A catfish for your thoughts: ukrainian literature at the turning point

A catfish for your thoughts: ukrainian literature at the turning point

In 1798, the first three parts of The Aeneid, a parody of Virgil, appeared in St. Petersburg. Its author, Ivan Kotliarevskyi, Marshall of the Poltava assembly of the nobility, never intended to publish his poem, which he’d written for the amusement of a small circle of friends. The Aeneid was, in fact, the first literary piece written in modern Ukrainian and became the starting point of the so-called new Ukrainian literature, opening a literary era only now coming to an end.

Over these 200 years, the main traditions of modern Ukrainian literature were formed. It was through literature that, gradually, the idea of a notional project came into being. Nationalism went hand in hand with romanticism. Writers became the key spokesmen for national ideas. Ukrainian writers from that time on often focused on what seemed a distant goal: the glorious moment when Ukraine would gain independence and statehood. Under brutal pressure from the colonizing power (at first Russia, and then the USSR) literatures task was to enlighten the nation. Writers were invariably called on to perform numerous non-literary roles — as politicians and economists, articulating alternative models of social development, lawyers, arguing for the rights of individuals and nations, and as scholars, defending Ukrainian claims in historical, ethnographic and other research.

Efforts to fight against populist ideas, to modernize the culture, and to enlarge the limits of the national project became central themes of debate within the culture. The struggle became especially dramatic between 1880 and 1920. Around 1929 the debates stopped, and all intellectual discussions receded deep into the subsurface. Today, Ukrainian scholarship is only beginning to reevaluate and reinterpret its national cultural heritage.

All Ukrainian writers faced at least two crucial choices. First, one had to decide what language to write in: Russian or Ukrainian. Secondly, a writer had to choose between the populist notion that art was only a vehicle for the communication of the national idea and, its competing claim, that art needed to be free of any social ideology. Whatever they decided on this second matter, the personal fate of the writer was the same: Ukrainian writers — those who wrote in Ukrainian — were expunged, exiled or executed by a hostile state.

After their deaths, these martyrs assumed their place in the national mythology and became fragments of the country’s iconostasis. They were worshipped as national heroes. Books such as Shevchenko’s Kobzar became gospels of the independence movement. The list of such sacred texts is long. These books were treated as great codes, which clearly carried symbolic meaning. Their encoded message was much more significant than their literary aesthetic content. And the best of the texts about these texts also became a form of secret writing. Practically all writing about Ukrainian culture always presumed the existence of another layer of meaning, even if the author deliberately avoided any hint of a national project.

There is a saying that «a poet in Russia is more than just a poet,» but in totally russified Ukraine at the beginning of the 1980s, writers remain the only bearers of the written Ukrainian language, national culture, and literary tradition. In this sense even the most faithful socialist realists presented some political danger to the colonizing power because they relied on the suspect, half-prohibited language.

This epoch — from Kotliarevskyi to the 1980s — has exhausted its meaning. In the case of such exemplary stylists as Oles’ Honchar, whose works could be the model for a handbook of good grammar, we can say the epoch has even degenerated. However, today, a life pledged to Ukrainian literature is no longer tantamount to a recitation of the Nicene creed. The future — the main goal of the national project — has been implemented. A dream came true. And only the present remains. There is nothing to put on a pedestal, the Utopian vision of the future has been corrected by the brutal reality of a post-colonial economic crisis. A void has replaced former dreams, illusions and principles. All genres of literature and criticism are now in crisis. The shift of ideological parameters, styles, and rhetoric is painful. It is aggravated by a problem in the publishing industry and a generational conflict among members of the Writers’ Union. Many acknowledged celebrities of the recent past, whose books are no longer published or read, declare that Ukrainian literature is dying. The «angry young men,» on the other hand, express contempt toward the generation of «fathers» despite the latter’s contribution to the national project, and their contribution to the liberation movement. These rebels are most acutely resentful of their former mentors.

While there is no future any more, the present is banal and disappointing. As a result, the past has become the focus of intellectual attention. And there are two standard approaches toward it. The first approach is idealization. At times the past takes on the role once played by the future. New Utopias are created of cossackdom, Kyivan Rus, pre-Christian times, women’s high status under the Hetmanate, even a Ukrainian matriarchy, an ideal peasant community, a national church, etc. The other approach proposes a critical stance in which icons are defaced and former gods unmasked.

The abolition of censorship and the long-awaited tearing down of iron curtains nevertheless came as a shock. Ukrainian culture is discovering for itself that twentieth century so long forbidden it: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre, with modernist experimentation, pessimism, negation of traditional humanistic values and post-modern satiation, along with all other attendant philosophies and personal experiments. Ukrainian authors are trying to find their place in world culture. Symptoms of post-modern awareness are obvious in the youngest generation of Ukrainian writers, although on the whole the development looks paradoxical, taking into consideration the fact that Ukrainian literature has not managed to produce a mature modernist tradition. However, similar situations already occurred before. Ukrainian romanticism also never challenged the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment as, for obvious historical reasons, these never took place in Ukraine.