The Voices of Ukrainian Emigre Poetry

Abstract

The question of poet's is a subject that is not unequivocally defined and, unlike form and genre, context and history, reception and hermeneutics, it is not a centrepiece of currently prominent poetic theories. To be sure, voice figures in historical and rhetorical, psychological and even deconstructive criticism; it is often contiguous to notions as point of view and persona; but perhaps by very fact that it partakes of several different critical domains, while at same time always being ineluctably tied to an individual writer, voice, like style, tends to be treated in a gingerly way. In Ukrainian literary criticism and literary history, it is seldom if ever treated as a separate category, as something that may usefully be distinguished from style, or creative method, or emotionality, wit, or pathos. Arguably, this lack of distinction between and the poet as such merely reflects naturalist bias of much of traditional Ukrainian literary criticism. A discussion of or voices in specific context of Ukrainian emigre poetry requires a delimitation ofthat context. As I take it, a Ukrainian emigre literature, in true meaning of term, begins only after World War II, in effect in D.P. period of 1945-1950. l It is only then that Ukrainian writers and readers are fully separated from their native environment and cast into cold reality of cultures. The interwar period, and indeed war years, present an entirely different picture: so-called emigre literature, i.e., writings of those who had left lands that had become Soviet Ukraine, was largely centred, in terms of publishing and of reading public, in Western Ukraine, then primarily under Poland; contacts between L'viv and Prague, and of course Warsaw, were practicable and sense of an authentic cultural and social, if not political, context was firmly based. In fact even these non-Ukrainian settings were hardly foreign and, taken historically, nothing new. Ukrainian literature in pastto take but examples of St. Petersburg of Shevchenko and Kulish, and Cracow of Stefanyk and Lepkyi, had often developed and indeed flourished in nominally centres. Thus difference