«Кожний історичний етап спрямовує людину до активності...» (Листи Агапія Шамрая до Анастасії Ніженець 1945–1949 рр.)

The publication, based on archival materials, reconstructs for the first time the unknown pages of the biography of the Ukrainian literary critic Ahapii Shamrai after his return from Russia to Kyiv in August 1944. The scientist was accused of “bourgeois nationalism” and cosmopolitanism during two repressive campaigns of the late 1940s after his article “Lesia Ukrainka and English Literature (Episode One)” (1945). This work is a valuable study: comparing Shelley`s “Ozymandia” and Lesya Ukrainka’s “Inscription on the Ruin”, the Shamrai expresses a thesis about the genetic links between these texts. The main points of accusation against Shamrai were formulated in the slanderous article of Ilia Stebun and Abram Gosenpud – “Harmful “concepts” of Prof. Shamrai” (1947). If the participation of a party worker and a researcher of the Institute named after T. Shevchenko (Kyiv) Ilia Stebun in the defeat of Shamrai is obvious, the reason for the conflict between two scientists - Shamrai and Gozenpud, who were both engaged in the study of the legacy of Lesia Ukrainka, is currently difficult to explain. Also, four letters of Ahapii Shamrai to the literary critic Anastasia Nizhenets (1945-1949), with whom he had been connected since the 1930s by his interest in ancient Ukrainian literature, in particular the polemical treatises of Ivan Vyshenskyi, are being published firstly. The published letters allow us to reconstruct the life of literary critics in the 1940s in Kyiv and Kharkiv, and to show the repressive campaigns against of researchers in this period inside.