In the «new» texts, words and sentences and syntax were broken (some of this had occurred in the Twenties, but as it had later been proscribed by the state, it felt entirely new). Raw obscenity and street idioms never before used in Ukrainian fiction or poetry, began appearing in print with some regularity. Western literatures had known similar euphorias over the breaking of taboos: first in the Thirties, and later in the Sixties. These days Henry Miller shocks no one; he merely annoys the feminists. However, the vulgate did open doors for new wave prose writers such as Bohdan Zholdak and Volodymyr Dibrova, as well as for a few poets, including Oleksander Irvanets.
Another crucial change in attitude had to do with where a writer sought approval and empowerment. Heretofore, a writer remained unrecognized unless his or her book was published in Russia or until he or she was mentioned by an important Moscow literary critic. Suddenly Ukrainian writers lost interest in this game. Although the West remained indifferent to their work, a benediction from the East seemed irrelevant. Ukrainian literature began curing itself of an old and deep sense of provincialism, marginality, and inadequacy. She (literature) was no longer interested in the refined and specialized languages of the worker, the professor, or the collective farm director. Models of intellectual and aesthetic orientation were shattering and writers began looking for approval from within.
Eclecticism still reigns: formalism, free verse, rap-influenced recitation all thrive side by side. The principal transformation in poetry, as well as in prose, had to do not with form but with diction. In the last years, urban sounds, anxieties, cynicism, and crude humor have won admission to the palace — no, make that the pub — of art.
Older critics tended to view these developments as little more than posturing and bravado. They simply couldn’t see beyond Rymaruk’s long hair or Pashkovskyi’s military boots, which really were imposing. (Alas, he no longer wears them.) The «hooligans» meanwhile mocked the language of politically engaged art at every turn while at the same time attending anti-Soviet demonstrations and gatherings outside Parliament, and supporting the students who held a hunger strike in October of 1990.
In 1991, Ukrainian independence, the most important event in the country’s history in this century, freed writers enormously. As long as they remained stateless, they were more or less stuck with endlessly shoring up the foundation on which a literature might be built. All earlier attempts over the last hundred years at creating «art for the sake of art» had failed. Now, at last, writers can move beyond their role as missionaries proselytizing on behalf of the Ukrainian language. Today, for the first time, they have a choice. Those who wish to may work in politics, education, or as propagandists, using their gifts for ideological purposes. Others may rally under beauty’s banner or, on the contrary, strive to shock with deliberate ugliness.
Neonationalists are not impressed by this liberation. They continue to claim that the new state, its spirituality, and its literature, do not accommodate them. They reject the influences of the West, declare religious belief the first sign of creative force, and aim at building «a true state» and a «real» national literature. It’s not hard to understand their concern: Ukraine has not turned into the land of their dreams and the Ukrainianaphones remain an oppressed minority in most eastern Ukrainian cities.
Independence has, however, had even less happy consequences: it has created a crisis in publishing which is felt by every writer in the country. Ukraine does not have a single paper mill within its borders. Until 1992, the country had no independent publishers. The last books of Zholdak, Vynnychuk, Dibrova, Rymaruk, Herasymiuk and others were published in 1991. Only a handful of books appeared in 1992, and 1993 was the least fruitful year in the entire century for the publication of literature.
Government publishing houses went bankrupt and subscriptions to literary journals dropped sharply. The few remaining magazines are grossly behind schedule. As a aile, new periodicals put out no more than two or three issues before going bust. Freedom opened the floodgates on Western writing, above all on work from America and chiefly in Russian translation, which has overwhelmed the Ukrainian book market. Contemporary Ukrainian literature is hardly published. The things that do appear do not deserve to be called books as they are printed on awful paper in broken type with ragged covers.
Yet one journal, Suchasnist (The Contemporary Scene), publishes new novels which are studied and debated by everyone who reads Ukrainian. Under other circumstances these works might become bestsellers, though at the moment they rarely appear as separate books. The literati are once again reduced to passing around typescripts.
The «new literature» is various, argumentative, and self-contradictory. The above mentioned Bu-Ba-Bu have survived a decade and now keep to themselves, remaining aloof even from their admirers, who tend to be «unserious,» liberal, urban, cosmopolitan. For these readers, literary activity is a game in which the author plays hide and seek with the audience. The writers are formalists for whom the structural aspects of art dominate ideology and content.
Their antithesis are the «serious» artists, the neonationalists, the village stylists, as well as the professional pilgrims and mystics. The issue of «Ukrainianness» plays a key role in their theories, and they regularly refer to more than one generation of «fathers» and ancestors against whom they wish to be measured. In 1993 one such circle formed a group known as «The New Literature.» Their ideologue, Yevhen Pashkovskyi, had, by age 32, published four novels. His prose is far more original and interesting than his group’s ideology, which smacks of pathos, pomposity, and partisanship. Pashkovskyi, like his antipode Andrukhovych, is also a formalist. He is a writer of remarkable prose rhythms. For a while he was considered a genuine innovator; however, he remains essentially a moralist and would probably subscribe to the sententia published in an issue of the journal Osnova: «There are more important things in life than writing.»
Until recently all discussions about socialist realism and dissident literature were conducted under the shadows cast by the walls of entirely unliterary and very real prisons. The most interesting works of the decade preceding perestroika are various writers’ letters from prison and exile. Meanwhile, the more literary work of political dissidents, with minor exceptions, already feels dated.
Dissident writers were limited by their political programs. Those who abandoned polemics for fantasy and science fiction, new age philosophy, or esoteric poetry had an easier time creating the New, and emancipating themselves — and literature — from established canons: romanticism, populism, traditional verse forms or the conventions of the realistic novel.
It’s difficult for some to accept that the days of «official» dissidence are over. They long to fight, to oppose the ruling elite. And the elite provides ample ground for opposition. However, it pays little attention to writers, leaving them bereft of the external pressure to which they’d grown so accustomed.
At the same time, all must face a gruesome legacy-, the fate of Ukrainian writers from the past. They lie buried inside a grave a century deep. During the seventy-year long existence of the USSR hundreds of Ukrainian writers were either murdered or died in prison. The first of these, Hryhory Chuprynka, was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921. The last, Vasyl Stus, died in 1985 in a Siberian labor camp.