Herstories

Herstories: an anthology of Ukrainian women prose writers, edited and compiled by Michael M. Naydan, London, Glagoslav Publishers, 2014, 444 pp., euro30.35/US$33.99 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-909-15602-9, euro21.40/US$28.70 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-909-15601-2This biggish book is a welcome addition to the still smallish corpus of Ukrainian literature in English translation. Edited by the prolific literary translator into English from Ukrainian and Russian, Michael M. Naydan, the collection comprises 40 texts by 18 women authors, the eldest, Lina Kostenko and Emma Andijewska, born in the 1930s, and the youngest, Irena Karpa and Tanya Malyarchuk, in the 1980s. The majority of writers represented in Herstories are not, in fact, as new as the subtitle suggests, but the works included in the anthology may be so regarded - not only because in almost all cases they were composed in the twenty-first century, but also because their chosen themes and styles depart from the realist mainstream of Ukrainian literature (pre-Soviet, Soviet, and even post-Soviet); and because, in contrast to most previous and much contemporary Ukrainian literature, they decline, more or less emphatically, to present the act of narration as gender neutral.The selection of authors is uncontroversial: all 18 have substantial established reputations. The editor's intention of conveying a representative flavour (10) of the flourishing field of Ukrainian-language fiction by women has determined a prominent feature of the anthology: more than half of the pieces in it are excerpts from longer works. If novels that excited considerable public debate, like Oksana Zabuzhko's Field Work in Ukrainian Sex or Kostenko's Diary of a Ukrainian Madman, are to be included - indeed, any samples of the longer genres in which the authors preeminently work - then, inevitably, they must be represented by excerpts. It is debatable, however, whether the cause of representativeness is well served by several short passages illustrating the work of a single author - four in the case of Iren Rozdobudko, for example, and three each for Maria Matios and Natalka Sniadanko.As was the case in Roma Franko and Sonia Morris's series Women's Voices in Ukrainian Literature, which brought together works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Herstories the juxtaposition of texts authored only by women brings to the fore a concentration of social and psychological themes far less evident in literature written by men: violence by men of all social categories against women and children (Liuko Dashvar, Maria Matios, Sofia Andrukhovych), the dominance of men in Ukrainian society and women's strategies of resistance against their power (Sofia Maidanska, Liudmyla Taran, Eugenia Kononenko, Iren Rozdobudko, Tanya Malyarchuk); sexual orientations other than the heterosexual (Oksana Zabuzhko); the connections between gender, politics, and nation (Kostenko, Nina Bichuya); the utopian quality of equal and mutually respectful relationships between women and men (Svitlana Povalyayeva, Dzvinka Matyash, Svitlana Pyrkalo); and the joys and despairs of feminist and postfeminist autonomy (Natalka Sniadanko, Larysa Denysenko, Irena Karpa). Emma Andijewska's Tales, on the other hand, mythical and surreal as they are, exist outside any direct connection to recognizable contemporary realities

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Ukrainian · Education and Social Development in Ukraine · History · Military, Security, and Education Studies · Philosophy · Soviet and Russian History