The Ukrainian bestseller: On the way to national identity

Abstract

The article considers the commercially successful works of fiction written in Ukrainian since the beginning of Ukraine’s independence, and provides a brief excursion into the history of the issue. A bestseller is viewed as a multifunctional phenomenon, the emergence of which is determined by not only the presence of the literary text itself, but also the infrastructure and competent marketing necessary for good sales. In the 1990s there were no and could not be bestsellers, since there were no necessary infrastructure, support from the state, appropriate attitude of publishing houses, and moreover, there was no Ukrainian reader. The buyers would more willingly buy books in Russian and there was some distrust of modern Ukrainian literature. Certain changes took place in the 2000s. Since the mid-2000s in Ukrainian culture the hit sales are books that offer a biased view of the controversial historical events of the Soviet past, use “hate speech” in relation to other ethnic groups, and manipulate the reader’s empathy. A conclusion is made about the relevance of such a one-dimensional image of the past for the formation of Ukrainian national identity in the current historical period.