This volume, originating from a workshop held at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in December 2022, brings Dmytro Chyzhevs’kyi to the forefront of contemporary literary scholarship. A pioneering Ukrainian-German scholar and founder of a comparative approach to Slavic literatures within a broader European framework, Chyzhevs’kyi produced influential work on literature, culture, and philosophy spanning from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Forced to leave Ukrainian lands in 1921 under the threat of persecution as a Menshevik, he spent most of his life in exile. His teaching and research in Prague, Halle, Harvard, and Heidelberg, along with his simultaneous engagement in multiple scholarly communities, make him a key figure for understanding the transnational history of literary theory – particularly Formalism – and its circulation between East and West across shifting political and intellectual borders. Alongside Roman Jakobson, Chyzhevs’kyi may be considered a key figure of 20th-century Slavic literary studies. His work on models of literary and art-historical periodization, his comparative study of Slavic literatures, and his transregional research on the European Baroque represent major contributions to the historical and theoretical foundations of Slavic studies within a European context.