85. Cultural meaning of Shistdesiatnyky

The Sixtiers (Russian: Шестидесятники) were representatives of а new generation of the Soviet Intelligentsia, most of whom were born between 1925 and 1950, and entered the culture and politics of the USSR during the late 1950s and 1960s — after the Khrushchev Thaw. Their worldviews were formed by years of Stalin's repressions and purges, which affected many of the sixtiers' immediate families; and World War II, where many of them had volunteered to fight.

Sixtiers were distinguished by their liberal and anti-totalitarian views, and romanticism that found vivid expressions in music and visual arts. Although most of the Sixtiers believed in Communist ideals, they had come to be strongly disappointed with Stalin's regime and its repression of basic civil liberties.

Many of the Sixtiers were intellectuals of roughly two strains: the "physicists" (those involved in the technical sciences) and the "lyricists" (writers, theater and film professionals and otherwise liberal arts representatives). Bard (singer-songwriter) culture, poetry, disillusionment in politics, and love for camping trips to the farther regions of the Soviet Union were some of the common attributes and pastimes of the Sixtiers.

86 Shistdesiatnyky: main representatives in Ukrainian literature

Shistdesiatnyky (also Shestydesiatnyky; The Sixtiers). The literary generation that began to publish in the second half of the 1950s, during Nikita Khrushchev's ‘de-Stalinization,’ and reached their literary peak in the early 1960s.

The first representatives were Lina Kostenko and Vasyl Symonenko. Following their lead came a veritable proliferation of poets: Ivan Drach, Mykola Vinhranovsky, H. Kyrychenko, Vasyl Holoborodko, Ihor Kalynets, B. Mamaisur, and others. At first Vitalii Korotych was close to the group. The more prominent prose writers were Valerii Shevchuk, Hryhir Tiutiunnyk, Volodymyr Drozd, Yevhen Hutsalo, and Ya. Stupak, and literary critics, Ivan Dziuba, Yevhen Sverstiuk. The shistdesiatnyky held their ‘literary parents’ responsible for Stalinist crimes, for adapting to a despotic regime, and for creative impotence. Characteristic of shistdesiatnyky poetry was the renewal of poetic forms and subjects, which had been stamped out by the dogma of socialist realism. The prose of the group was characterized by realistic descriptions free of the constraints of socialist realism, witty humor (as in the short stories of Tiutiunnyk) or sharp satire (as in Drozd's ‘Katastrofa’ [Catastrophe] and ‘Maslyny’ [Olives]), subtle delineation of the motives of protagonists, and an interest in historical subjects (as in the works of Shevchuk).