Avant-garde is a direction in the literature of the 20th century associated with the

destruction of traditional forms and canons. Avant-garde stylistic movements

include futurism, expressionism, constructivism, dadaism, surrealism, imagism,
abstractionism, cubism. Predecessors of avant-garde are the late Renaissance and
romanticism. With the late Renaissance, the avant-garde brings together social and
artistic utopianism, with romanticism - subjectivism, agnosticism, immersion in the
irrational, dynamism, fragmentation, targeting the future, understanding intuition
as the main creative source, a critical attitude to the rational worldview, opposition
to the worldview of the Enlightenment. Avant-garde connects rejection of realism
with modernism. Modernism is characterized by a selectively critical attitude
towards traditions, avant-garde — in opposition to the past.
In avant-garde, the components of Freudism and Marxism are more prominent than
in modernism. Avant-garde is characterized by an atmosphere of rebellion, an
apocalyptic outlook on the world, an experiment with form. Vanguardists created a
new type of hero — a strong-willed, spiritually active person. They declared active
masculinity, inheriting Nietzsche's superior attitude towards women as an
"incomplete" man. Nietzsche believed that a woman is an imperfect being, capable
of realizing herself only through childbirth.
A sign of the avant-garde movement is the manifesto — it is a component of
poetics and a document of the era. At the heart of the manifesto is the idea of
spiritual freedom from traditions and social conditions. Vanguardists believe that
only a free person can create a new era and a new language, they appeal to instinct,
because it is a primal feeling, uncomplicated by civilizational and cultural taboos.
Proponents of avant-garde defend the concept of an irrational, intuitive type of
perception, call for the knowledge of hallucinations, dreams, choose the role of
clowns, fools, and heretics.
The majority of literary critics count avant-garde from 1909-1910, that is, from the
appearance of the first futurist manifestos. To reduce the literary avant-garde to
futurism: O. Ilnytskyi, S. Pavlychko, V. Morenets, O. Bobrynska. But avant-garde
includes many other stylistic currents, among them - Dadaism, Surrealism,
Imagism, Constructivism. Therefore, the problem of the lower chronological limit
of the avant-garde remains debatable.
The European avant-garde had three periods of development: early (before the
First World War), mature (between the wars), neo-avant-garde (trans-avant-garde)
— after the Second World War. The development of avant-garde in Ukraine was
stopped by the rule of socialist realism, some of its features were restored in the
60s of the 20th century. In the 1980s, it acquired features of neo-avant-garde.