After their deaths, these martyrs assumed their place in the national mythology and became fragments of the country’s iconostasis. They were worshipped as national heroes. Books such as Shevchenko’s Kobzar became gospels of the independence movement. The list of such sacred texts is long. These books were treated as great codes, which clearly carried symbolic meaning. Their encoded message was much more significant than their literary aesthetic content. And the best of the texts about these texts also became a form of secret writing. Practically all writing about Ukrainian culture always presumed the existence of another layer of meaning, even if the author deliberately avoided any hint of a national project.
There is a saying that «a poet in Russia is more than just a poet,» but in totally russified Ukraine at the beginning of the 1980s, writers remain the only bearers of the written Ukrainian language, national culture, and literary tradition. In this sense even the most faithful socialist realists presented some political danger to the colonizing power because they relied on the suspect, half-prohibited language.
This epoch — from Kotliarevskyi to the 1980s — has exhausted its meaning. In the case of such exemplary stylists as Oles’ Honchar, whose works could be the model for a handbook of good grammar, we can say the epoch has even degenerated. However, today, a life pledged to Ukrainian literature is no longer tantamount to a recitation of the Nicene creed. The future — the main goal of the national project — has been implemented. A dream came true. And only the present remains. There is nothing to put on a pedestal, the Utopian vision of the future has been corrected by the brutal reality of a post-colonial economic crisis. A void has replaced former dreams, illusions and principles. All genres of literature and criticism are now in crisis. The shift of ideological parameters, styles, and rhetoric is painful. It is aggravated by a problem in the publishing industry and a generational conflict among members of the Writers’ Union. Many acknowledged celebrities of the recent past, whose books are no longer published or read, declare that Ukrainian literature is dying. The «angry young men,» on the other hand, express contempt toward the generation of «fathers» despite the latter’s contribution to the national project, and their contribution to the liberation movement. These rebels are most acutely resentful of their former mentors.
While there is no future any more, the present is banal and disappointing. As a result, the past has become the focus of intellectual attention. And there are two standard approaches toward it. The first approach is idealization. At times the past takes on the role once played by the future. New Utopias are created of cossackdom, Kyivan Rus, pre-Christian times, women’s high status under the Hetmanate, even a Ukrainian matriarchy, an ideal peasant community, a national church, etc. The other approach proposes a critical stance in which icons are defaced and former gods unmasked.
The abolition of censorship and the long-awaited tearing down of iron curtains nevertheless came as a shock. Ukrainian culture is discovering for itself that twentieth century so long forbidden it: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre, with modernist experimentation, pessimism, negation of traditional humanistic values and post-modern satiation, along with all other attendant philosophies and personal experiments. Ukrainian authors are trying to find their place in world culture. Symptoms of post-modern awareness are obvious in the youngest generation of Ukrainian writers, although on the whole the development looks paradoxical, taking into consideration the fact that Ukrainian literature has not managed to produce a mature modernist tradition. However, similar situations already occurred before. Ukrainian romanticism also never challenged the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment as, for obvious historical reasons, these never took place in Ukraine.
Language
In the final years of the Brezhnev era, when the General secretary of the Communist Party was granted membership ticket number one in the All-Soviet Writers Union, the language used by Ukrainian writers became totally contrived. Poems and novels were written in a beautiful, stylistically perfect but unreal idiom good only as material for lexicographers. Reams of attention were devoted to increasingly trivial subjects. In reality, the work was composed in a language spoken neither by the writers themselves nor even by the professors of literature. The party elite used only Russian, with the famous strong Ukrainian accent of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachov and many others noticeable and annoying to native Russians. On the street, slang was spoken, a barbaric Russian-Ukrainian mixture, blistered with profanities. Only in Western Ukrainian cities did an urban Ukrainian milieu exist with a more or less developed spoken Ukrainian urban dialect. But it never found its way into literature. Nor was real life an object of Ukrainian writing. Short stories by Hryhir Tiutiunnyk, who committed suicide in 1980, may be the single exception. Heroes of Ukrainian novels never made love, they never mentioned the existence of ever-present KGB and informers who infiltrated the whole society; never pointed out the banality of party rituals; they never listened to «enemy radio voices» at night, never told dirty stories. They were, in fact, pathetic, loyal, and totally unreal.
Prose was doomed to be a secondary genre in the Ukrainian literary hierarchy. A realistic urban novel in Ukrainian could not have been written. There was barely enough substance for a short story. «Village prose» was central, not because of primitive populism and the patriarchal spirit of its authors, but because its language had something to point to. The village had not been Russified. Under the Soviets, historical novels flourished. They were even quite popular, although they were heavily censored, and were supposed to reflect the official version of national history.
The new generation of prose writers who emerged in the mid 1980s bring to literature an urban drive and a deliberately shocking naturalism. The biggest concern of the new generation is to appropriate new layers of the language, never used in written texts. Sex, for instance, which appeared on the pages of literary texts for the first time several years ago, is often there merely to give the artist an excuse for exercising new vocabulary. The generation born in the 50s and 60s tries to describe situations which have never been written about before.
Poetry
Until recently poetry dominated the literary landscape. Romanticism, which came to life in the 1830s and flourished in Shevchenko’s works, never really ended. Recently it seemed that 2 out of 3 writers were poets, and prose suffered from a debilitating tendency to poeticize.
The younger generation of poets came on the scene determined to bury «the sweet Ukrainian style» as well as to put an end to the poetry of populist slogans and pathos. Yuri Andrukhovych, Oleksander Irvanets, and Victor Neborak — three poets from Western Ukraine (which is also not accidental) — founded in the mid 1980s a group called Bu-Ba-Bu (standing for Burlesque, Bunk, Buffoonery). In contrast to their predecessors, their poetry relied heavily on language games, where words, which had never before found their way into poetry, suddenly took on primary importance. The three poets are extremely sarcastic. They parody literary traditions, and, especially, all aspects of the poetic embodiment of the national project.
Their even younger followers and successors — members of numerous avant-garde (as they all call themselves) groups, took further steps toward wiping away the poetic vocabulary. For example, it appears that the aesthetic purpose of another group of poets called Propala Hramota (The Lost Certificate) is to shock the listener or reader with swear words and narratives describing the most unpoetic of situations.