Marko Pavlyshyn

Introduction: Special section on Ukraine

Since achieving independence in 1991, Ukraine has experienced two episodes of protracted mass civil protest that resulted in changes of government and were welcomed by optimists, at least initially, as heralding deep and positive changes in the country’s political culture. The importance of the issues at stake – a society’s defence of electoral democracy in one instance, its refusal of authoritarianism in the other – as well as the dramatically telegenic character of both events brought Ukraine, for two extended periods, to the attention of the global media. The first of these events was the Orange Revolution of 2004. An uprising against electoral fraud, the Orange Revolution resulted in a clean election that brought to the presidency Victor Yushchenko, a figure symbolic of what was widely referred to in Ukraine as the country’s ‘European choice’. Then as now, ‘European choice’ in Ukrainian public discourse meant a commitment to rule of law, democratic practices in politics, transparency in the conduct of the country’s economic life, and intensified cooperation with the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In 2010, however, disenchantment with the government’s failure to meet public expectations led to the election of Victor Yanukovych, Yushchenko’s adversary in the earlier fraudulent elections, as president. Yanukovych’s political base was the Party of Regions, strongly supported in the Donbas and other eastern and southern parts of Ukraine but widely resented in the centre, especially Kyiv, and west. New levels of corruption, nepotism and cronyism, and an increasingly arbitrary and repressive use of state power came to be seen as the hallmarks of Yanukovych’s rule, alongside indifference and even enmity toward Ukrainian culture and accommodation to the interests of the Russian Federation. In November 2013 the government, pressured by Russia, resolved against signing the Association Agreement with the European Union that had long been an objective of Ukrainian foreign policy. A relatively minor student protest against this decision,

Literary history as provocation of national identity, national identity as provocation of literary history The case of Ukraine

Empirical research into political sentiments gives force to the proposition that, in the context of the 2013–14 Euromaidan and subsequent war, Ukrainian national identity, for most of its history predominantly ethno-cultural, has undergone changes justifying its qualification as ‘civic’. In this article I discuss the ethno-cultural orientation, conventional during the 19th and 20th centuries, of Ukrainian literary history, a scholarly genre that has a tradition of promoting the cause of Ukrainian nation-building; I identify contemporary examples of discourses in the literary sphere – literary works themselves, literary anthologies and the public statements and debates of writers – that embody or applaud civic identities akin to those in evidence on the Euromaidan; and I reflect upon the values, inclusive and multicultural, that a Ukrainian national literary history rhetorically in harmony with post-Euromaidan sentiment would evince.

Alexander Kratochvil. Aufbruch und Rückkehr: Ukrainische und tschechische Prosa im Zeichen der Postmoderne.

Alexander Kratochvil. Aufbruch und Ruckkehr: Ukrainische und tschechische Prosa im Zeichen der Postmoderne . [Venturing Forth and Coming Back: Ukrainian and Czech Prose in the Context of Postmodernity.] Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2013. 311 pp. Bibliography. Index. Paper.

Andrukhovych’s Secret: The return of colonial resignation

Since the period of glasnost in the USSR and, after 1991, the emergence of independent nation states on its former territory, the Ukrainian poet, prose writer and essayist Yuri Andrukhovych (b. 1960) has attended in the majority of his writings to geography and its relationship to geopolitics, to the persistence in central and eastern Europe of old colonial power structures, and to the nature of the relationship between his homeland and various conceptions of “Europe”: central and eastern Europe, and Europe as “the west”. Andrukhovych’s novel-length text Taiemnytsia [2007; Secret] subtitled “instead of a novel” and structured like a series of interviews, adopts a position of pessimism with regard to the likely emergence of a humane and just state of affairs in a Europe where western prosperity, coupled with indifference toward the east European Other, confront material want and an enduring deficit of liberty. The book constructs a world-model where the exercise of colonial or neocolonial power (economic, political and cultural) is so ubiquitous that even the colonized are not innocent of exercising it.

Defending the Cultural Nation before and after 1991: Ivan Dziuba

The Ukrainian literary and cultural critic Ivan Dziuba (b. 1931) exerted his greatest impact on Ukrainian public life as a dissident in the 1960s and as a public intellectual from the late 1980s onward. Throughout his writings Dziuba has urged state and society to develop Ukrainian culture proactively and to defend it against encroachment by dominant cultures allied to politically and economically dominant powers.

The Rhetoric of Geography in Ukrainian Literature, 1991–2005

Representations of space in works of literature sustain interpretation as arguments in favour of particular geopolitical configurations corresponding to particular socio-political interests and addressing particular audiences. Ukrainian literature since independence has witnessed the demise of the system of symbols, corresponding to the priorities of the USSR, that oriented geographical, historical and political space toward Moscow. In its place have arisen two competing spatial rhetorics, each imagining itself as articulating the needs of the independent Ukrainian state. One adopts a severely local focus, seeking to reveal the dignity of the nation as flowing from its people and the places where they live. The other conceptualizes the dignity of the national self as possible only within an international context and professes an affinity with Europe and ‘the West’.

What Really Happens in Kobylians’ka’s Land, and Why It Matters

Abstract Since the publication of OlTia Kobylians’ka’s novel Zemlia (Land, 1902), the consensus of Ukrainian critics and scholars, both non-Soviet and Soviet, has held that the novel’s central event, and the element of the plot offering the main challenge to interpretation, is the murder of a young peasant by his brother. Attentive reading, however, reveals that the murder is constructed in the novel as a deed whose perpetrator remains unknown. Readings of the novel as an illustration of social or psychological causation in human affairs corresponded to the predispositions of populist critics of various periods. Readings more respectful of the text, and more in keeping with Kobylians’ka’s oeuvre as a whole, need to acknowledge that the world-view consistent with the novel is one that despairs of demonstrable causes. Narrative voice and implied readership in Land are managed so as to exclude the construct of an omniscient narrator authorizing a final, knowable version of past events. Instead, the novel may be seen as reflecting upon the irrationality of diverse models for explaining human behaviour. Common-sense social and psychological notions of causality are found inadequate to explain the murder in Land, as are racial determinism, accident, divine intervention, and the Nietzsche-inspired model of humankind as divided into strong and weak, free and enslaved.