Prose

Prose is the liveliest game in town. Here the new cultural discourse is being forged. Here the contradictory nature of modern times, its growing sense of unease, is most strikingly reflected. The loss of the future, and the lack of a meaningful present, are the coordinates of the current spiritual crisis. The most absurd fantasies of Beckett or Ionesco lag behind the reality of socialism. The turn toward absurdity in East European literatures, including Ukrainian, is natural, even inevitable.

The new generation of novelists consists of people of different ages and background. For example, Yuri Vynnychuk, Bohdan Zholdak, Volodymyr Dibrova are in their 40s. Today they are publishing pieces often written some 15 years ago and read at underground literary gatherings since the end of the 1970s. They suffered both from not being able to publish as well as from being forced by political circumstances into leading a double life. Mykola Vorobyov, for example, a poet who after his publications of the 1960s was not published again for 18 years (1968–1985) worked during this period as a fireman. Most suffocated in the oppressive atmosphere of the 1970s. Those who withstood the test consider themselves a lost generation and feel that their artistic growth was seriously damaged.

Their much younger colleagues — Yevhen Pashkovskyi and Yuri Andrukhovych, who started their literary careers in the mid 1980s, were accepted and published despite the terrible problems of the publishing industry.

The five authors mentioned above, whose styles differ radically, nevertheless have much in common. They share a vision bereft of optimism, pathos, lightness. Life is seen in Hobbesian terms: nasty, brutish, and short. The new fiction is characterized by black humor, a wallowing in the seamy side of life, and surreal absurdity. It mocks everything: the national project, sacred symbols of the past and present, the sacred role of a Poet, who, as already mentioned, was more than a poet. Its authors label themselves avant-garde. However, nobody really cares about the true meaning of these definitions. The writers need above all to mock all types of socialist realism and use every chance to express their contempt for the bureaucracy of the official Writers’ Union, although they are themselves all members.

Yevhen Pashkovskyi, by general agreement, is the new star of the most recent Ukrainian literature. The world of his novel The Abyss (Bezodnia), published in the literary journal Suchasnist in 1992 (N 5, 6), is overwhelmingly bleak. His hero, a road-builder, nearly a tramp, roams around Ukraine looking for work. What little money he earns he quickly squanders on booze. The village, where his mother lives, is marked by terrible poverty. The city is hostile, alien. He has no home, not only in the real, but in the spiritual sense. As an anti-intellectual type from the lower depths, he speaks little and he does not think too much. He merely sees and feels and his chaotic feelings are reflected using stream of consciousness. Actually, his novel is one long phrase: a howl cry of pain and despair.

People brutalized by the former socialist society do not have any social consciousness or much internal resistance. The language of this, as well as Pashkovskyi’s other novels, echoes the vocabularies of those who never studied at universities or participated in any political actions. This is a language of those who never speak out, who have no voice at all, who do not have the right to have a voice in literature. This language is fantastic in its realism and variety.

The dark worlds of Yuri Andrukhovych are absolutely different. They are funny, grotesque, phantasmagoric, almost unreal. His style is bookish and playfully allusive, riddled with paraphrases and quotations. Most of the action in his books takes place within the distorted consciousness of his protagonists. The heroes of his novels, Recreations, 1992, and Moskoviada, 1993, are both poets and are both always drunk.

Moskoviada, subtitled «a horror story», is set in Moscow. The Ukrainian poet Otto von F. is a student of the notorious Gorky Literary Institute. He roams around Moscow for one day, like Stephen Dedalus in Dublin. Like Dedalus, he does not come to any philosophical or spiritual decisions. So Otto von F. wanders through Moscow without any visible aim, visiting dingy bars, lovers, Russian nationalist gatherings, secret tunnels of the Moscow subway where giant rats trained by the KGB to sabotage antigovernment rallies and gala meetings of «political corpses» (Lenin and Anatoli Ivanovich — the latter, no doubt, one of the organizers of the August 1991 coup — among them) are held. Moscow is real (its mud and greyness are real) and Moscow is also a symbolic embodiment of his hatred towards the Empire. Hatred, however, is spiritually paralyzing. It is a part of a terrible inferiority complex and a fear of his own inner emptiness. At the end, in his own imaginary literary world, he is killed; in the meantime, in real life, sick and drunk, Otto von F. takes the train for Kyiv. When the conductor asks him for his ticket, Otto offers him the totem he’s been carrying with him all day: a catfish.

The cultural discourse was never so complicated and polyphonic as it has now become. The above-mentioned writers stand in the literary center. However, there are some other points worth mentioning by way of providing some background on the new setting for Ukrainian literature.

Mass culture, which never existed in Ukraine, but which is quickly growing, is an interesting social phenomenon. There are at least two kinds — the first, populist, originally Ukrainian; and the other, cosmopolitan, which is formed along Western, mostly American, lines.

The paradigm of populist mass literature consists of an idealization of the past, the village and the peasant community, the mother and religion as the foundation of morality. Stylistically, this involves imitations of different forms of folk art, folk songs, tales, legends, and the Bible. It imposes its system of restrictions and norms of social and gender behavior. Everything inside the system, everything local, «ours» is seen as positive; everything outside the system, foreign, not Ukrainian, is bad. The idea of national authenticity and spirituality is at its center. Evil came from outside; Ukrainians themselves are innocent.

This second kind of mass culture, based on Western models, promoting sex and violence, has an enormous audience in the former Soviet countries, since it offers a primitive outlet for the destructive energy, the anger, brutality and violence of everyday life.

Ukrainian literature is experiencing critical changes. The emergence of black humor inevitably suggests a crisis of values. On the other hand, linguistic and stylistic experiment signals considerable aesthetic development. Inevitably, the culture will tire of negation for the sake of negation, experimentation for its own sake, and literature for the sake of language. And then, literature will begin. It is difficult to predict what this new period will be like, but one thing is certain: we are witnessing a radical transformation, characterized by a complete upheaval of categories, a blurring of all boundaries. At this moment, we can’t discern progress from crisis, the beautiful from the ugly, the moral from the immoral. Where we stop, no one knows.

1994