The Shore of Expectations

In his monograph Simone Bellezza reconstructs the history of the shistdesiatnyky—the generation of Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals who spearheaded the renaissance of Ukrainian national culture in the 1960s. His analysis begins with the awakening of artistic and literary expression during the so-called Soviet Thaw and describes the varied relationship that Ukrainian artists and writers had with the Soviet authorities until the mass arrests and repressions of intellectuals in January 1972. Dr. Bellezza has consulted a wide range of sources: official and samvydav (samizdat) publications, archival documents (including those preserved in the former archive of the KGB in Kyiv), interviews, and many unpublished sources that were previously ignored in the historiography of the period. Bellezza presents the movement of the shistdesiatnyky in all of its complexity. It was a fundamental stage in the development of Ukraine as a modern nation but also a typically Soviet phenomenon linked to broader Soviet culture.