The beginning: The poetry of Lina Kostenko during the Thaw (original) (raw)
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Mykola Khvyl'ovyy and the making of Soviet Ukrainian literature
Connexe, 2019
The October Revolution brought about a radical shift in the cultural sphere. A new generation of artists and writers was formed. Their orientation towards the future and critical attitude to the past initiated a new chapter of revolutionary and proletarian culture. In Soviet Ukraine, this new artistic cohort in addition embraced national sentiments advancing a culture that was both Soviet and Ukrainian. This article examines the artistic and ideological development of Mykola Khvyl'ovyy (1893-1933), a writer and publicist who championed the ideological struggle for the autonomous project of a Soviet Ukrainian literature to be developed independently from Russian patterns. In this article, Khvyl'ovyy's ideas as presented in his early prose and pamphlets, written during the so-called Literary Discussion of 1925-1928, are used to outline the writer's vision of Soviet Ukrainian culture. These ideas are examined against the backdrop of the political developments of the decade characterised by the gradual toughening of the political and ideological climate Union-wide. It is argued that, during the 1920s, an autonomous cultural project in Soviet Ukraine was developed on a par with the centrally endorsed canon of all-Soviet culture implemented in every Soviet republic as a by-product of the korenizatsiya (indigenisation) campaign introduced in 1923. By the early 1930s, the all-Soviet canon gained prominence, whereas the project of an autonomous Soviet Ukrainian culture vanished together with its main representatives, who, in most cases, were physically annihilated. Khvyl'ovyy's suicide in May 1933 symbolically drew a line under the 1920s decade of transition, with its relative ideological and political tolerance as well as its artistic experimentation. Résumé La révolution d'Octobre provoque un changement culturel radical qui voit la formation d'une nouvelle génération d'artistes et d'écrivains. Avides d'avenir et critiques envers le passé, ils ont ouvert un nouveau chapitre de la culture révolutionnaire et prolétarienne. En Ukraine soviétique, cette nouvelle cohorte artistique a également intégré les sentiments nationaux afin d'aller vers une culture à la fois soviétique et ukrainienne. Cet article s'attache au développement artistique et idéologique de Mykola Khvylovy (1893-1933), un écrivain qui était à l'avant-garde de la lutte pour une littérature ukrainienne soviétique indépendante des modèles russes. Il s'est exprimé à ce sujet lors de la « Discussion littéraire » de 1925-1928, dans sa prose comme dans ses premiers pamphlets, et il faut situer ses prises de position dans le contexte politique d'un durcissement idéologique progressif dans toute l'Union soviétique au long des années 1920. Nous avançons l'hypothèse suivante : un projet culturel autonome avait alors été développé en Ukraine soviétique en parallèle à celui qui était promu de façon centralisée en URSS. Ce modèle culturel général devait être décliné dans chaque république soviétique en application de la campagne de korenizatsïa (indigénisation) introduite en 1923. Au début des années 1930, ce modèle culturel pan-soviétique a pris le dessus alors que le projet d'une culture ukrainienne soviétique autonome disparaissait avec ses principaux représentants. Dans la plupart des cas, ils ont été physiquement éliminés. En mai 1933, le suicide de Khvylovy a symboliquement tourné la page des années 1920, une décennie de transition, ouverte à l'expérimentation artistique et à un relatif pluralisme idéologique et politique.
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2018
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Postcolonial identity in Yurii Andrukhovych’s poetry: landscapes and dislocation
Slavia Centralis, 2019
Postcolonial theory deals with many important issues and the question of identity is a key one along with the power / knowledge dichotomy and the narrative strategies of representation. The analysis of literary text allows to identify ideological transformations in public discourse and individual consciousness which is based on subject’s linguistic behavior. The postcolonial approach allows to analyze identity construction and transformation as well as the intersection between the speaking subject and its different identities. In this context, the poetry of Yurii Andrukhovych is an interesting object for reflection. Subject construction and transformation strategies can be examined through the landscape and dislocation key concept. This transformation is vivid in the context of generational paradigm. Based on the transition from the 1980s generation, this poetry provides subject expansion to the 1990s generation poetry, and is oriented towards the doubling and multiplying of subject.
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Engendering Byt: Russian Women's Writing and Everyday Life from I. Grekova to Liudmila Ulitskaia
2005
Gender and byt (everyday life) in post-Stalinist culture stem from tacit conceptions linking the quotidian to women. During the Thaw and Stagnation the posited egalitarianism of Soviet rhetoric and pre-exiting conceptions of the quotidian caused critics to use byt as shorthand for female experience and its literary expression. Addressing the prose of Natal'ia Baranskaia and I. Grekova, they connected the everyday to banality, reduced scope, ateleological time, private life, and anomaly. The authors, for their part, relied on selective representation of the quotidian and a chronotope of crisis to hesitantly address taboo subjects. During perestroika women's prose reemerged in the context of social turmoil and changing gender roles. The appearance of six literary anthologies gave women authors and Liudmila Petrushevskaia in particular a new visibility. Female writers employed discourse and a broadened chronotope of crisis, along with the era's emphasis on exposure, negatio...
Літературний процес, 2021
The subject of the study is the system of reticence techniques in the women’s autobiography of Oksana Ivanenko, the Ukrainian writer of the 20th century. Western theorists of women’s autobiography (Mary Mason, Estelle Jelinek) considered relativity, fragmentation, nonlinearity to be its defining qualities. However, the concept of Leigh Gilmore, who considered autobiography as a writing strategy that constructs its object, allows us to raise the question of the potential functions of constructive techniques in this text. These and other studies analyse the autobiographies of women in the Western world, leaving aside the writings of Eastern Europeans, however, the works of those who had to live under Soviet conditions are of particular interest for various reasons. The aim of the proposed study is to show the peculiarities of the creation and functioning of the women’s autobiographics (Gilmore’s self-representation) in ideological societies on the example of Ivanenko’s memoirs “Always in Life”. As a result of the study, it has been found that in Ivanenko’s memoirs the theme of creative selfrealization and literature in general pushes aside the narrative that Western theorists consider to be the main one for women’s biography: comprehending their own female experience (first of all, love, marriage, motherhood). The relativity, embodied in the genre of the essay, allowed the author to talk about oneself, when she wanted it, and at the right moment to return to the pseudo-object. The nonlinearity of the narrative helps emphasize advantageous moments and avoid coerced chronology. However, fragmentation and heterogeneity allow the woman writer not to build a holistic narrative about oneself, but to offer “flickering” content to readers. Thus, feeling ideological pressure, the author escaped memories not only of the difficult period in Ukrainian history, but also of important events in her life, ignoring her true experience. This means that an autobiographical work may be called upon not to record a true experience but to create a socially acceptable version of the writer.