The All-Encompassing Eye of Ukraine : Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi's Realist Prose

One of the most important realist novelists of nineteenth-century Ukraine, Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi was caricatured and then forgotten by a generation of literary modernists who rejected his aesthetic and ideological views. In The All-Encompassing Eye of Ukraine, Maxim Tarnawsky presents a thorough and much-needed reexamination of Nechui-Levyts'kyi and his work. A solitary, modest man whose chief interest was in promoting and defending a Ukrainian identity threatened by the cultural policies of the Russian Empire, Levyts'kyi’s writing described Ukraine, its people, its culture, and the forces threatening it. A satirist who attacked modernism and cosmopolitanism, he wrote in a style marked by what Tarnawsky calls non-purposeful narration – slow-paced humour built on rhetorical finesse rather than on plot or character development. A vital reconsideration of a significant Ukrainian novelist written by the foremost expert on his work, The All-Encompassing Eye of Ukraine deepens and expands our understanding of Ukraine’s nineteenth-century literature.