Ukrainian Women Writers and the National Imaginary: From the Collapse of the USSR to the Euromaidan by Oleksandra Wallo (review)

National construction is often associated with patriarchal discourse. The terms patriotism and patriarchy, for instance, are derived from the Latin concept of patria (homeland). However, in contrast to this line of thought, Oleksandra Wallo's Ukranian Women Writers and the National Imaginary: From the Collapse of the USSR to the Euromaidan shows that feminist writers too have contributed to the national imaginary as active agents in the nation-building process. Just as Ukraine became an independent country only in 1991 and still struggles to gain its place on the world map, so also have Ukrainian women writers had a long history of struggle to claim their places in the landscape of Ukrainian literature. Wallo's work analyzes the Ukrainian national imaginary through the lens of women's writing as it developed during the late Soviet years through the Revolution of Dignity of 2013–2014, known also as the Euromaidan. This important new research evaluates the critical intersection of feminism and postcolonialism in Ukrainian contemporary literature.

The monograph is focused on the corpus of three of the most successful and well-known women writers of the visimdesyatnyky, the literary generation of writers who started to write and publish during the last decade of the Soviet Union—Oksana Zabuzhko, Yevhenia Kononenko, and Maria Matios. As Wallo writes in the introduction, "this book is the first in-depth study of how Ukrainian women's prose, after decades of being marginalized, was able to reemerge so powerfully in the post-Soviet era" (p. 3). Each of the six chapters highlights the development of the national imaginary according to the changing political and cultural situation in Ukraine during the last three decades. The monograph is well contextualized and informative. It is rich in factual material and provides important historical and biographical explanations useful for those who are not familiar with Ukrainian history and literary tradition. Wallo takes the trouble to explain sociohistorical nuances, as well as intergenerational and intertextual references that might be unfamiliar to North American readers.

Wallo begins her study with a careful analysis of Nina Bichuia, a predecessor of the main subjects covered later in the book. She reminds readers that women writers in Soviet Ukraine were marginalized and could not easily publish their work. In the first chapter, "On the Invisibility of Ukrainian Women's Writing in the Soviet Empire," Wallo argues that despite an official declaration of gender equality, women writers in Soviet Ukraine did not have the same publishing opportunities as their male colleagues. This emphasis on silencing Ukrainian women's writing in the Soviet Union is an important contribution to the field not only of women's and gender studies but also Soviet studies.

The second chapter, "How Can a Ukrainian Woman Write?" continues the argument and shows that young women writers in late Soviet Ukraine and early post-Soviet Ukraine tried to make their mark in the literary world. Young women writers presumably did not feel at home in the larger literary publishing culture at that time. For instance, Zabuzhko's early novel analyzed here was even titled The Alien Woman (1992). This chapter also examines Kononenko's text "On Sunday Morning" (2004). Wallo shows that both authors tried to find support and grounding in the older tradition of pre-Soviet Ukrainian women writers such as Lesya Ukrainka and Olha Kobylianska. Wallo highlights the relation of the national imaginary to female voices in Ukrainian literature. As Ukraine made its first steps toward national independence in 1992, so too did Kononeko and Zabuzhko attempt to "revive the tradition of feminist women's writing in Ukraine and to write themselves into it" (p. 62).

The third chapter, "Voicing the Self: The First Ukrainian Bestseller by a Woman Writer," analyzes the role of Zabuzhko's novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996) in not only unveiling tabooed themes of sex but also in...