This chapter takes a transnational perspective on the development of Ukrainian literary theory in the interwar period, exploring the interplay between early Soviet literary criticism and the intellectual contributions of Ukrainian émigré scholars. It focuses in particular on how Heinrich Wölfflin’s concept of the "style of the era" was perceived in the intellectual context of the late Russian Empire, further developed in early Soviet literary debates, and later rearticulated with renewed significance in Western academic discourse. A central figure in this trajectory is Dmytro Chyzhevs'kyi, who began formulating his typology of literary styles in the early 1940s. Almost all of his major works on literary history, as well as his many articles on Slavic literatures – particularly Ukrainian, Russian, and Czech – are structured around a paradigm that views literary history as a wave like succession of "styles of the era," conceived as a universal pattern applicable to most European literatures.
This contribution argues that the pre-revolutionary Russian and early Soviet intellectual environment – particularly non-Marxist literary theories of the 1920s – played a decisive role in shaping Chyzhevs'kyi's ideas. His concept of cultural-historical epochs, far from being an isolated innovation, emerges as a synthesis of com peting methodologies and periodization schemes debated within early Soviet and émigré academic circles. This study proposes that Chyzhevs'kyi's stylistic periodization of Ukrainian literature expanded and systematized approaches emerged before 1917 Revolution and developed in early Soviet literary criticism. His method represents a synthetic model that brings together some philosophical, historical, ideological and literary-critical perspectives – reflecting the polymathic intellectual type shaped by pre-revolutionary imperial academic tradition. In this sense, Chyzhevs'kyi's work stands as a synthesis of the most advanced achievements in Ukrainian, Russian, and European literary theory during the interwar period.