From Three Worlds. New Writing from Ukraine

Despite having a population of some fifty million, which made it the second largest republic in the USSR, Ukraine was for the most part a blank spot in the cultural imagination. While writers like the Estonian Jaan Kross, the Chuvash Gennadi Aigi, and the Abkhazian Fazil Iskander were lauded both in the West and in the USSR for their ability to be simultaneously inside and outside the dominant Russian tradition, Ukrainian writers were for the most part unable to forge a recognizable literary identity. In part, this was because the Ukrainian language was fairly easy for the Moscow censorship apparatus to understand, and so Ukrainian publications tended to be screened more severely than, say, Armenian or Estonian ones. And in part it was due to the particularly harsh treatment of Ukrainian intellectuals in the Stalinist purges.

Since the coming of Ukrainian independence in 1991, and despite the fact that political and economic progress has been less apparent than many had expected, the opportunity has arisen for Ukrainian literature to develop its own national profile. From Three Worlds. New Writing from Ukraine presents a smorgasbord of writing (from five poets and ten prose fiction writers) as well as a collection of photographs in an attempt (for the most part remarkably successful) to give English-language readers a feel for the vitality of post-independence Ukrainian culture.

A word should be said at first about the title of this collection which is nowhere explained. One might guess that is merely appropriated from the title of one of the stories published here: “Three Worlds,” by Evhenia Kononenko. But it is difficult to see why or how that story could be taken as emblematic of the entire collection. To this reviewer, however, the title did make sense because what one takes away from the whole is a recognition that modern Ukrainian literature does indeed grow from three distinct, albeit contiguous worlds, building as it does on the achievements of such nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ukrainian predecessors as Taras Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainka, and Ivan Franko, but also partaking of the Russian and Central European cultural spheres.

As in any collection, some writers and works stand out and are worthy of particular attention. Yuri Andrukhovych was born in 1960 and had the misfortune to serve in the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. His story, “Observation Duty,” is narrated in the first person by a veteran who has just returned from the front. His response to the liberation from the constant fear of death is an exuberant enjoyment of the prosaic:

“Of all the approaches to life, I have chosen active observation. I relish chance conversations with unknown people—this exchange of everyday phrases which might seem boring and a waste of time to a more troubled or serious person. . . . I have nothing against watching auto races on TV, or trying my luck at a shooting gallery. And the marketplace! What a luscious setting for the true observer. I delight in watching how things are displayed, sold, weighed and counted.

(212)

But at the same time, it is clear to the reader, although apparently not to the narrator, that the physical and psychological wounds inflicted by the war have not and probably will not heal. He wanders through the city, drinking, smoking and searching for a kind of normalcy that he will never achieve. “I am lying on the damp grass and have no urge to get up, to move my arms or legs. I am very tired. This is the heart of the matter” (223). To American readers, the tone of this story will be reminiscent of a great deal of post-Vietnam prose, but Andrukhovych’s voice is distinguished by its delicate balance of lyricism and cynicism.

Yuri Vynnychuk’s contribution to the collection, entitled “Max and Me,” is also narrated in the first person. But all similarities with Andrukhovych’s story end there. Vynnychuk’s tale is part grotesque, part gothic camp, told in the manner that in Russian prose has come to be known as “skaz.” Such narratives, whose Russian tradition begins with Gogol and Leskov in the nineteenth century and was ably carried on in the 1920s by Zoshchenko and Zamiatin among others, are presented in imitation of oral story telling by a speaker who is understood to belong to a lower class of education than the work’s author (American readers looking for a reasonable comparison might do well to think of the stories of Damon Runyan). In this case the narrator, confined to a hospital for the criminally insane from which he is planning his escape, tells the story of his teen-age years. The tale is grotesque enough, involving prostitution, murder, and cannibalism. But the narrator’s seemingly objective stance regarding the events described gives the story its characteristic humor and its chilling matter-of-fact gruesomeness.

Like the prose in the volume, the poetry is quite varied in tone and technique. Natalka Bilotserkivets (born 1954) is represented by six poems distinguished by tight form and elegiac feeling. In particular, this reader was impressed with the liquid cascades of alliterations in her incantatory “Rain . . . Rain in the cities of Lviv and Ternopil.” In contrast, the poetry of Viktor Neborak included here is characterized by carefully modulated changes in tone and a dry wit, as in the final section of his poem “Fish”:

no fish is an island/this involves all of us, all of us/processing plants drip with their cold blood/some of us object in poems,/paintings, documentary films/still they make good eating/even while the fish spirits are watching.

(187)

The translations in the volume are by various hands, but in almost every case they have been accomplished by a team consisting of a native speaker of Ukrainian and one of English. The results are generally quite good. In the case of the poetic texts, to which this reviewer had access in the original thanks to the editor’s praiseworthy willingness to print the poetry in both languages, the translations stick fairly close to the Ukrainian on the level of lexicon and structure without making any real attempt to capture the verse feel. Prose texts sound quite varied stylistically, an indication that a serious attempt has been made to capture the idiosyncrasies of each author’s style. The only real quibble this reviewer had on a technical level was with the notes, which appear to have been compiled in a haphazard way, sometimes providing too much information and sometimes not enough.

A more serious question about the volume, and one that I as a non-specialist in Ukrainian am not in a position to answer, concerns the overall tone of the volume. Speaking generally, one can say that what connects practically all the work presented here—and including the evocative photographs of Tania D’Avignon as well—is a tendency to review and recollect and an inability to get beyond the horrors of Ukraine’s experience in the twentieth century. Given the devastation that was wrought in Ukraine by the Civil War of 1918–20, the massive starvation caused by collectivization in the late 1920s, the purges of the 1930s, the German invasion during World War II (along with the extermination of much of Ukraine’s Jewish population—a theme that does not appear to interest any of the authors included in this volume), and the dull lethargy of the late Soviet period, such a focus is not unreasonable. Nevertheless, a literature entirely based on the sore spots of the past shows little prospect for future development, a fact that is clear to Solomea Pavlychko (who has written a fine introductory essay contextualizing the work in the volume). As she puts it:

The most interesting voices are those which are free of the ‘prison house complex,’ which aren’t turned to the past, and don’t rehearse the old myths or worship in the ancient temples, but instead breathe in the present.

(18)

Unfortunately for Ukrainian literature, and for the literature in post-Communist Eastern Europe in general, such voices have been few and far between. And until they appear I am afraid that there will be nothing in contemporary East European literature to equal the revelations produced by such figures of the previous generation as Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kis, and Zbigniew Herbert.