Соломія Павличко - Теорія літератури

Government publishing houses went bankrupt and subscriptions to literary journals dropped sharply. The few remaining magazines are grossly behind schedule. As a aile, new periodicals put out no more than two or three issues before going bust. Freedom opened the floodgates on Western writing, above all on work from America and chiefly in Russian translation, which has overwhelmed the Ukrainian book market. Contemporary Ukrainian literature is hardly published. The things that do appear do not deserve to be called books as they are printed on awful paper in broken type with ragged covers.

Yet one journal, Suchasnist (The Contemporary Scene), publishes new novels which are studied and debated by everyone who reads Ukrainian. Under other circumstances these works might become bestsellers, though at the moment they rarely appear as separate books. The literati are once again reduced to passing around typescripts.

The «new literature» is various, argumentative, and self-contradictory. The above mentioned Bu-Ba-Bu have survived a decade and now keep to themselves, remaining aloof even from their admirers, who tend to be «unserious,» liberal, urban, cosmopolitan. For these readers, literary activity is a game in which the author plays hide and seek with the audience. The writers are formalists for whom the structural aspects of art dominate ideology and content.

Their antithesis are the «serious» artists, the neonationalists, the village stylists, as well as the professional pilgrims and mystics. The issue of «Ukrainianness» plays a key role in their theories, and they regularly refer to more than one generation of «fathers» and ancestors against whom they wish to be measured. In 1993 one such circle formed a group known as «The New Literature.» Their ideologue, Yevhen Pashkovskyi, had, by age 32, published four novels. His prose is far more original and interesting than his group’s ideology, which smacks of pathos, pomposity, and partisanship. Pashkovskyi, like his antipode Andrukhovych, is also a formalist. He is a writer of remarkable prose rhythms. For a while he was considered a genuine innovator; however, he remains essentially a moralist and would probably subscribe to the sententia published in an issue of the journal Osnova: «There are more important things in life than writing.»

Until recently all discussions about socialist realism and dissident literature were conducted under the shadows cast by the walls of entirely unliterary and very real prisons. The most interesting works of the decade preceding perestroika are various writers’ letters from prison and exile. Meanwhile, the more literary work of political dissidents, with minor exceptions, already feels dated.

Dissident writers were limited by their political programs. Those who abandoned polemics for fantasy and science fiction, new age philosophy, or esoteric poetry had an easier time creating the New, and emancipating themselves — and literature — from established canons: romanticism, populism, traditional verse forms or the conventions of the realistic novel.

It’s difficult for some to accept that the days of «official» dissidence are over. They long to fight, to oppose the ruling elite. And the elite provides ample ground for opposition. However, it pays little attention to writers, leaving them bereft of the external pressure to which they’d grown so accustomed.

At the same time, all must face a gruesome legacy-, the fate of Ukrainian writers from the past. They lie buried inside a grave a century deep. During the seventy-year long existence of the USSR hundreds of Ukrainian writers were either murdered or died in prison. The first of these, Hryhory Chuprynka, was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921. The last, Vasyl Stus, died in 1985 in a Siberian labor camp.

Aside from the actual physical plants of the numerous «correctional facilities» which threatened an entire society, there was a larger prison without walls spread across the entire country. The state ran a monstrous house of repression, and writers were merely its most dangerous denizens. Even some of the best known, most servile, officially celebrated party loyalists lived under the constant surveillance of the KGB.

And while recent history is already treated as a bad dream, It continues to paralyze the psyches of writers, knotting their thoughts and their hands. Almost all are trying to explain and understand a haunted past which gives them no peace. Without coming to terms with this, it’s not possible to evaluate the current scene. That is why the past continues to impose itself on contemporary literature, which mainly describes the way things were rather than how they are.

Among the young, the past has given birth to feelings of guilt, inferiority, and fear. The newest literature wants first to condemn and then to forget it. In Yevhen Pashkovskyi’s essay, «Literature as Crime,» he blames all those who accepted Soviet reality, and especially those who contributed to the creation of it. But he fails to see the danger in fostering a literature of retribution.

Retribution is in fact the business of the hero of Yuri Andrukhovych’s novel The Moskoviada. His autobiographical hero is filled with hate for the empire and its capital, Moscow, although he is drawn there and spends most of his time in its vicinity. Hating it, he also hates himself, his weakness, his inner emptiness. Ukrainian prose has never had a hero this empty and alienated. But what is his view on the future? Does he intend to inhabit this loathing for his past and for himself forever? Or will analysis and confession liberate him from his complexes? I suspect the latter impulse will win; Ukrainian culture is growing increasingly critical not only of its traditionally hostile surroundings but also of itself.

Living inside the ruins of a prison produces one final, widespread mode of discourse: that of violence and cruelty. This began with stories about the army, which for a time appeared to be the central theme of a generation. The brutality of military life is consonant with the harshness of post-Soviet life in general. It is a life without love, saturated in reciprocal violence, where men