(Non)peripheral Modernism: Transculturality, Bohemia, and the Locus of a Café

The paper analyzes contemporary interpretations of modernism as a global literary and cultural phenomenon. It applies the concept of transculturality, which demonstrates how provinces liberate themselves from the power of the center and how they interact with it—with attention to both the cultural dominance of centers and the creativity of peripheral practices. Ukrainian modernism is viewed as a variant of (non)peripheral modernism based on transculturality, which treats the periphery as an equal participant in the symbolic exchange of cultural values and experiences within the European modernist network. This approach revises the concept of the metropolis as the cultural capital of modernism—such as Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—and analyzes modernism in terms of the transfer of cultural tastes, types of consciousness, and the modern image of the artist, primarily associated with a bohemian lifestyle. In this case, modernism emerges as a network based on the technological and communicative model of information transfer that is characteristic of the modern era. The transcultural approach surpasses the model of undifferentiated imitation of a pan-European trend by national cultures seeking to fit into the general European cultural process. The example of the “Young Muse” group reveals the mediating role of transnational contacts practiced by Ukrainian modernist authors of the late 19th century in spreading new artistic tendencies. Bohemianism is examined as the sociocultural and psychological environment in which a new modernist consciousness emerged and spread during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using the examples of Osyp Shpytko’s story “Vyrid”, Vasyl Pachovsky’s story “Zhertva shtuky” (“The Victim of Art”), and the works of Mykhailo Yatskiv, the paper demonstrates the bohemian type of sensuality and its transcultural nature. It also examines the role of the coffee shop as a ‘third space’ and a form of cultural transfer during the modernist period.