National and Cultural Identity in Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Diary Entries

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the construction of national and cultural identity in Diary (1940s–1950s) of Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894–1956), Ukrainian-born and known as Soviet director, film producer, and screenwriter. The means of construction of the national identity is based on the constant recollection of Dovzhenko’s past in Ukraine. Being a nationalist in the Civil war (1917–1919) and subsequently living in the Soviet Union, Dovzhenko was not its genuine resident. After the Soviets established their control in Ukraine, Dovzhenko’s spiritual rebirth as a Soviet citizen did not fully occur. However, in these diary entries the future is associated with the Soviet ideology and the creation of a new better society in the frame of communist ideological paradigm. Thus, in Dovzhenko’s diaries, two identities can be distinguished, Ukrainian and the Soviet, and they coexist in the diary narrative. Their logic is inclusive and complementary rather than oppositional. The artist criticizes the Soviet regime and very often returns his childhood in the village of Sosnytsia in the Chernihiv region of Ukraine. Artist’s past becomes a traumatic memoir, mainly associated with Stalin’s criticism of his cinemanovel “Ukraina v ohni” (“Ukraine in Flames”, 1943). Since the scandal around this book, Dovzhenko tries to prove Stalin that he is absolutely a Soviet artist. In the diary entries, he also writes about his sorrow and nostalgia for Ukraine, his homeland; and he cannot be considered as a genuine Soviet artist. Although the filmmaker could not express his thoughts openly due to ideological pressures, traces of such reflections may be found in his diary, which combined both Ukrainian and Soviet elements. Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s multilayered self-narration encompasses his nationalist past and the Soviet legacy in all of its complex psychological interactions. Dovzhenko’s diary is a unique record providing the artist’s self-reflections under the Stalinist regime.