Volodymyr Tsybul’ko, a poet from Kyiv, goes his own way. His work subverts grammar, spelling, orthography. His poetry challenges not only the rules of rhetoric but also of syntax, and the written word itself. It is essentially nonsense verse. The inner crisis of culture, disharmony and the confusion of the soul, growing out of profound psychological and social change, cannot be expressed through a harmonious current of masterly rhymed metaphors. His sabotage of the language is creative: his language games compensate for what may be seen as a universal sense of displacement.
The three members of the Bu-Ba-Bu group and their followers declared that the age of poetry has passed forever. The very notion of poetry suggested a provincialism and moral hypocrisy. They practically suggest it is shameful to write poetry of any kind. Vet they are themselves poets. Their own writing, however, has become part of a psychological hang-up. In a recent interview, Yuri Andrukhovych, on the occasion of his 33rd birthday, said he rejects the conventional view which regards poetry as being there to serve some social function. For him, poetry has only one duty and that is its obligation before the language. In this he finds support in the well known ideas of T. S. Eliot. Performing this function, he simultaneously fulfills his task before the people, the state, and humanity. But it isn’t his job to think about this. Then he offers his recipe on the subject of what a poet must and must not do: «… A poet must protest, must be unsatisfied with society, must insult it, etc., but he should be treated as a necessary evil.» The statement suggests that its author, like most members of the younger generation, does not yet have a clear purpose. His claim contradicts the myth of a disengaged literature.
Andrukhovych confidently issues directives and recipes for literature. He knows exactly what the art of the future will look like. And in this he does not differ greatly from many generations of his predecessors.
Three times during this century the future of Ukrainian literature was passionately debated: in the 1920s, the 1940s in the émigré literary community, and again at the end of the 1980s. Every time the same rhetoric and arguments were used, and the result was always the same: reality overruled all grand plans and predictions.
The latest Ukrainian poetry approaches words and emotions in a spirit of play. Becoming more and more philological and playful, it often substitutes verbal gaming for philosophical purpose. Some poets escape from life into hermetic, esoteric, abstract imagery. Those who are brave enough to propose spiritual solutions for the problems of modern life are on the margins of the literary world. Any hint of poetic support for state building is laughed at. The poet, working hand in glove with the politician, is vigorously derided.
Prose
Prose is the liveliest game in town. Here the new cultural discourse is being forged. Here the contradictory nature of modern times, its growing sense of unease, is most strikingly reflected. The loss of the future, and the lack of a meaningful present, are the coordinates of the current spiritual crisis. The most absurd fantasies of Beckett or Ionesco lag behind the reality of socialism. The turn toward absurdity in East European literatures, including Ukrainian, is natural, even inevitable.
The new generation of novelists consists of people of different ages and background. For example, Yuri Vynnychuk, Bohdan Zholdak, Volodymyr Dibrova are in their 40s. Today they are publishing pieces often written some 15 years ago and read at underground literary gatherings since the end of the 1970s. They suffered both from not being able to publish as well as from being forced by political circumstances into leading a double life. Mykola Vorobyov, for example, a poet who after his publications of the 1960s was not published again for 18 years (1968–1985) worked during this period as a fireman. Most suffocated in the oppressive atmosphere of the 1970s. Those who withstood the test consider themselves a lost generation and feel that their artistic growth was seriously damaged.
Their much younger colleagues — Yevhen Pashkovskyi and Yuri Andrukhovych, who started their literary careers in the mid 1980s, were accepted and published despite the terrible problems of the publishing industry.
The five authors mentioned above, whose styles differ radically, nevertheless have much in common. They share a vision bereft of optimism, pathos, lightness. Life is seen in Hobbesian terms: nasty, brutish, and short. The new fiction is characterized by black humor, a wallowing in the seamy side of life, and surreal absurdity. It mocks everything: the national project, sacred symbols of the past and present, the sacred role of a Poet, who, as already mentioned, was more than a poet. Its authors label themselves avant-garde. However, nobody really cares about the true meaning of these definitions. The writers need above all to mock all types of socialist realism and use every chance to express their contempt for the bureaucracy of the official Writers’ Union, although they are themselves all members.
Yevhen Pashkovskyi, by general agreement, is the new star of the most recent Ukrainian literature. The world of his novel The Abyss (Bezodnia), published in the literary journal Suchasnist in 1992 (N 5, 6), is overwhelmingly bleak. His hero, a road-builder, nearly a tramp, roams around Ukraine looking for work. What little money he earns he quickly squanders on booze. The village, where his mother lives, is marked by terrible poverty. The city is hostile, alien. He has no home, not only in the real, but in the spiritual sense. As an anti-intellectual type from the lower depths, he speaks little and he does not think too much. He merely sees and feels and his chaotic feelings are reflected using stream of consciousness. Actually, his novel is one long phrase: a howl cry of pain and despair.
People brutalized by the former socialist society do not have any social consciousness or much internal resistance. The language of this, as well as Pashkovskyi’s other novels, echoes the vocabularies of those who never studied at universities or participated in any political actions. This is a language of those who never speak out, who have no voice at all, who do not have the right to have a voice in literature. This language is fantastic in its realism and variety.
The dark worlds of Yuri Andrukhovych are absolutely different. They are funny, grotesque, phantasmagoric, almost unreal. His style is bookish and playfully allusive, riddled with paraphrases and quotations. Most of the action in his books takes place within the distorted consciousness of his protagonists. The heroes of his novels, Recreations, 1992, and Moskoviada, 1993, are both poets and are both always drunk.
Moskoviada, subtitled «a horror story», is set in Moscow. The Ukrainian poet Otto von F. is a student of the notorious Gorky Literary Institute. He roams around Moscow for one day, like Stephen Dedalus in Dublin. Like Dedalus, he does not come to any philosophical or spiritual decisions. So Otto von F. wanders through Moscow without any visible aim, visiting dingy bars, lovers, Russian nationalist gatherings, secret tunnels of the Moscow subway where giant rats trained by the KGB to sabotage antigovernment rallies and gala meetings of «political corpses» (Lenin and Anatoli Ivanovich — the latter, no doubt, one of the organizers of the August 1991 coup — among them) are held. Moscow is real (its mud and greyness are real) and Moscow is also a symbolic embodiment of his hatred towards the Empire. Hatred, however, is spiritually paralyzing. It is a part of a terrible inferiority complex and a fear of his own inner emptiness. At the end, in his own imaginary literary world, he is killed; in the meantime, in real life, sick and drunk, Otto von F. takes the train for Kyiv. When the conductor asks him for his ticket, Otto offers him the totem he’s been carrying with him all day: a catfish.