Europe and us. In My [We], Autumn, 1933, pp. 95-106.

The article addresses a problem of Ukrainian literature manifested in writers’ tendency toward moralizing and agitation in favor of ready-made ideological programs such as socialism, nationalism, or Catholic messianism. The author criticizes this stance, emphasizing that under such conditions writers neither form nor offer their own worldview but merely retransmit party resolutions and generalized ideological directives. Instead, the article stresses the priority of immediate individual experience and the author’s personal переживання (lived experiences) as the foundation of literary creativity, which should prevail over abstract and universalized ideas.

Against this background, Rudnytskyi outlines characteristic features of European literature, including an understanding of literary creation as the expression of one’s own “self,” an attitude toward the reader as an equal interlocutor within the space of spiritual experience, a high level of the author’s education and maturity, and a rebellion against the standardization and normalization of the creative process. The absence of these features in the Ukrainian literary context, caused by a historical separation from the European cultural tradition, leads, according to the author, to the production of texts that lack relevance, reproduce generalized narratives, and have no direct connection with real life.

The article also emphasizes that appeals to morality, characteristic of Ukrainian writers, cannot be fruitful without philosophical reflection, while philosophy itself cannot exist in an enclosed context without open communication and intellectual interaction among thinkers.