Ukraine's Quest for Identity

Ukraine's Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1911–2011 represents a thoughtful, innovative, and well-researched study of the country's literary production dating back to the first two decades of its independence. Maria G. Rewakowicz arrives at her goal—“to draw the connection between the literary production and identity construction” (p. ix)—by operating under two premises: that it is possible to identify the range and nature of literary texts within the grid of specific identities, and that these texts invariably represent value in the body of the new national literature, impacting the politics of canon formation (p. viii) via language choice, ideology, the role of institutions in literary production, as well as its evaluation and dissemination. The monograph's corpus comprises the major works of Ukrainian fiction of the period that are homogeneously distributed across the five body chapters dedicated to regionalism, gender issues, language politics, social ills, and popular culture.The first introductory chapter succinctly furnishes a useful framework for studying the period in question. It focuses on cultural hybridity through the lens of post-colonial theory and combines this approach with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural field, exploring “implications and reasons behind the tendency toward plural kind of identity” (p. 2). Drawing from works of Homi Bhabha and his later critic Amar Acheraïou, Rewakowicz offers her own definition of Ukrainian cultural hybridity as a highly unstable and heterogeneous space that encompasses “both cultural artifacts and processes underlying their production” and signifies the “coexistence of diverse cultural objects, be it Ukrainian, Russian, or indeed mixed” (p. 6). According to this definition, domestic literature written in Russian belongs to the Ukrainian cultural space (p. 7).The second chapter ponders the topics of cultural and literary geographies, regionalism, and territorial identities. Its ambit is two-fold and entails a parallel investigation of both the city and the region as the protagonist. The literary cities include Kyiv, Rivno, Chernivtsy, Lviv, and New York, while the regions include Slobozhanshchyna, the Carpathian Mountains, Zakarpattia, and Halychyna. The selection of the urban texts displays several contending tendencies. To give a few examples, Andrey Kurkov's Kyiv stands “synonymous with Ukraine itself” (p. 58); Oleksandr Irvanets’ Rivne is a “dystopian and consciously constructed place” (p. 60); Vasyl Kozhelianko's Chernivtsy is a fascinating multiethnic place with visible non-Ukrainian cultures (Austrian, Jewish, and Romanian); Yuri Vynnychuk and Viktor Neborak's Lviv morphs into a “symbolic place” (p. 66) and unfolds synecdochally, retaining “local color through language” (p. 66); Vasyl Makhno's New York engenders a “fresh” approach to creativity by bringing “outsider perspective” (p. 71). The most insightful discussion in this chapter resides in the tour de force analysis of how Yuri Andrukhovych, one of Ukraine's most established contemporary prose authors, debunks the older Soviet center-periphery colonial myth and reconceptualizes Ukraine's relationship with Europe.The third chapter accomplished a feat of discussing a diverse cast of nineteen women writers on thirty-three pages by grouping them as feminists, post-feminists, and non-feminists who belong to the two generations, that is, those who were born in the 1950s and 1960s and the younger age group. The discussion of the first, feminist group is centered on the work of Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine's most prominent feminist, and her gendered paradigm of dealing with colonial and national woes (p. 102). Other authors in this group include Svitlana Prykalo, Natalka Sniadanko, Oksana Lyutsyshyna, Marianna Kiianovska, Mariana Savka, Halyna Kruk, and Liudmila Taran. The common unifying factor in their work is “the woman's role and place in transitional society” (p. 112). Other factors include the genre hybridity, biographical, and European turn. The discussion of post-feminist texts by authors of the younger generation is fragmented and entails the texts by Sofiia Anfrukhovych, Irena Karpa, and Tania Maliarchuk, where post-feminism is identified in connection to reliance on competitive individualism (p. 121). Somewhat apart stands the corpus of Dzvinka and Bohdana Matiiash, Halyna Pakhutiak, and Svitlana Povaliaieva. Growing up in the 1990s, these authors turned to the themes of magic, spirituality, liminality, death, and self-destruction. All in all, the chapter provides a balanced survey of Ukrainian women writers from 1991 to 2011, but the topic itself warrants a separate book study.The fourth chapter investigates language as the protagonist and deliberates on the overlaps and discords in the Ukrainian authors’ identities and linguistic strategies of their expression. Its subtopics include Russophone writers (Andrey Kurkov, Serhiy and Maryna Diachenko, and Lada Luzina), as well as the use of textual surzhyk, the vernacular mixture of Russian and Ukrainian (Bohdan Zholdak and Les Poderviansky, Pavlo Vovach, and Svitlana Prykalo), polyglots (Oksana Zabuzhko, Svitlana Prykalo, Irena Karpa, Andrii Bondarand, Serhiy Zhadan, and Vasyl Makhno), and bilinguals (Dmytro Lazutkin and Yana Dubynianska). Rewakowicz convincingly lays out a variety of hybridization strategies, which include fashioning the literary personae, engaging with the country's current affairs, as well as with its mythology and folklore, and the linguistic hybridization. The author additionally remarks on a range of the writers’ attitudes toward the language itself, from the post-modern ludic approach to assigning the intrinsic value to the Ukrainian literary language in the national identity construction.In chapter 5, Rewakowicz engages with “manifestations of social marginalization [. . .] against the background of a new social and political reality” (p. 175). She approaches the traumas of social change through the study of liminal characters—“misfits, outcasts, madmen, rebellious youth, religious zealots, and criminals’” (p. 175)—which she breaks into the following groups: 1.) “neurotics, psychopaths, and mentally disturbed” (pp. 182–188; p. 2) “post-Soviet criminality and social misfits” (pp. 196–200; p. 3.) A separate cluster is dedicated to the transgressions of the youth—the proverbial sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll (pp. 188–196). Their textual construction of all these categories goes hand in hand with the construction of a new Ukrainian identity negotiated through belonging (p. 176). By discussing works of eight writers (including Volodymyr Dibrova, Oles Ulianenko, Yuri Izdryk, Anatolii Dnistrovy, Kostiantyn Moskalts, Serhii Zhadan, Liubko Deresh, and Andrei Kurkov), the author paints an impressive tableau of Ukrainian marginal characters of the transitional period. What unites all texts in this chapter is the recognition of “a need for a radical transformation in order to combat Ukraine's social decay and its ability to marginalize whole segments of society” (p. 200).The sixth and the last chapter is titled “Popular Literature and National Identity Construction.” The author discusses the following three tendencies in contemporary Ukrainian popular literature: 1.) attempt to popularize national traumas; 2.) the emergence of the new type of female protagonist; 3.) appropriation of popular genres as a vehicle for identity construction (p. 204). The national traumas in question date back to the 1920s and World War II, as well as to the more recent events of the Orange Revolution. The author arrives at the conclusion that texts by Vasyl Shkliar, Mariia Matios, and Lina Kostenko are meant to bring out “the heroic and the civic in otherwise passive communities” (p. 212). Less surprising is the rise of “a professional woman,” the new type of the female protagonist in detective stories and crime tales, as discussed in works by Iren Rozdobudko, Liuko Dashvar, Larysa Senisenko, and Yevheniia Kononenko. The last section discusses the connection between popular genres—such as fantasy, romance, and detective novels—and national identity construction. Often written by the Russophone authors, Ukrainian fantasy utilizes elements of the country's folklore. At the same time, the plethora of romance and detective novels written in literary Ukrainian language can be considered a marker of the paradigm shift in the country's literary production. Rewakowicz concludes the chapter by an important observation that “by adopting popular genres in the 1990s, Ukrainian writers en masse made a conscious effort to offset a considerable influx of mass culture products coming from Russia,” “facilitating and consolidating a sense of national belonging” (p. 226) and thus went beyond being “merely entertaining” (p. 239).The book concludes with a discussion of plurality and hybridity of Ukraine's literary identities that are caught in the tide and pool of colonial and post-colonial cultural consciousness. Maria Rewakowicz does not provide a single answer to the question of what the country's literary canon should be, but rather leaves it open-ended. She states that “plural identities invariably yield plural cannons” (p. 239) and rightfully gestures toward the limitations of the government cultural policy and a relative weakness of the independent literary institutions. The epilogue gives the reader an insight into the dramatic paradigm shift in Ukrainian cultural production which took place after 2014, the year marking the Russian aggression in Crimea and East Ukraine. The country's wartime literary output has made it clear that the ambivalent identities are no longer tolerated.In conclusion, Maria G. Rewakowicz's tour de force analysis succeeds in drawing out the connection between Ukrainian literary production from 1991 to 2011 and identity construction. The author moves freely between concepts and literary texts and, with discursive prowess, brings their interconnections to the fore. The bibliography is conveniently located at the end of each chapter, while the monograph's overall compact and elegant research design enables its easy navigation. Ukraine's Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1911–2011 is an eloquently written and well-researched study for the literature of post-independence Ukraine. It will be of interest to the specialists in Ukrainian literature and culture, post-Soviet literatures, and comparatists studying the East-Central European region. Most importantly, this monograph also contributes to the long-term development of the field by laying out a sustainable methodology to explore the phenomenon of hybridity in other post-Soviet literatures and cultures

Aesthetics · Art · Hybridity · Identity (music) · Literature · Sociology · Diverse Scientific Research in Ukraine · Gender Studies

• National self-identifications and coexistence in war-affected Ukraine

  Open Access•Skvirskaja•Focaal•2025

  Add to list

• Rupture and Call

  Open Access•Emily Holt, Emily W Holt et al.•East/West: Journal of Ukrainian…•2020

  Add to list

• Translating Ukrainian War Poetry into English

  Open Access•Roman Ivashkiv•East/West: Journal of Ukrainian…•2022

  Add to list