Prague School (of Ukrainian poets)

The Prague School is the conventional name for a creative grouping of Ukrainian émigré poets of the interwar era (1920s–1930s), associated with the centers of Ukrainian emigration in Prague, Poděbrady, and Warsaw. It was not a formal organization but a community of worldview: the Prague School was united by a statist, heroic, willful pathos, a cult of the strong personality, historicism, longing for the lost homeland, and the idea of national liberation. Its leading figures are Yevhen Malaniuk, Oleh Olzhych, Olena Teliha, Yurii Lypa, Oksana Liaturynska, and Leonid Mosendz. Their work, ideologically close to the Visnyk circle of Dmytro Dontsov, opposed manly, active heroism to decadent moods. The fate of many of the school's poets was tragic: Olena Teliha, arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, was presumably shot by the Nazis at Babyn Yar, and Oleh Olzhych was tortured to death by the Gestapo in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (1944). The Prague School is an important and highly artistic page of twentieth-century Ukrainian poetry.