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Lecture XIII – Andrei Kurkov (2006) Worlds Apart? Life and Literature In

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Lecture XIII – Andrei Kurkov (2006) Worlds Apart? Life and Literature In The 2006 J.B. Rudnyckyj Distinguished Lecture University of Manitoba, February 23, 2006 Presented by Andrey Kurkov novelist, journalist and screenwriter Kyiv, Ukraine Independent Ukraine as a function of Soviet Inertia In 1991 Ukraine broke away from the USSR, like a huge piece of ice breaking off an ice-berg. In the suddenly “freed” (and I use this word in inverted commas) Ukraine the Soviet state apparatus still functioned, the country was still led by Soviet “statesmen” (more inverted commas I’m afraid!) Essentially the economy remained Soviet too, although the co-operative businesses, which had been allowed by the Communist Party since the economic crises began in the mid eighties, became more active. The Communist Party lost its monopoly on power and the most active former communists and Komsomol members formed their own parties on the “which party doesn’t exist yet? We’ll start that one” principle! These new party leaders had no personal political persuasions. Only RUKh and the ecology movement party “Zeleni Svit” (“Green World”) had their own ideology. The other 100 or so parties were created by their leaders specifically as instruments in the fight for power. The Communist Party, that was later banned for some time, and the Komsomol movement turned out to have been the only “schools” for top- and middle- managers. This already formally independent country had no choice but to follow these leaders from the communist “school of management”. Even today, in the new century, people brought up in the Soviet system hold top-positions. I don’t think there was any other historic alternative to this development, but this is the main reason for the slow evolution of our society and for the rapid formation of a class of very rich people. This situation is also partially responsible for all cultural atavisms that the society drags behind itself from 1980s. Soviet pop- culture is still in demand and is considered by its older “consumers” as something more real and human than contemporary pop-culture. The Soviet system of giving titles such as Honorary or People’s artist remains in use in Ukraine and Russia. Only in literary life of Ukraine, not all Soviet literature is viewed with nostalgia. At the end of 1980s over 1500 of the members of Writers’ Union of Ukraine were Communist Party members. From its formation, the Union had served communist ideology through literature. Thousands of novels about factories, collective farms, good communists and the heroic deeds of non-party factory workers were produced by its members. This parallel reality created by Soviet writers was taught in school and universities. Those who studied these works well, as well as those who had a sincere belief in the message they gave, were more likely to make a good career for themselves, since any career, even one in the arts, was dependent on the degree to which a person accepted this parallel reality as the basis for reality itself. The majority of writers served the system loyally. They knew what awaited them if they did not, and they had no desire to lose their privileged status because of a soar conscience. Only the most cunning and talented writers, like Pavlo Zahrebelny and Valerii Shevchuk succeeded in avoiding subservience to communist ideology. There were a few niches where those reluctant to serve the party could go: historical and ethnic mythology, children’s literature or lyrical poetry. But there was little room in any of these niches. Zahrebelny, even as a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Ukraine, wrote historical novels about the history of Ukraine and in some of them an attentive reader could find that his attitude to Ukrainian historical personalities was much more positive than to those from Russia. The Soviet censors simply were not interested in getting him to improve the image of Peter the Great or of Count Potemkin. In 1991, along with the USSR, Ukrainian Soviet literature sank without trace. State publishers ceased to work and the publishing houses that sprung up began producing literature that was really in demand. And it was not literature about good communists anymore. In that year Ukrainian books accounted for 60-70 percent of all book sales in towns and cities and 90 percent in the villages. The rest of the books were published in Russia and were always in short supply. After 1991, when state Ukrainian publishing collapsed, the vacuum was filled by books produced by Russian publishers and Ukrainian publishers in the Russian language. After decades of the “politically correct” novel, the pendulum swung violently in the other direction. Initially the demand was for foreign science fiction, foreign detectives, books on alternative medicine, and love stories. Later the foreign science fiction was replaced by similar fare produced by Russian and Ukrainian authors. In the mid nineties the Russian government lifted all taxes on publishers, and book production became a very lucrative business. However, the Ukrainian book industry had to wait until the mid nineties only to receive a small reduction in VAT. Prior to that books were subject to the same VAT as alcohol. As a result, from 1990 the Ukrainian book market was gradually taken over by Russian publishers who are now investing money in book trading in Ukraine, 80 percent of all books produced in Soviet Ukraine had to be in the Ukrainian language. Practically all of them had more to do with ideological propaganda than with literature, and by the end of the eighties only a handful of Ukrainian writers had a real readership. Quite large print-runs of books that no one wanted were bought, compulsorily, by libraries and universities. From 1991 no new publishers wanted to print the work of the old, Ukrainian writers, even when they wrote on more contemporary themes without the old ideology. Many writers simply could not grasp the idea of freedom in creativity. They genuinely believed that writers should serve the party and so, when the first wave of nationalist ideology hit the country some writers turned their typewriters to serve the cause of the Ukrainian national idea. However, state orders for such books with large print-runs and a guaranteed income were not forthcoming. The niche for national-ideological literature was filled spontaneously, rather than in any organized way and this occurred largely thanks to financial support from the Ukrainian diaspora and charitable foundations. Previously banned works by such writers as Vasyl Stus and Lina Kostenko, as well as by the Ukrainian “bourgeois” philosophers and historians, were published. Despite the small print runs of the first wave of these works, they were met with tremendous enthusiasm. The Ukrainian intelligentsia, however, demanded more and other books. All this was happening against a background of the mass publication of once banned Soviet dissident and émigré literature. Many Russian authors started to publish their novels and short stories which had failed to pass the Soviet censors. Samizdat (samvydav in Ukrainian) had existed in Ukraine since the time of Taras Shevshenko and in the 1960s and 1970s it nourished a relatively small group of Ukrainian dissidents (around 1500 people). Most unfortunately, for various reasons, very little of their previously banned work inspired interest among publishers and those books which were published did not reach a wider audience. Nor did any form of a social literature take shape. Not a single, memorable work was published which touched upon the theme of Ukraine’s newly independent status. In the mid 1990s Ukraine saw the first of the new generation of young writers. There was a gaping hole in the literary market for Ukrainian literature, but the book market was and probably still is 90 percent taken over by Russian publishers. Although some Russian publishers have already tried to publish books in Ukrainian for the Ukrainian market, the imbalance between the two languages in the bookshops is still far from being redressed. In the Western Ukraine the majority of active readers refused to read Russian language books. Thus, in the mid nineties, if the situation for the Ukrainian publishers (officially numbering about 600, of which only about a few dozen were actually producing literature) was difficult, it was very promising for the young Ukrainian language writers. It is against this background that we see the appearance of first Ukrainian cult novels: Oksana Zabuzhko’s Field Research in Ukrainian Sex and Yurii Andrukhovych’s Moskoviada. The success of these two leading post-Soviet Ukrainian authors gave an example and hope to the younger generation of writers. I will talk more about these pioneering works later. Suffice it to say now that the place of the Soviet Ukrainian writers – the hundreds who were already lost in history – was being taken by perhaps a dozen Ukrainian postmodernists. At the same time, teachers of Ukrainian literature in schools, universities and colleges decided to focus on pre-Soviet Ukrainian classics, while “rehabilitating” the Ukrainian poets of the 1920s and 1930s, like Pavlo Tychyna and Volodymyr Sosiura. For the majority of these teachers, new Ukrainian literature was more a source of annoyance than material for a lecture. They chose not to support the new generation of writers by bringing them to the attention of their students. In many higher educational establishments this tendency still remains strong. A year ago, I went with Andrii Kokotukha to give a talk to students at the Nizhen Institute of Culture, in Chernihiv oblast. We were guests of the faculty of librarianship. I asked students to raise their hands whenever I mentioned a writer whom they had heard of. I started with some outsiders, that I did not expect many people to know about, but even when I mentioned Zabuzhko and Andrukhovych, only the lecturers’ hands went up, and when I asked the students which writers they did know about, they replied: “Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka and Ivan Franko”.
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