POST-SOVIET WOMEN WRITERS and the NATIONAL IMAGINARY, 1989-2009 by OLEKSANDRA IHOR SHCHUR DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulf
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POST-SOVIET WOMEN WRITERS AND THE NATIONAL IMAGINARY, 1989-2009 BY OLEKSANDRA IHOR SHCHUR DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Valeria Sobol, Chair Associate Professor Lilya Kaganovsky Professor Harriet Murav Associate Professor Teresa Barnes ABSTRACT This project is a case study of how post-Soviet women writers have attempted to renegotiate women's (and women writers') traditional roles in and vis-à-vis their newly independent postcommunist nations through fiction that engages the questions of gender and national identity in the post-Soviet space. The dissertation examines the writings and paths to literary recognition of several by now established Ukrainian women authors who first appeared on the literary scene in the late 1980s (Oksana Zabuzhko, Yevhenia Kononenko, and Maria Matios) and compares the Ukrainian case of a proliferation in late/post-Soviet women's writing to the Russian one, which is better known in the West. I argue that one important way in which Ukrainian post-Soviet women writers have been able to gain recognition and even acceptance into the literary canon is by turning to the “national” themes, such as the traumatic Soviet past. Yet their fiction has often treated the questions of the nation through a gender lens, representing and re-imagining the Soviet past and its relevance for the national present from the perspective of a female subject. By placing women in the center of the narrative―as highly individualized characters and not mere symbols of the nation―these works participate in (re)shaping the Ukrainian national imaginary and especially those of its elements that have to do with gender (for instance, the stereotypes about women's roles in the nation). The project utilizes the tools of nationalism studies, postcolonial studies, and gender-nation studies to analyze women writers' interventions into the national imaginary and identifies two broad types of narrative plots about the nation which post-Soviet women writers have used and often simultaneously undermined in their recent fiction. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: NATIONAL IMAGINARIES AND WOMEN WRITERS IN THE POSTCOLONIAL POST-SOVIET SPACE.....................................................................11 CHAPTER 2: WRITING ONESELF INTO LITERATURE: THE RE-EMERGENCE OF UKRAINIAN WOMEN'S WRITING IN THE LATE 1980s AND THE EARLY 1990s.................................................................................................................................46 CHAPTER 3: BETWEEN GENDER, NATION, AND DISSEMINATION: THE FIRST UKRAINIAN BESTSELLER BY A WOMAN WRITER..............................................101 CHAPTER 4: FOUNDATIONAL NATIONAL NARRATIVES BY UKRAINIAN WOMEN WRITERS―AND WITH A DIFFERENCE...................................................................142 CHAPTER 5: NARRATING THE POST-SOVIET NATION AND ITS GENDER: A RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN COMPARISON.....................................................................198 CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................................239 BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................................245 iii INTRODUCTION According to the Ukrainian literary scholar Solomiya Pavlychko, the end of the 1980s in Ukrainian literature was marked by a “return” of women writers (“Vyklyk stereotypam: novi zhinochi holosy v suchasnii ukrains'kii literaturi” 181).1 At the same time, the fall of the Soviet Union and the gaining of independence by Ukraine in 1991 placed before the local intellectual elites the challenge of constructing “a new collective identity, different from the Soviet one” and made the ensuing transitional period a time of heated discussions about the Soviet past, national identity, and the urgent tasks of post-Soviet nation-building (Hnatiuk 17). Not surprisingly for “literature-centric” Ukraine,2 much of this construction and discussion happened in prose fiction (as well as literary essays3), with many of the newly emergent women writers actively participating in this process and contributing their visions of Ukraine's past and present. This study examines the two developments―women's re-emergence in Ukrainian literature and their literary interventions into Ukraine's national imaginary―together. I explore the works and literary careers of several by now established, professional Ukrainian women writers of the so-called “eightiers” (visimdesiatnyky) generation.4 I argue that these writers' success in asserting themselves on the male-dominated literary scene, gaining popularity and acceptance into the Ukrainian literary canon has often hinged on their willingness to address important national issues in their fiction, such as those of the traumatic Soviet past or Ukraine's post-Soviet challenges. This often implicit cultural expectation of the “national” themes in 1 Translations from Ukrainian and Russian throughout are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 2 A term applied both to Ukraine and Russia by the literary scholar Vitaly Chernetsky (Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization). For more on literature-centrism in Eastern Europe and Ukraine in particular, see Chapter 1. 3 For the national identity debates that took place in the 1990s on the pages of Ukrainian literary essays, see Hnatiuk. 4 This is a generation of Ukrainian writers that first came onto the literary scene in the mid- to late 1980s. I discuss their significance and characteristics in more detail in Chapter 2. 1 fiction can be traced back to Ukrainian literature's traditional role as the locus for the articulation and preservation of a sense of national identity in the absence of an independent Ukrainian state, as well as to what I describe, borrowing a term from Serguei Oushakine, as the Soviet regime's “discursive monopoly”―the state's demand for writing that deals primarily with the state's ideology and explicitly political topics (“The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,” 214). Using the example of Nina Bichuya, whom I see as the sole female precursor to the women writers of prose fiction from the eightiers generation, I explain in Chapter 2 how the Soviet discursive monopoly and the literary politics within Soviet Ukraine hindered the career of this talented author and likely prevented more Ukrainian women writers from emerging in the Soviet period. I further argue that, as in the case of Russian women's literature (better known in the West), to which I compare Ukrainian women's writing in Chapter 5 of this dissertation, women authors in late Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine have had to deal with the patriarchal stereotype that issues of gender and women's daily life are the hallmark of “narrow-minded” and therefore “inferior” women’s literature.5 As my analysis of a number of recent critically acclaimed prose texts by Ukrainian women writers shows, one way in which these authors were able to work around this stereotype―and gain critical and readers' recognition in the process―was by creating fiction that treated the questions of the nation through a gender lens, so to speak. Prose works written between 1989 and 2009 by Oksana Zabuzhko, Yevhenia Kononenko, and Maria Matios, examined in this dissertation, discuss, reconstruct and/or re-imagine Ukraine’s Soviet past and its relevance for the national present, but frequently do so from the perspective of a female subject. By placing women in the center of the narrative―as highly individualized characters and not mere symbols of the nation―these texts participate in (re)shaping the 5 For an explanation of such attitudes to women's writing in Russia, see Helena Goscilo's Dehexing Sex, especially pp. 16-8. 2 contemporary Ukrainian national imaginary―a collectively held conception of the Ukrainian nation, based on a complex of narratives, myths, and symbols (including those that pertain to gender) that are believed to define the “uniqueness” of the Ukrainian national community and hold it together.6 In so doing, these works attribute to their authors a tinge of subversiveness―first, because national imaginaries (and the Ukrainian one is no exception) are generally quite resistant to change and, second, because the conservative national discourses usually cast women in the role of biological and cultural reproducers rather than producers of new cultural meanings.7 Thus, the act of re-imagining and re-writing the national may become a subversive act for a woman writer―as it did, for example, in the case of Zabuzhko's first novel, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), examined in Chapter 3. Through the close readings of representative prose fiction by Zabuzhko, Kononenko, and Matios, as well as an inquiry into its reception and cultural influence―reviews, criticism, literary prizes and awards received, translations into other languages and stage adaptations, I attempt to answer the following questions: What are these visions of the Ukrainian nation that contemporary women writers have authored in the past several decades, and how do they differ from the most representative national visions by male writers? What kind of Ukrainian