Minor literature of a major country

January 18, 2006 A few years ago I happened to teach a course on Ukrainian Culture and Civilization at Penn State University to a dozen of students whose major was agriculture, chemical technology or electric engineering but who had opted for a minor course on Ukrainian culture rather than Russian, Chinese or Malaysian, because most of them were of Ukrainian origin and believed, rather candidly, that they knew at least something about the subject.

One of the easiest questions on the subject in the final examination was: Which countries does Ukraine border with?

Nobody managed to mention all Ukraine’s neighbours. Everybody, however, managed to mention two of them: Poland and Russia. Even a hopelessly confused girl who stated that Ukraine bordered with Lithuania to the north and Yugoslavia to the south.

North and South in this part of the world are not important. What really matters is West and East – where ‘civilized’ Europe ends and ‘barbarous’ Asia begins. Poland marks the former, Russia the latter. Ukraine marks nothing – a stretch of silence between the two words ‘West’ and ‘East’, an empty space between the two continents of Europe and Asia, a no-man’s land between the two iron curtains, barbed-wire entanglements, accumulated biases and long-lasting stereotypes.

The name ‘Ukraine’, many believe, stems from okraina, meaning ‘borderland’.

The country has been marginalized, divided and misidentified for so long that still, after nine years of independence, it has thorny problems in relation to its integrity and identity.

Like most East European nations that had never been nations – i.e. nation-states – Ukraine had little choice but to shape and ethnic rather than a civic identity, based primarily on a common language and culture rather than common rights and duties. It was the intelligentsia rather than the state bureaucracy that had to convert local peasants into Ukrainians. In Western Ukraine, ruled by the liberal Habsburgs, the project proved to be as successful as elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In the eastern part of the country, ruled by the hard-line Romanovs (and, later on, by the Bolsheviks), the process of nation-building had been arrested and virtually aborted. Ethnic identity was doomed, since its core – the Ukrainian language – was officially treated as a mere dialect of Russian, and teaching, speaking and publishing in it were consecutively banned.

Modern Ukrainian literature, which emerged in the late 18th century, after a long evolution from Church Slavonic to spoken Ukrainian, was eventually to become the only means of national self-expression, a substitute for national school, national church, national media, national scholarship, national politics. This has strengthened to an incredible degree the role of literature and of writers within the emerging national society – and it is hardly surprising that for 150 years the greatest Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, has been perceived as a sacred figure, the Father of the Nation, the prophet of her inevitable resurrection.

The other side of this phenomenon, however, is that a national society based on, and served by, national literature, and deprived of national education, politics and economy, runs the risk of remaining too narrow and artificial, too parochial and segregated (for committed Ukrainophiles only) – especially if education means Russification, and social advancement means the stripping away of anything Ukrainian. What kind of literature should a writer produce in a country where most people who speak his or her language cannot read, and where those who can read loathe the writer’s language?

For over a century, Ukrainian writers were torn between two tasks: serving ‘the people’ and serving ‘Art’. Neither, however, could be fulfilled properly. Most of ‘the people’ were illiterate and had little interest in any writing. Most of the Ukrainian elite were Russophone and consumed the ‘Art’ emanating from St. Petersburg. And the Ukrainophone elite was small in number and preoccupied with ‘the people’ rather than with ‘Art’.

The Soviet regime brought mass literacy and further Russification. When the Soviet empire at last collapsed and censorship vanished, ‘the people’ opted for Russian kitsch rather than for the national literature, which was meant to awaken and enlighten them. Writers had little choice then but to opt for “l’art pour l’art”, Europe, export grants and fellowships, international festivals and a rather cynical or, perhaps, stoical view of the world around them.

In 1996, a large group of younger authors left the official Writers’ Union and established the Association of Ukrainian Writers. This has ten times fewer members (120) than the old Union but it seems to be perfectly adjusted to the new environment. The majority of the books now sold in Ukraine and discussed by the critics and virtually all the Ukrainian books translated [and read] abroad are written by members of the Association. While the Writers’ Union still tries to serve ‘the people’ and complains that the government doesn’t help them fulfil their patriotic duty, the Association claims that the government is really bad but is still the best government we have ever had because for the first time it doesn’t kill us or starve us to death, doesn’t exile anybody, imprison people and send them to the Gulag, doesn’t proscribe our works and suffocate us with censorship. Thank God, it’s too preoccupied with its own business – exports of steel, re-exports of oil, private accounts in Switzerland, modest villas in California. It’s almost as good as that of the Habsburgs: it doesn’t help but doesn’t impede; it simply doesn’t care about any culture at all, and Ukrainian culture in particular.

As a result, Ukrainian culture of the 1990s, even though it isn’t yet flourishing, seems to be far from extinction – much further than ever. During the last decade, there has been more Ukrainian writing translated abroad than during the century before. Anthologies predominate: the world seems to be filling the gap and redrawing the cultural map in the promptest (and simplest) way. At least two Ukrainian authors draw the special attention of international publishers nowadays: {id="5528" title="Yuri Andrukhovych"} and {id="5524" title="Oksana Zabuzhko"}. Both are witty, bright and charming; both are marketable – with their texts and as people: they write good prose, and nice poetry, and excellent essays; they speak foreign languages, wear fashionable clothes, visit Western capitals, deliver lectures, give interviews, take part in TV talk shows; they know perfectly how the successful writer must look and behave. Andrukhovych is probably stronger in writing; Zabuzhko is peerless in image-making. Both, however, are young and gifted, and diligent, and ambitious enough to dream of the Nobel Prize, or whatever else public opinion may suggest to them.

The Nobel Prize remains an obsession for many Ukrainians – a stateless nation had few chances to be noticed, and even less to attract anybody’s attention to its literature; nonetheless, it was the only chance for them to be heard and cared about in the world. In 1916, the great Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko (an Austro-Hungarian subject at the time) died as soon as he was nominated for the award. In 1939, a prominent Ukrainian prose writer, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, who had lived in exile in France since the Bolshevik revolution, was withdrawn from the nomination as World War II erupted. And in 1985, the great Ukrainian poet and dissident, Vasyl Stus, was murdered in a Soviet concentration camp – and the processing of his nomination for the Nobel Prize was stopped.

Today Ukraine has ceased to be a ‘hidden’, virtually non-existent nation, and Ukrainian literature seems to be gaining momentum in the re-mapped world. Besides Zabuzhko and Andrukhovych, there are many more highly promising writers who may come from ‘nowhere’ (exactly as Ukraine did) and surprise both foreigners and their fellow citizens with something bold and unusual.

Two years ago, the American PEN-Club awarded its annual prize for the best poetry translated from other languages to somebody called {id="5525" title="Oleh Lysheha"} for his Selected Poems. Lysheha is not a ‘young’ writer; but although in his fifties, he is the author of only two slim books: Zyma u Tysmenyci (Winter in Tysmenytsia), published in the late 1970s in samizdat, and Velykyj Mist (A High Bridge), published in Kyiv in the late 1980s, as perestroika advanced. He is a well-known and highly respected figure in Ukraine – but mostly among fellow writers and artists; hardly any ‘ordinary readers’ have heard of him. As a typical outsider, he is the antithesis of the jovial playboy, Yuri Andrukhovych, and the demonic iron-voice feminist, Oksana Zabuzhko. He lives poetry rather than merely writing it; he looks like an ancient Chinese sage, a Taoist, a Zen Buddhist or maybe a latter-day hippy.

In the US, his first if not only wish was to visit the forest where David Henry Thoreau wrote his book and, if possible, to swim a little bit in his pond. In Ukraine, again, his first business was to dig some clay, to settle the fire and to make some pottery and ceramics, as he has been used to doing for decades.

There is clearly a long way to go before Ukrainian literature achieves world recognition as well as internal acknowledgment – in a country where nearly half the population don’t speak Ukrainian, and even more people don’t read it. Yet, inner freedom and external diversity are perhaps the greatest achievements of Ukrainian literature in recent years; these have never existed before in this part of the world – in this black hole, in the borderland between Europe and Asia, Poland and Russia, Dniper River and Thoreau’s pond, Lithuania and Yugoslavia.


First published in in Serbian in Belgrade daily Danas, 2000.