Pisliachornobyl's'ka biblioteka: ukrains'kyi literaturnyi postmodern by Tamara Hundorova (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS I47 Hundorova, Tamara. Pisliachornobyl's 'ka biblioteka:ukrains'kyiliteraturnyi postmo dern.Krytyka, Kyiv, 2005. 263 pp. Notes. Index. English Summary. 19UAH (paperback). In Pisliachornobyl's'ka biblioteka (The Post-Chornobyl Library) Tamara Hun dorova translates the idea that the nuclear age is linkedwith the postmodern condition toUkraine: theChornobyl disaster, in the author's view, dramati cally transformed theUkrainian consciousness, entering it as a discourse in the same way that the nuclear threat of the Cold War entered Western consciousness. Chornobyl brought with itmistrust not only of totalitarian authority, but also of all authoritative discourse. The disaster also led to a rethinking of time and space, since itseffectsknew no boundaries and threat ened to end time and plunge theworld intopost-apocalyptic regression.With the disintegration of structures and hierarchies that it brought, Chornobyl consequently caused a decentralization and fragmentation of Ukrainian literature. Ukrainian intellectual and literary life became highly diversified, though with one uniting factor: the post-Chornobyl discourse. The texts produced within this discourse constitute the 'post-Chornobyl library' of the book's title. After laying out this theoretical approach, Hundorova discusses the devel opment of postmodernism inUkraine, highlighting numerous complications such as the interference of nationalist-romantic discourse in the embryonic postmodern process, or the re-activation of Ukrainian modernism: Ukrainian postmodernism paradoxically becomes a 'reflection and a completion' of this interruptedmodernism, rather than standing in opposition to it (p. 39). Other issues discussed by Hundorova include the process of re-evaluation of the Ukrainian literary canon, transformations in linguistic behaviour and how postmodernism fits into a 'culturally organic' vision of Ukrainian literature (p. 57). The book then goes on to discuss individual or groups of writers. The author sees theKyiv ironists,with their ironic linguistic behaviour, and the Bu-Ba-Bu poets, with their subversive carnival ethos, as forerunners and initiators of Ukrainian postmodernism. She identifies a common 'morpho logical' approach to reality between Taras Prokhasko and Iurii Izdryk, comparing the 'novel-essays' of the former, with their 'thought image con structions',with the latter's distorted dream imagery, inwhich the boundaries between subject and object become blurred (pp. 97-115). She also examines the advent of Ukrainian feminist postmodernism in the shape of Oksana Zabuzhko, who combines sexuality, language and national-cultural identity in a hybrid form ofwriting somewhere between popular women's fictionand the intellectual essay. In Serhii Zhadan's work Hundorova sees deliberate contrasting of 1960sWestern ideals with the nationalistic modernism popular inUkraine at the same time, combined with a deconstructive approach to socialist symbols that she identifieswith thework of theMoscow conceptual ists.The Chornobyl disaster itself ismost directly linked with the work of Ievhen Pashkovskyi, and his apocalyptic, moralizing texts.The author also identifieswhat she calls 'post-totalitarian kaif (post-totalitarian kicks) in the 148 SEER, 86, I, 2008 work of Volodymyr Tsybulko (p. 159), who combines mass-culture kitsch with a constructive underlying cultural agenda. In the final chapter she examines ?migr? dramatist George Tarnawsky's original stance on Derridian deconstruction in his 'anthology of anti-feminist concepts' (p. 227). Iurii Andrukhovych is themost analysed author in the book (which leads at times to repetition), and is discussed in the context of 'carnival postmodernism' (p. 77), post-colonialism and in the chapter 'Post-modern topography: nostalgia and revenge' (pp. 125-37). What is demonstrated by the book is somewhat at odds with what might seem to be its initial premise. The varied nature of the examined texts, and the literaryapproaches and cultural philosophies behind them, suggest a literary postmodernism that at once embraces and rejects the name. Few of thewriters discussed can be said to be purely postmodernist: the Bu-Ba-Bu was an embryonic form of postmodernism, not recognized as such at the time and remarkable more for its socio-political role; theKyiv ironistswere also only retrospectively associated with postmodernism; the 'post-totalitarian kaif ofTsybulko, the apocalyptic visions of Pashkovskyi and the intellectual ideals of Tarnawsky, while all involving postmodernist techniques, have more in common with what Hundorova herself describes as a 'neo-modernist' view of literature (p. 254); similarly, the two most important writers discussed, Andrukhovych and Zabuzhko, have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with postmodernism which, in its Western form...