У статті зроблено спробу простежити загальні зміни в традиційному потрактуванні образу міста в українській літературі (від полінгвістичних текстів у давньому письменстві до поезії неокласиків). Ключовим для аналізу стала бінарна опозиція "місто-село", властива українській літературі ХІХ століття, що пізніше змістилася до протиставлення провінційного міста та міста столичного (або ж історичного величного міста, древнього).
Introduction. Throughout the poetic way in the work of the neoclassicists became the city – not only the artistic embodiment of time and space, but also a peculiar character: the witness of the past, a silent companion, to which the poets appealed in philosophical cognitions of the transience of being. The city captured the neoclassical poets with grandeur and ancient beauty that contrasted so well with the post -revolutionary reality.
Purpose is an analysis of the key dominant in the aesthetic interpretation of the image of the city in Ukrainian literature from a long period to the work of Mykola Zerov.
Methods – cultural historical and descriptive.
Results. The image of the city, recorded in the works of Ukrainian literature of different periods, in particular in the literature of the Renaissance and Baroque era, has undergone a substantial aesthetic rethinking. Poetry of the Renaissance literature created the image of a magnificent city. Originality. There is a lot of scientific research on the work of Mykola Zerov, but the change in the aesthetic concept of interpreting the city in the historical aspect in the poetry of Mykola Zerov was not considered.
Conclusion. The interpretation of the image of the city in the poetry of M. Zerov is built around the idea of the city as a spiritual center, a place where ancient architecture recorded the flow of time, the greatness of generations. The binary opposition "city-village" inherent in the previous literary tradition is preserved, but transformed in the poetry of M. Zerov, as well as in other neoclassical poets: an ancient city, a beautiful, majestic, calm city, opposes the city to the provincial, mostly quiet, everyday fussy, gray and unattractive. In the poetic image of the city, the motif of the city of the future, updated by the revolutionary time, as a place of realization of dreams and desires, treasures of opportunities, was also impregnated. In the first half of the nineteenth century, writers begin to see the city as the center of inattention, hypocrisy and covetousness – there is an opposition "city-village". In the second half of the nineteenth century, such an opposition deepened, modifying it in a realistic way. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, this tendency begins to weaken somewhat. Neoclassicists, in particular, M. Zerov, return to the Renaissance-Baroque interpretation of the image of the city as the value of the historical, cultural, center of spiritual life.
