The Ukrainian theme in the Spanish language literary studies of the diaspora

Abstract

The paper recounts about the first and still the only attempt to present Ukrainian literature in the Spanish language which was undertaken by Dmytro Buchynskyi, Petro Kluk, Dmytro Chyzhevskyi, and Yuriy Shevelov. They tell their Spanish readers about the key phenomena and names of Ukrainian literature and interpret the latter as reflection of the Ukrainian identity produced by combination of national spirit and European values. D. Buchynskyi and P. Kluk, who lived in Spain and wrote Spanish, focused on analysis of Spanish imagery in the works of Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, Spyrydon Cherkasenko, and Natalena Koroleva. The hermeneutics of D. Chyzhevskyi and Y. Shevelov, whose essays were translated into Spanish for the special issue of the journal Oriente Europeo dedicated to Ukraine (1957), reflect a broader European perspective. All Ukrainian emigrant intellectuals, whose essays are studied in the paper, reject models of understanding Ukrainian literature which were imposed by the official Soviet literary studies. D. Buchynskyi and P. Kluk embody this trend by emphasizing religious and humanistic values in the works of Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka. D. Chyzhevskyi argues that the baroque Ukrainian literature, which was prohibited in the USSR, was a mediator in exchange of ideas, including theology, between West and East. Y. Shevelov plays a special role in undermining the Soviet version of the Ukrainian literary canon of the first half of the 20th century. He declares the Soviet regime a mortal threat to literary imagination. The researcher restores the list of writers deleted from the Ukrainian cultural memory by the Stalinist terror and provides examples of original reading of the works of Pavlo Tychyna, Mykhail Semenko, Mykola Kvyliovyi, Mykola Kulish and others. The essays about Ukrainian literature published in Spain is a dramatic episode of the cultural war of the Ukrainian diaspora against the Soviet version of the Ukrainian literary canon.