Writing Between the Lines: Formal Discontinuities in Autobiographies of Ukrainian Writers, 1890s-1940s The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40046481 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Writing between the lines: Formal discontinuities in autobiographies of Ukrainian writers, 1890s-1940s A dissertation presented by Iaroslava Strikha to The Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Slavic Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2017 © 2017 Iaroslava Strikha All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor George G. Grabowicz Iaroslava Strikha Writing between the lines: Formal discontinuities in autobiographies of Ukrainian writers, 1890s-1940s Abstract My dissertation treats life-writing in Ukrainian literature from the 1890s to the 1940s. These texts are often marked by radical discontinuities: temporal, stylistic, ideological, linguistic, etc. Autobiographies tempt readers to imagine narrators in a straight teleological progression towards self-actualization. However, my research focuses on cultural and historical periods that render such teleological readings unattainable. Unable or unwilling to render intelligible or to impose totalizing cohesiveness on the tensions within the tradition, writers often put discontinuities in the forefront thematically and formally. Chapter 1 offers an overview of the history of life writing in contemporary Ukrainian literature from the latter third of the 19th century to the present, with special attention to inconsistencies and breaks in continuities. Chapter 2 focuses on how Soviet questionnaires shaped authorial self-fashioning in the 1920s, and the avant-gardists creative responses to the form, based on the so-called Plevako Archives and the editorial crypto-autobiographies of the journal Literaturnyj Iarmarok. Chapter 3 delves on the pronoun trouble in The Enchanted Desna by Oleksandr Dovzhenko and in the short """! ! stories by Vasyl Stefanyk. Oleksandr Dovzhenko probes the boundaries of life writing as a genre, contending that a writer’s biography encompasses not his or her individual biography, but rather the history of the writer’s literary tradition. Therefore, first person singular pronouns incorporate a multitude of occasionally contradictory voices. Vasyl Stefanyk’s short stories, meanwhile, enact the drama of the narrator’s disappearance, pointing to the fact that his authorial positioning was rife with conflicts that he had for a while sought to reconcile through the medium of life writing. Chapter 4 offers an analysis of experiments with temporality in The Princess by Olha Kobylianska and The Master of the Ship by Iurii Ianovskii. Both of the novels are meta-autobiographical: they follow protagonists engaged in the act of life writing and explore the specificity of autobiographical texts. Kobylianska focused on the instability of identity constructs over time, questioning the possibility of a totalizing cohesive vision of selfhood. Meanwhile, Ianovskyi’s The Master of the Ship explored the possibility of life writing as the synthetic and collective art form, combining the expressive possibilities of fiction, cinema, and more. "#! ! Table of Contents! ABSTRACT! """! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS! #""! INTRODUCTION! $! CHAPTER 1! %! AUTOBIOGRAPHIES IN MODERN UKRAINIAN LITERATURE! %! 1.2 1890S UNTIL 1921! &'! 1.3 SOVIET TIMES! '&! 1.4 CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN LITERATURE! (&! CHAPTER 2.! ()! QUESTIONING AUTOBIOGRAPHIES:! ()! SOVIET QUESTIONNAIRES AND OTHER CRYPTO-AUTOBIOGRAPHIES! ()! IN UKRAINIAN LITERATURE OF THE 1920S! ()! 2.1.1 PLEVAKO’S ARCHIVES: OVERVIEW! *&! 2.1.2 TAXONOMIES OF SELF-REPRESENTATION IN PLEVAKO’S ARCHIVES! *%! 2.2.1 UNWRITING LIFE WRITING! +)! 2.2.2 PUTTING QUESTION MARKS INTO AUTO(?)BIO(?)GRAPHIES: EDITORIAL CRYPTO- AUTOBIOGRAPHIES IN LITERATURNYI IARMAROK! )(! CHAPTER 3.! $,%! PRONOUN TROUBLE IN “ENCHANTED DESNA” BY OLEKSANDR DOVZHENKO AND! $,%! SHORT STORIES BY VASYL STEFANYK! $,%! 3.1.1 VASYL STEFANYK: QUANDARIES OF AN UNWITTING ETHNOGRAPHER! $$,! 3.1.2 THE DARING DISAPPEARING ACT OF A FIRST-PERSON NARRATOR! $$$! 3.1.3 ADDRESSEE AS AN UNWITTING ETHNOGRAPHER: CHALLENGES AND RESPONSIBILITIES ! $&,! 3.1.4 BETWEEN ETHNOGRAPHY AND FICTION! $&%! CHAPTER 4! $-%! TIME TRAVEL BY ANY OTHER NAME: EXPERIMENTS WITH TEMPORALITY IN TSARIVNA BY OLHA KOBYLIANSKA AND MAISTER KORABLIA BY IURII IANOSKYI! $-%! 4.1 OLHA KOBYLIANSKA IN THE NOOKS OF TIME! $-)! #! ! 4.1.1 USES AND ABUSES OF DIARY STYLIZATIONS! $%*! 4.1.2 UTOPIA AS A THIRD PERSON JOB! $+(! 4.2 MAISTER KORABLIA BY IURII IANOVSKYI! $)(! 4.2.1 MEMOIRS AS AN OPEN STRUCTURE! $)%! 4.2.2 LIFE WRITING AS DIRECTING! &,*! CONCLUSIONS! &$&! BIBLIOGRAPHY! &$*! ! #"! ! Acknowledgements I owe the debt of gratitude to my dissertation committee. My dissertation advisor George G. Grabowicz and my readers Stephanie Sandler and!William Mills Todd III had been of invaluable help and support, holding my writing to a high standard and simultaneously setting an equally high standard for academic generosity with their time and input. Their insightful comments and suggestions pointed me to new lines of inquiry, helped me to tighten the argument and steered me back towards the central theme whenever excessive verbosity beckoned. For the remaining gaffes I bear full responsibility. Archival research in Ukraine was made possible by the generosity of Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, which offered me the! Maurice Lazarus Graduate Research Travel Award (2015). My deepest gratitude belongs to the support and kind assistance of archivists at the Institute of Manuscripts (Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine) and at the Central State Archive-Museum for Literature and Art, who helped me to circumnavigate the catalogue system largely based, it appears, on the Borgesian classification of animals (…and innumerable ones). This text would not have been possible without the courses that helped me to articulate the issues that would remain of interest to me, taught by my intrepid committee and Joanna Ni!y"ska, who introduced me to trauma studies as the prism for Eastern European literatures. I am also grateful to discussants and fellow presenters at the conferences where I presented parts of this project (including, though not limited to Halyna Hryn, Taras Koznarsky, and Oleh Kotsyuba) for their invaluable feedback. #""! ! Last but not least, my gratitude belongs to my family that remained nonplussed by the infestation of obscure writers who plagued our dinnertime conversations through the years of writing, and, finally, to all those writers, obscure and not, who dared—against all odds—to imagine Ukraine, a country that was a literary project before it became a political fact, the country that I am proud to call my home. #"""! ! Introduction My research project treats various forms of life-writing in Ukrainian literature from the late 1890s to the 1940s. These texts are often marked by radical discontinuities: breaks in the temporal planes of narrators and their past narrated selves; conscious style shifts where style is treated as a constituent of identity; attempts and refusals to reconcile one’s life story with the Soviet questionnaires meant to define a model Soviet citizen, and more. Autobiographies can tempt us to imagine narrators in a straight teleological progression towards a fuller self-actualization of a somewhat essentialized notion of identity. But some cultural and historical periods render such teleological readings unattainable, and it is precisely those moments on which my research focuses. The earliest texts analyzed here were written at the time when Ukraine was divided between two empires (Austria-Hungary in the West, Russian Empire in the East); the latest were created during the Soviet times. All the autobiographers I treat had a choice between several cultures, literary traditions, historical narratives and languages, which often resulted in hybridized inter-linguistic and inter-cultural identities. The tensions or mediations between these choices were often realized on the formal level as well, resulting in tense shifts, changing rhetorical registers and styles, and ironic engagements with often conflicting places of memory. Although such moments of discontinuity in autobiographical texts are occasionally treated as signs of fictionality, I do not intend to analyze such instances through the prism of the fact/fiction dichotomy. I $! ! am interested in these formal devices as meaning-generating mechanisms within the context of life writing, the spaces of artistic ambiguity that encourage new articulations of identities (particularly in relation to the preexisting cultural tradition as perceived by each writer). They serve an important function in structuring authorial self-fashioning, figuring the place of writing and sources of authority, exploring through non-linear narration the new interrelations between the narrating personae, the narrated personae, and the implied or explicitly described addressee, and more. The first chapter offers a concise overview of the history of life writing in contemporary Ukrainian literature