unlike Shevchenko’s peasant-centered romanticism, Malaniuk’s poetry exudes elite ambition.
His invocation of Byzantium, the baroque, and Hellenic civilization was not ornamental, but rather a refusal to define Ukrainian identity solely through the binary of Slavic victimhood versus Russian domination.
In Malaniuk's poetic vision, culture must precede the state. Without a conscious elite, disciplined memory, and an intellectual class capable of shaping historical narrative, no real sovereignty could exist.
Yuriy Shevelov (1908–2002), a literary scholar, linguist, and essayist, is one of the most influential figures in Ukrainian intellectual history, particularly in the diaspora.
His linguistic research laid the groundwork for understanding the independence of the Ukrainian language from Russian, challenging decades of Soviet-imposed linguistic hierarchy.
Shevelov argued that the Soviet regime attempted not only to control Ukrainian literature but to rewrite its trajectory.
He reclaimed the legacy of Ukrainian modernist writers from the 1920s, such as Mykola Khvylovy and Valerian Pidmohylny, arguing that the state-mandated socialist realism of the 1930s was an imperial imposition rather than a natural development of Ukrainian language.
He dissects the Russocentric logic of Soviet literary policy, showing how even so-called “Ukrainian” literature was written within colonial grammars - both literally and metaphorically.
Another essential yet often overlooked figure is Emma Andijewska (1931), a poet and artist associated with the New York group of Ukrainian writers. Her surrealist poetry and paintings defy conventional interpretation, yet teem with allusions to Ukrainian folklore and mysticism.
Her work offers an alternative path to cultural memory - less historical and polemical than Malaniuk, less philological than Shevelov - but no less national. It shows that Ukrainian identity can be playful, mystical, and avant-garde, not just tragic or heroic.
A survivor of Soviet repression, Ivan Bahrianyi (1906–1963) wrote prose that captured the realities of life under totalitarianism.
His novel "The Garden of Gethsemane" is a gripping psychological and spiritual account of life in the NKVD (The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs abbreviated as NKVD, the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union) prison.
The protagonist of Bahrianyi’s fiction endures brutal interrogation but clings to an inner dignity that cannot be touched. Bahrianyi does not romanticize suffering.
Instead, he universalizes the Ukrainian condition—not in the sense of erasing its particularities, but in elevating its ethical weight.
He was also a political thinker and activist, whose writings - both literary and political - insisted on Ukraine's right to self-determination at a time when such claims were dangerous.
These voices are just a few among many - Olena Teliha, Mykola Khvylovy, Bohdan-Ihor Antonych and others - who form what might be called a "quiet canon" of Ukrainian literature: voices that speak with nuance, exile, complexity, and courage. Their works are political not because they deliver slogans, but because they explore the cultural architecture of freedom.
At a time when Ukraine is once again fighting for its cultural and political survival, rediscovering these figures is more than a scholarly act - it is an affirmation of a living tradition that defies erasure.
Ukrainian literature and arts have always been a voice of national identity—not just in the monumental names etched in textbooks, but also in the quieter, persistent voices that carried the flame in exile, in underground circles, or in marginal publications.
To engage with them is to grasp the full spectrum of what Ukraine has been - and what it aspires to be.
This publication was compiled with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation. It’s content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the International Renaissance Foundation.
