«Сковородинівський» текст в українських драматургії і театрі 1980–1990-х років

The article considers “Skovorodian text” in Ukrainian drama and theatre of the 1980s and 1990s, the actualization of which marks a return to a non-mimetic type of artistic thinking that coincides in time with the manifestation of postmodern tendencies based on conventionality, openness, freedom, experimentation, and reinterpretation. This phenomenon was in line with artistic practices of modernist, predominantly unrealistic, drama the development of which was artificially interrupted by the repressive totalitarian machine in the 1930s.The processes of changing the artistic language that started in Ukrainian culture in the 1960s (chimeric prose, Ukrainian poetic cinema, the poetry of 60s generation etc.) were successfully implemented in the 1990s, when artists became free from totalitarian ideological pressure and censorship. In drama and theatre, the process of overcoming the matrix of socialist realism took longer but ended in the 1980s and 1990s with the emergence of the “new wave” generation of playwrights and directors consisted of the artists from several generations.Appeal to the Baroque era and the figure of its bright representative Hryhorii Skovoroda can be interpreted as a sign of the formal and substantive renewal of art, indicating both a change of an ideological vector and aesthetic platform. Skovoroda as somehow a national archetype appears as an embodiment of freedom, creativity, anti-utilitarianism, Ukrainianness, and Christian asceticism.The article focuses on the reception of Hryhorii Skovoroda’s worls as well as his image or the image of “Skovorodian” man in the plays “The Gadren” (1971) and “Vertep” (1972) by Valerii Shevchuk that were successfully staged by young directors in new theatre centers where a literary text was considered not only an illustration, but also a reason for your own theatrical statement. Valerii Shevchuk’s play “The Garden” was staged by director Oleksiy Kuzhelnyi at the newly established Kyiv Academic Theater Arts Workshop “Suzirya” in 1989 under the title “The Garden of Divine Songs”, which is polysemantic in the cultural space of Ukraine. The “Vertep” also began its stage history in 1989 courtesy of the director Vitalii Malakhov and the Kyiv Academic Drama Theatre on Podil.Special attention is paid on the performance “The Grateful Erodius” was introduced to the audience in 1993 by Volodymyr Kuchynskyi, the director of the Les Kurbas Lviv Academic Theatre (founded in 1988 as the Youth Studio Theatre), who developed a theatre philosophy based not so much on the plot as on the play; such a worldview correlates with the conception by Les Kurbas, whose name in the theatre’s name is also a declaration of the connection between generations and a return to searchTherefore, the themes Ukrainian thinker’s life and his intellectual heritage were actively present in the culture of the twentieth century, namely in the era of modernism and at the turn of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, when Ukrainian culture was in the process of absorbing the postmodern experience.