The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural Study of the Shistdesiatnyky.

In his monograph The Shore of Expectations: A Study on the Culture of the Ukrainian Shistdesiatnyky Simone Bellezza reconstructs the history of the generation of intellectuals that promoted the renaissance of Ukrainian national culture in the 1960s. His analysis begins with the awakening of artistic expressiveness during the Thaw and describes the contrasted relationship between artists and writers on one side and Soviet authorities on the other, up to the pogrom of Ukrainian intellectuals in January 1972. Bellezza uses a wide range of different documents: from the official publications to the samizdat, from archival documents (including those preserved in the former archive of KGB in Kyiv) to interviews with the some of the shistdesiatnyky, thus including many unpublished sources that were ignored by previous historiography. The aim of this book is to present the shistdesiatnyky’s movement in all its complexity: the shistdesiatnytstvo was not only a fundamental stage in the development of Ukraine as a modern nation, but also a typically Soviet phenomenon, linked to the broader Soviet culture. The shistdesiatnyky were born in the 1930s and considered themselves the best product of the Soviet educational system: precisely for this reason the rediscovery of Ukrainian culture did not lead them to an automatic rejection of either Russian culture or socialism as an ideology. Conscious of the close and complex relations between the Russians and Ukrainians, the Ukrainian shistdesiatnyky condemned the traditional Great-Russian chauvinism that had passed from the Tsarist empire to the Soviet Union, but without renouncing the hope of being able to reform the USSR in a democratic and libertarian sense.