Теорія літератури

Aside from the actual physical plants of the numerous «correctional facilities» which threatened an entire society, there was a larger prison without walls spread across the entire country. The state ran a monstrous house of repression, and writers were merely its most dangerous denizens. Even some of the best known, most servile, officially celebrated party loyalists lived under the constant surveillance of the KGB.

And while recent history is already treated as a bad dream, It continues to paralyze the psyches of writers, knotting their thoughts and their hands. Almost all are trying to explain and understand a haunted past which gives them no peace. Without coming to terms with this, it’s not possible to evaluate the current scene. That is why the past continues to impose itself on contemporary literature, which mainly describes the way things were rather than how they are.

Among the young, the past has given birth to feelings of guilt, inferiority, and fear. The newest literature wants first to condemn and then to forget it. In Yevhen Pashkovskyi’s essay, «Literature as Crime,» he blames all those who accepted Soviet reality, and especially those who contributed to the creation of it. But he fails to see the danger in fostering a literature of retribution.

Retribution is in fact the business of the hero of Yuri Andrukhovych’s novel The Moskoviada. His autobiographical hero is filled with hate for the empire and its capital, Moscow, although he is drawn there and spends most of his time in its vicinity. Hating it, he also hates himself, his weakness, his inner emptiness. Ukrainian prose has never had a hero this empty and alienated. But what is his view on the future? Does he intend to inhabit this loathing for his past and for himself forever? Or will analysis and confession liberate him from his complexes? I suspect the latter impulse will win; Ukrainian culture is growing increasingly critical not only of its traditionally hostile surroundings but also of itself.

Living inside the ruins of a prison produces one final, widespread mode of discourse: that of violence and cruelty. This began with stories about the army, which for a time appeared to be the central theme of a generation. The brutality of military life is consonant with the harshness of post-Soviet life in general. It is a life without love, saturated in reciprocal violence, where men rape women and women men, where prostitution, betrayal, and sexual cynicism are the norm in human relations.

The most interesting voices are those which are free of the «prison house complex,» which aren’t turned to the past, and don’t rehearse the old myths or worship in the ancient temples, but instead breathe in the present. These belong mainly to a few women. They are more universal, without the note of rage animating their male colleagues. Most still rely on the patriarchal tradition in which they «sing» about the joys of motherhood, their love for their men, or the «tragic fate of Ukraine and Ukrainian women,» producing various «laments.» This offers male critics an excuse to unfairly group all women writers on the periphery of the traditionally masculine culture.