Yuri Andrukhovych Research Articles

DYKTATURA HISTORII, AMFETAMINA GEOGRAFII: EUROPA ZWANA ŚRODKOWĄ W ESEJACH

The article deals with the concept of Central Europe in the essays by Yuri Andrukhovych and Andrzej Stasiuk collected in the book My Europe. Both authors try to deconstruct the spatial categories deeply rooted in the collective consciousness, at the same time proving to be reproducers of the regressive mental schemes generated inside the European discourse.

The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation by Andrew Wilson (review)

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 894 he became increasingly antisemitic. But even aside from his prejudices there were good propaganda considerations not to stress the attempted genocide of the Jews by the Germans. Hicks devotes considerable attention to the reception of Soviet films and documentaries in the West. He correctly argues that Western audiences failed to appreciate and understand Soviet films and the depictions of Nazi barbarities committed on the Eastern front. Neither during nor after the war could they fit into the perception of Western audiences that the Soviet people won the war and in the process suffered incomparable losses. After 1945 neither in Communist nor in Western countries did people regard the Holocaust as a central issue for which the war was fought. One or two generations had to pass before we came to regard the murder of the Jews as an example of ultimate evil. Stevenson College Peter Kenez University of California, Santa Cruz Wilson, Andrew. The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation. Third edition. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2009. xviii + 392 pp. Chronology. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Index. £14.99 (paperback) In the third edition of his excellent, unorthodox history of Ukraine, Andrew WilsonupdateshisnarrativetoincludetheOrangeRevolutionanditsaftermath. First published in 2000, his account of Ukrainian history is distinguished by a ‘constructivist’ approach that works very well in deconstructing both Ukrainian and Russian historical mythologies. The author sees the Ukrainian nation as a work-in-progress, as an incomplete cultural and political project. He makes a point of avoiding the loaded term ‘nation building’ with its teleological assumptions, trying instead to explore counterfactual questions. What if a single Ruthenian nation had developed, including both the modernday Ukrainians and Belarusians? What if the Russian Empire had absorbed Galicia, that future stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism, either in 1772 or during 1813–15? Or, on the contrary, could have the Soviet Union survived into the twenty-first century if Stalin had not overextended it westward? The point of such provocative suggestions is, of course, to challenge the reader to think outside the box, to de-nationalize the familiar structures of ‘national history’. Such a creative deconstruction of nationalist metanarratives is particularly important in the Ukrainian case, in which the intertwined tropes of national victimhood and nationalist triumphalism have defined much of the native historical writing after independence. Wilson’s irreverent and imaginative approach also makes his book stand out among other, more traditional, English-language surveys of Ukrainian history. The author’s decision to begin with the chapter on Kyivan Rus´ and only then deal with the land’s more ancient past seems counterintuitive at first, REVIEWS 895 but its logic soon becomes apparent to the reader. By dissecting the often extravagant nationalist historical mythologies, Wilson introduces an important theme in his book, that of the cultural construction of the nation. Similar considerations justify another violation of the chronological order: the relegation of a historical survey of Ukrainian geopolitical theories to the block of chapters dealing with contemporary politics. This time the lesson for the reader is that Ukraine’s alleged ‘Europeanness’ has always been a political proposition. Another feature of Wilson’s history that contributes greatly to its readability is the author’s subtle analysis of cultural artefacts. He is always on the lookout for a painting, play, or novel that could be used to illuminate his point. The author’s vivid gallery of vignettes encompasses a wide range of literary figures, from such classics as Nikolai Gogol´, Taras Shevchenko, and Mikhail Bulgakov, to our contemporaries Yuri Andrukhovych and Oksana Zabuzhko. Along the way, Wilson also provides an excellent interpretation of Il´ia Repin’s famous painting Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880–91) and reveals to the reader his personal favorite on the Ukrainian rock scene — ‘Where We Are Not’ (1998) by the group Okean El´zy, which he reads as a commentary of sorts on Ukraine’s relation to Europe. The Western general reader will find helpful the author’s extended explanation of how Ukraine’s historical entanglement with Russia is both similar to and distinct from the relations between Scotland and England. Specialists on Eastern Europe will appreciate Wilson’s excellent analysis of blurred cultural boundaries and mixed national identities during...

Andrukhovych’s Secret: The return of colonial resignation

Since the period of glasnost in the USSR and, after 1991, the emergence of independent nation states on its former territory, the Ukrainian poet, prose writer and essayist Yuri Andrukhovych (b. 1960) has attended in the majority of his writings to geography and its relationship to geopolitics, to the persistence in central and eastern Europe of old colonial power structures, and to the nature of the relationship between his homeland and various conceptions of “Europe”: central and eastern Europe, and Europe as “the west”. Andrukhovych’s novel-length text Taiemnytsia [2007; Secret] subtitled “instead of a novel” and structured like a series of interviews, adopts a position of pessimism with regard to the likely emergence of a humane and just state of affairs in a Europe where western prosperity, coupled with indifference toward the east European Other, confront material want and an enduring deficit of liberty. The book constructs a world-model where the exercise of colonial or neocolonial power (economic, political and cultural) is so ubiquitous that even the colonized are not innocent of exercising it.

Lièwesschprooch Dichtung: Langue d'amour—Poésie (1940-2008) by Claude Vigée

EUROPEAN WAYNE MILLER, and KEVIN PRJJFER. Ni Dhomhnaill are presented along side those who use a more literal, colloquial language, likeRomania's Simona Popescu or Ukrainian poet Yuri Andrukhovych (seeWLT, Sep tember 2005, 24-32). The length of individual poems tends toward longer rather than shorter, and poetic influences are eclectic, rang ing from surrealism and dadaism to Russian acmeism and American confessionalism. What is equally striking is the breadth of historical engagement in many of the poems. The Finnish poet Martin Enckell offers a haunt ing hymn to the romantic, tragic history of the city of St. Petersburg ("in thiscityof the mothers, and the sphinxes, / lifewrites its shadow script, as in fever/'), and the Norwe gian poet 0ystein Wingaard Wolf presents a potent poem-memoir of a Jewish soap-maker who "became a small pile of soap and ashes / that theNazis wanted towash Europe with." Notable too is the frequency with which a playfully ironic or irreverent tone dominates the selec tions. Polish poet Ewa Sonnenberg What isequally striking isthe breadth of historical engagement in many of the poems. The Finnish poet Martin Enckelloffers a haunting hymnto the romantic,tragic history of thecity of St. Petersburgand the Norwegian poet 0ysteinWingaard Wolf presents a potent poem memoir of a Jewish soap-maker. wryly addresses the poem as if it were a person ("My funny little poem I'llwarm you inmy hands / we'll tell life we're sorry for writing not living"). The German poet Ulla Hahn delivers a witty send-up in sonnet form of both the lover and theact of love-making: "Rub ringsof sunshine intobelly's shell / so that thewarmth remains. / Then keep my eyelids open,my lips aswell." In theirintroduction,theeditors explain thatone of theirreasons for bringing together thepoems in this anthology was that the cultural and historical evolution of Europe dur ing the past few decades resulted in thewriting of "radically differ ent" poetry, creating theneed foran update. They also express concern that current American readers of = poetry and American poets them- = selves may have become less inter- = ested in European poetry in recent = years. Ifthat is true, it is all the more = reason forus tobe grateful thatwe = have been given access to an assem- = blage of contemporary European = verse that is uniformly vibrant and = well translated. = Rita Signorelli-Pappas = Princeton, New Jersey = Claude Vigee. Liewesschprooch E Dichtung: Langue d'amour?Poesie E (1940-2008). Bischwiller, France. 1 L'Associationdes Amis du Musee de la E Laub. 2008. 184 pages. 20. isbn 978- 1 2-9512380-8-4| "A language can only be pro- E nounced dead when no breath of E poetry strives to awaken it from a E prolonged coma, bestowing on it E with devotion, talent, and love, a E saving kiss of life/'Claude Vigee E writes about his endangered native E tongue,Alsatian, in the introduction E tohis newest book of poetry. Vigee E isa prolific, well-known French poet E who was awarded theGrand Prix E de Poesie de la Societe des Gens de E Lettres in 1987 and theGrand Prix E de Poesie de l'Academie Francaise in E 1997,amongmany otherdistinctions. E Today at eighty-seven,Vigee has had E a remarkable career spanning some = sixty years, with over fiftypoetry E collections inFrench, and important E French translationsofRilke and T. S. E Eliot. Translations of his works into E English include the recentChants de E Yabsence/Songs of Absence, translated E byAnthony Rudolf (2007), and Flow E Tide: SelectedPoetry and Prose, edited E and translated by Anthony Rudolf, E with additional translationsbyWillis E Barnstone (1992). Liewesschprooch, the E Alsatian word for"language of love," E isClaude Vigee's first book ofpoetry E _March-April 2009 i75 I > ^1 I H I ? I I "I written inwhat are in facthis two endangered mother tongues, Alsa tian (Els?ssisch) and Judeo-Alsatian (Eiss?ser-Jiddische L?sche). These languages, of Alemannic-German provenance, have been spoken for centuries in Alsace, a region in east ern France, but are facing extinction. Judeo-Alsatian is now spoken only by a few elders: l?ngschtvergesseni schtemme, "long forgotten voices." It is a revitalizing forcewhen a great poet likeVigee publishes works in these...

New European Poets by Wayne Miller, Kevin Prufer

New European Poets by Wayne Miller, Kevin Prufer

From "Letters to Ukraine"

From "Letters to Ukraine" Yuri Andrukhovych Translated by Nina Shevchuk-Murray (bio) II This is the capital. It is way too crowdedand not green enough for plants or botanists.This city is so like a ship (or a shipwreck?)and not much of an arc, more like the Titanic. There isn't air enough for these crowds.As everywhere most are fools or losers.Everyone turned away from the gates of heavenhas the right to ashes and a place in an urn. I must have written that I wear overalls.I have also learned the word "bespeaking,"learned to drink kvas, gauge the alma populi,and grow purplish blue from constant drinking. I've learned to play cards, drink chyfeer(tea essence) and play rock until morning, [End Page 161] sip rubbing alcohol, judge hangovers, brushthe tops of my shoes on the bottoms of curtains, and keep my soul in an ill-treated body,distinguish by taste local cigarette factories,1learned to swear by god, and reach for nothing,spit at the ceiling like decadent royalty. I've learned to view trees as occasions for lynching,a convenience embodied in every seed.I am closer than ever to knowing the people.Please. Show this letter to all in Ukraine. III About the girls. They are not so much youthfulas shrewd—they could outscrew Casanova.2Junio is when they come into bloom—or June, I'm sorry, I'm forgetting Ukrainian.Their public behavior is often vulgar,they cling to guys like boulevard-walkers.True, they dress nicely, with a certain élan—those clothes were chic in Europe last autumn.About their beauty. The sensibilitiesof temptation. On average they are familiarwith a dozen tricks, all of which, I must say, [End Page 162] we regard at home as quite inadequate.You will see for yourself—we'll go when you visiton a tour of brothels and similar places.Only you must first master English or Yiddish—locals aren't worth to them more than a penny. Ukrainian girls are more southern, picturesque.Their nails and eyelashes are equally fiery.They are all cherry-eyed,3 all pure and virtuous—even whores are honest at selling and buying.I can't say I had wilted completely without them,I drive them through my dreams like a shepherd . . .Their wrists are bruised with the marks of yasyr,4only soldiers and Tatars want them in marriage.5 VII There's another way out—to go into sciencelike a prophet to the masses. Go shuffle booksand if you don't have a bitch at hand,that is, a girl that has got you hooked, and if your spiritual axis is hardened,and your magic root is full of ability,there is a chance for a flow of discovery,observations, impressions, and a mutability [End Page 163] of your thoughts from stupid to wise.Everything depends on your concentration.This enslavement to knowledge, like manna from the skies,must be taken without the least reservation. For example, I learned what poems are.They are not wounds of words with humid aromas,not the rhythms of dreams, as some would have it,nor the field of battle with the Unicorn,6 but the prayers to Someone, Whom you do not trustand that's why the words must be honest, but boring.Poems are gifts you bring to the godswho have long ago despised such offerings. I have also learned that one must in timerecognize the devil, his crooked grimace.For contacts with him they'll break your ribsbut you cannot hide from him anywhere here. VIII I am revelling here like a constant hard-on,in the culture of womanly sighs and sobs.It's like being without a tux in a roomoccupied by a throng of luxurious snobs, [End Page 164] emigrés from down there, from Little Russia,7a place remembered here mostly from jokes.They're treated commonly like aboriginesof the Barents Land, that is—like idiots.8 But even among them there are weighty personaswho advance with wit and proper manners:Feofan Prokopovich...

Yuri Andrukhovych. Perverzion. Translated from the Ukrainian and with an introduction by Michael M. Naydan. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University press, 2005. 327 pp. $69.95 us.

Yuri Andrukhovych. Perverzion. Translated from the Ukrainian and with an introduction by Michael M. Naydan. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University press, 2005. 327 pp. $69.95 us.

The Flying Head (10)

Born in i960 in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk where he still resides, Yuri Andrukhovych is one of Ukraine's premier writers and the patriarch of the Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group that reenergized Ukrainian literary culture in the late 1980s and 1990s. He is the recipient of the Herder Prize (2001) and the Antonovych Prize (2001) in literature. His four published novels include Recreations (1992), Moskoviada (1993), Perverzion (1996), and The Twelve Rings (2003). He has authored four books of poetry and a book of essays, Disorientation in Locality (1999). Translations of his poetry and prose have appeared in many literary journals in North America and Europe. Andrukhovych is also an accomplished translator of the Beat Generation writers, the New York School poets, and Shakespeare's Hamlet into Ukrainian, and he is the literary editor of the cyberjournal Train-76.

BOOK REVIEW:ED. Abdul-Rasheed Na'allah. THE PEOPLE'S POET: EMERGING PERSPECTIVES ON NIYI OSUNDARE. Trenton: Africa World P, 2003.

Reviewed by: The People’s Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare F. Odun Balogun The People’s Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare Ed. Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah Trenton: Africa World P, 2003. 629 pp. ISBN 0-86543-849-8 paper. Niyi Osundare's growth as a poet is perceived in most essays in this collection as evolutionary, with his latest volume, Waiting Laughter, seen, for example, in Abiola Irele's preface, as marking the highest peak in the poet's developmental progression [End Page 186] toward an artistic fusion of craft and content that has produced an increasingly dense poetic idiom. In an introduction to Songs of the Market Place, featured in this collection as "Afterword," the critic Biodun Jeyifo had earlier noted what is now uniformly acknowledged in most contributions to this book, that Osundare's intense preoccupation with poetic craft is what sets him apart from the other Nigerian poets of his generation, except that Odia Ofeimun is noted by Stewart Brown as also displaying similar poetic fastidiousness (102). Though Osundare is acclaimed as primus inter pares, many scholars in this collection equally emphasize his representativeness as a poet of his generation because the group of poets that emerged about the same time as he were responding to the same national artistic impulse. In protest against the poetry of opaque density, characterizing first-generation Nigerian poets like Clark, Okigbo, and Soyinka, the second generation sought to create a poetry that was marked by stylistic accessibility. Ironically, although Osundare's poetry exemplifies the trend for accessibility at its best, especially in his early poems which articulated this generational poetic manifesto, a number of the essays included here have validly observed that the more artistically proficient Osundare's poetry becomes, the more it is characterized by stylistic opacity. This phenomenon, it is pointed out, is a consequence of Osundare's love of stylistic experimentations, which in Irene Sywenky's opinion include a tendency that Osundare shares with the Ukranian poet Yuri Andrukhovych, to re-evaluate and recontextualize both received native oral tradition as well as borrowed Western literary models as a way of "writing oneself into the world culture while maintaining a distinct cultural identity" (375). Poetic density, in Adepitan's view, is also an inescapable consequence of Osundare's adoption of the oral poetic tradition, known for its mythic tendencies. "Osundare," he writes, "is not overly concerned with myth-making in The Eye of the Earth. Nonetheless, is it fair to ask a Yoruba poet to write a whole tome of invocations and salutations in obeisance to the earth without willy-nilly re-discovering that mystic, mythic association with the earth for which his forefathers were exemplars? The answer is no—not even for a poet with a materialist outlook." (72) A generous number of essays analyze Osundare's stylistic experimentations with various aspects of poetic composition, including morphology, metaphoric diction, and oral tradition's performance devices. If the adoption of the stylistic elements of orature and a preference for intensely committed social themes, as correctly pointed out in several essays, constitute traits that Osundare shares with other poets of his generation, it is equally remarked that his patronage of ecological themes as a poet of nature and his infusion of hope and optimism into the treatment of the ills of the society are qualities that also set him aside from his peers (see Adepitan, Brown, Burness). As much as Femi Oyebode admires the brilliance with which Osundare integrates elements of his native Yoruba poetic devices in his Nigerian English poetry, he nonetheless argues that all that Osundare can achieve in this regard is a qualified, limited success in as much as poetry, more than drama or prose fiction, requires a native language to adequately express a native reality. "The overall effect" of composing poetry on Nigeria in English rather than his native Yoruba, the scholar insists, "is of a language treating its subject as alien to the integrity of the language itself " (86). While it may be argued that English cannot strictly be regarded as an alien language to Osundare, considering his training in it as a linguist, as well as his amply demonstrated [End Page 187...

The People's Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare (review)

Reviewed by: The People’s Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare F. Odun Balogun The People’s Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare Ed. Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah Trenton: Africa World P, 2003. 629 pp. ISBN 0-86543-849-8 paper. Niyi Osundare's growth as a poet is perceived in most essays in this collection as evolutionary, with his latest volume, Waiting Laughter, seen, for example, in Abiola Irele's preface, as marking the highest peak in the poet's developmental progression [End Page 186] toward an artistic fusion of craft and content that has produced an increasingly dense poetic idiom. In an introduction to Songs of the Market Place, featured in this collection as "Afterword," the critic Biodun Jeyifo had earlier noted what is now uniformly acknowledged in most contributions to this book, that Osundare's intense preoccupation with poetic craft is what sets him apart from the other Nigerian poets of his generation, except that Odia Ofeimun is noted by Stewart Brown as also displaying similar poetic fastidiousness (102). Though Osundare is acclaimed as primus inter pares, many scholars in this collection equally emphasize his representativeness as a poet of his generation because the group of poets that emerged about the same time as he were responding to the same national artistic impulse. In protest against the poetry of opaque density, characterizing first-generation Nigerian poets like Clark, Okigbo, and Soyinka, the second generation sought to create a poetry that was marked by stylistic accessibility. Ironically, although Osundare's poetry exemplifies the trend for accessibility at its best, especially in his early poems which articulated this generational poetic manifesto, a number of the essays included here have validly observed that the more artistically proficient Osundare's poetry becomes, the more it is characterized by stylistic opacity. This phenomenon, it is pointed out, is a consequence of Osundare's love of stylistic experimentations, which in Irene Sywenky's opinion include a tendency that Osundare shares with the Ukranian poet Yuri Andrukhovych, to re-evaluate and recontextualize both received native oral tradition as well as borrowed Western literary models as a way of "writing oneself into the world culture while maintaining a distinct cultural identity" (375). Poetic density, in Adepitan's view, is also an inescapable consequence of Osundare's adoption of the oral poetic tradition, known for its mythic tendencies. "Osundare," he writes, "is not overly concerned with myth-making in The Eye of the Earth. Nonetheless, is it fair to ask a Yoruba poet to write a whole tome of invocations and salutations in obeisance to the earth without willy-nilly re-discovering that mystic, mythic association with the earth for which his forefathers were exemplars? The answer is no—not even for a poet with a materialist outlook." (72) A generous number of essays analyze Osundare's stylistic experimentations with various aspects of poetic composition, including morphology, metaphoric diction, and oral tradition's performance devices. If the adoption of the stylistic elements of orature and a preference for intensely committed social themes, as correctly pointed out in several essays, constitute traits that Osundare shares with other poets of his generation, it is equally remarked that his patronage of ecological themes as a poet of nature and his infusion of hope and optimism into the treatment of the ills of the society are qualities that also set him aside from his peers (see Adepitan, Brown, Burness). As much as Femi Oyebode admires the brilliance with which Osundare integrates elements of his native Yoruba poetic devices in his Nigerian English poetry, he nonetheless argues that all that Osundare can achieve in this regard is a qualified, limited success in as much as poetry, more than drama or prose fiction, requires a native language to adequately express a native reality. "The overall effect" of composing poetry on Nigeria in English rather than his native Yoruba, the scholar insists, "is of a language treating its subject as alien to the integrity of the language itself " (86). While it may be argued that English cannot strictly be regarded as an alien language to Osundare, considering his training in it as a linguist, as well as his amply demonstrated [End Page 187...

Translating A Novel's Novelty: Yuri Andrukhovych's Perverzion In English

This article addresses the issues involved in translating complicated prose into English, focusing on the translation of Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych's postmodernist novel Perverzion. Andrukhovych's novel echoes elements of several genres--the philosophical novel, the saint's life (vita), the mystery novel, the picaresque, and the travelogue. The novel is replete with linguistic and stylistic complexities that require creative resolution by the translator. The major issues addressed include the translation of meaningful names, the translation of linguistically deformed text, and the translation of poetic passages. The translator concludes that creative resolution of these problems--the conveying of multiple and subsurface meanings as well as the effects of the original--gives an anglophone reading audience a better approximation of the author's true nature as a writer.