Movements
Classicism
Classicism is an artistic movement in European literature and art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that took ancient classics as its model and proclaimed the cult of reason, harmony, and clarity and the observance of strict rules. The aesthetics of Classicism (codified in Nicolas Boileau's Art of Poetry) demanded the unities of action, time, and place in drama, a clear division of genres into 'high' (tragedy, ode, epic) and 'low' (comedy, fable, satire), and the dominance of duty over feeling. World models are the tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine and the comedies of Molière. In Ukrainian literature Classicism arose in a specific form: the leading genres were not the 'high' but the 'low' ones, above all the burlesque-travesty Eneida of Ivan Kotliarevsky, as well as fables, satires, and comedies in which the living folk language was affirmed.
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Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Two styles of the 17th–18th centuries, opposite in worldview. The Baroque is built on contrast, dynamism, excess and splendour, on a sense of the drama of being and the contradiction of earthly and heavenly, inclining to allegory, metaphor and ornament (Ukrainian Baroque, Skovoroda). Classicism instead cultivates reason, measure, clarity and harmony, a strict hierarchy of genres and the rule of three unities, imitating antique models. The Baroque overwhelms with a luxuriance of forms; Classicism, with discipline and balance.
