Naturalism

Naturalism is a literary movement of the last third of the nineteenth century that developed and sharpened the principles of Realism, striving for the most precise, 'scientific' reproduction of reality on the basis of positivist philosophy. The Naturalists explained human behavior by the influence of heredity, physiology, and the social environment, and depicted the darkest, coarsest sides of life without embellishment, with documentary detail. The theorist and leading master of the movement was the Frenchman Émile Zola (the novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart); close to Naturalism are the Goncourt brothers and Guy de Maupassant. In Ukrainian literature naturalist tendencies — attention to physiology, social determinism, and the 'lower depths' of life — appeared in certain works of Ivan Franko (the Boryslav stories about the exploitation of workers), in the prose of Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and in early Ukrainian modernism, which assimilated the European experience.