Ukrainian Culture in the USSR 5 страница

Throughout his literary career Rylsky also did many literary translations. An excellent example of his mastery of the art is his translation of Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz. His translations from French are of a similarly high standard, from the classics of the 17th century to the poetry of Paul Verlaine, in particular the translations of Victor Hugo's Hernani, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, and Voltaire's La Pucelle d'Orlé ans. He also translated William Shakespeare's King Lear and Twelfth Night, and Aleksandr Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin.

Like most of the Soviet poets of the interwar generation, Rylsky did not manage to revitalize his writing at the beginning of ‘de-Stalinization, ’ and his work remained merely technically proficient versification. Rylsky achieved much, however, in his role of community activist and publicist and contributed greatly to the brief literary rebirth of the early 1960s. In his essays and articles of that period, which are collected in publications such as Vechirni rozmovy (Evening Conversations, 1962) and Pro mystetstvo (On Art, 1962), he carefully and tactfully, though unflaggingly, defended Ukrainian culture against the pressure of Russification. Rylsky was not so much an innovator in Ukrainian poetry as a practitioner of classic verse, the sonnet form in particular. He contributed more than any of his contemporaries to the development of the Ukrainian literary language.

The next sub-period of Soviet culture is usually identified with Stagnation or Brezhnev period (1970s–mid-1980s). It is marked by official propagating of “Soviet values”. Then the increasingly modernized Soviet society became more urban, and people became better educated and more professionalized. There was a fourth fold growth in the higher education between the 1950s and 1980s; that development was referred to as the scientific-technological revolution. Scientific fields of genetic and computer science got impulse for the development. Pressure remained in the spheres of history and social sciences.

The development of culture in Ukraine of that period was contradictory. Achievements in natural sciences and technological development were considerable. The first electronic calculating machine was constructed by Soviet scholars in 1950s. V. Glushkov, the founder of informational technologies in the USSR, one of the founders of cybernetics worked in Kiev. P. Paton, present President of National Academy of Science of Ukraine is a world wide known specialist in electric welding.

Lecture 9