Language

In the final years of the Brezhnev era, when the General secretary of the Communist Party was granted membership ticket number one in the All-Soviet Writers Union, the language used by Ukrainian writers became totally contrived. Poems and novels were written in a beautiful, stylistically perfect but unreal idiom good only as material for lexicographers. Reams of attention were devoted to increasingly trivial subjects. In reality, the work was composed in a language spoken neither by the writers themselves nor even by the professors of literature. The party elite used only Russian, with the famous strong Ukrainian accent of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachov and many others noticeable and annoying to native Russians. On the street, slang was spoken, a barbaric Russian-Ukrainian mixture, blistered with profanities. Only in Western Ukrainian cities did an urban Ukrainian milieu exist with a more or less developed spoken Ukrainian urban dialect. But it never found its way into literature. Nor was real life an object of Ukrainian writing. Short stories by Hryhir Tiutiunnyk, who committed suicide in 1980, may be the single exception. Heroes of Ukrainian novels never made love, they never mentioned the existence of ever-present KGB and informers who infiltrated the whole society; never pointed out the banality of party rituals; they never listened to «enemy radio voices» at night, never told dirty stories. They were, in fact, pathetic, loyal, and totally unreal.

Prose was doomed to be a secondary genre in the Ukrainian literary hierarchy. A realistic urban novel in Ukrainian could not have been written. There was barely enough substance for a short story. «Village prose» was central, not because of primitive populism and the patriarchal spirit of its authors, but because its language had something to point to. The village had not been Russified. Under the Soviets, historical novels flourished. They were even quite popular, although they were heavily censored, and were supposed to reflect the official version of national history.

The new generation of prose writers who emerged in the mid 1980s bring to literature an urban drive and a deliberately shocking naturalism. The biggest concern of the new generation is to appropriate new layers of the language, never used in written texts. Sex, for instance, which appeared on the pages of literary texts for the first time several years ago, is often there merely to give the artist an excuse for exercising new vocabulary. The generation born in the 50s and 60s tries to describe situations which have never been written about before.