Neoromanticism

Neoromanticism is a stylistic current of early Modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that revived, on new ground, the romantic pathos of the strong, willful personality, of heroic aspiration, dream, and the opposition of a lofty ideal to gray everyday life, but combined it with Modernist refinement of form. Neoromanticism sings of the spirit of struggle, of self-sacrifice in the name of an ideal, and of the beauty of an indomitable will. World parallels are the work of Knut Hamsun and the early Maxim Gorky. In Ukrainian literature Neoromanticism became the worldview core of the work of Lesia Ukrainka, who herself defined her movement thus: her dramatic poems (The Possessed, In the Wilderness, The Stone Host) and the fairy drama The Forest Song affirm the heroic personality, fidelity to an ideal, and unbreakable spirit. Neoromantic pathos also sounds in the early poetry of Oleksandr Oles and in the heroic motifs of later authors.