Excerpts on HURI Books

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 From the Preface

There are many theories of postmodernism. From my perspective, it begins in 1946, when in the first issue of the almanac Mystets´kyi Literaturnyi Rukh (MUR, or Artistic Literary Movement), Jacques Hnizdovsky (Iakiv Hnizdovs´kyi) set in to talk about “Ukrainian grotesque.” He maintained that postwar Europe was returning to the world of naive emotions, and that the new era was breaking out with an appreciation for Sancho Panza and a mistrust of the intellectual Don Quixote. The era of Don Quixotes is over, and under way is the epoch of the naive, practical, and emotional Sancho Panza, claimed Hnizdovsky—a graphic artist who in his art discovered an atomic plurality of worldview and in his paradoxical thinking echoed the artistic postmodern of the Dutchman Morris Cornelis Escher.

In that same issue of MUR, Viktor Petrov (Ber) discussed the new era of the split atom and envisioned that art would lose its modernist negative-experimental color and would become “positive, real, and natural, although its naturalness and reality will be the nature and reality of the technical world.”¹

The actual aesthetic thinking that I associate with the postmodernism of the end of the twentieth century is tied to the oeuvre of the American writer John Barth, who in 1996 labeled postmodernism as “endism”: “endings, endings everywhere: apocalypses large and small,”² he wrote ironically and suggested putting “[a]n end to endings.” One form of such an “end to endings” for Barth is a narrative, a story, which from the perspective of ending defers the end itself. Thus he talks about a woman who comes out of the house, approaches a man working in the garden in order to break to him some horrible news she has just heard over the phone. She knows the news, but he does not yet. This is where Barth finds the gist of the narrative—in the postponement of the trauma, in tricking both the addressee and the message, in suspending the communication by putting it sideways, behind, for a moment, not to freeze the emotions but to protect existence itself: “In narrated life,” he says, “we could suspend and protract the remaining action indefinitely, without ‘freeze-framing’ … we need only slow it, delay it, atomize it, flash back in time as the woman strolls forward in space with her terrible news.”³

To me, this kind of story is postapocalyptic postmodern narrative.

This suspension-in-play is, for me, embodied in the carnivalesque Ukrainian postmodernity, which begins simultaneously with the Chornobyl explosion in April 1986. Another version of postmodernism forms later, in the 1990s. It is characterized by a recombination of fragments and modes of writing, which shows similarities with the process of postapocalyptic existence. Overall, it is exactly the Chornobyl discourse that provokes the deployment of Ukrainian postmodernism because Chornobyl is not only associated with a socio-techno-ecological catastrophe that occurred in a certain time and place but also signifies a symbolic event that projects the postapocalyptic text about the postponement of the end of civilization, culture, and human into the post-atomic era.

My book about postmodernism focuses on the post-Chornobyl library. In my view, the post-Chornobyl library is a metaphorical image of culture that is threatened and salvaged at the same time, of culture that—like the ark, museum, temple, and list—is a bridge between real life and fiction, the past and the present, self and other, play and apocalypse, high and mass culture. I see Chornobyl as an event that legitimized the beginning of Ukrainian postmodernity, and the post-Chornobyl library as a number of texts, topoi, topograms, quotes, discourses, and canons that atomize Ukrainian culture and turn it into a process unfolding not only from the beginning to the end but also backwards, from the end to the beginning: a postapocalyptic narrative. The postmodern library is an archive that preserves culture and renders it relevant; it is also a field of the resurfacing of past complexes and old taboos. Polyphonic and polysemantic, the post-Chornobyl library is not reducible to a single overarching narrative: it is written on the margins of other texts and at the ends of others’ stories, thereby filling in the gaps of the national culture.

This book results from observations that for the most part are detached from literary milieus and literary practices. I wanted to look at contemporary Ukrainian literature from a certain distance and to interpret what seems significant from the perspective of a witness without laying claims to fullness or definitiveness of my conclusions. I do not touch on the usual definitions of postmodernism, as I aim to build a specifically Ukrainian version of literary postmodernity.

There is no doubt that the Ukrainian literature that emerges in the 1990s is radically different from what preceded it. A separation from socialist realist thinking, along with an actualization of the aborted experience of the avant-garde and modernism of the 1920s, becomes the most important impulse for artistic experiment in the late Soviet era. At the same time, writers, first and foremost of the Eastern and Central European region, are introduced to the achievements and tendencies of Western literature and develop an inter-est in Western philosophy and cultural studies, previously unknown in the Soviet Union. The birth of Ukrainian postmodernity is also brought about by generational change. It depends on a new openness to the West; the informational-technological explosion which occurred due to the arrival of personal computers, video, forms of mass communication; and the arrival of the “society of the spectacle” with its advertising industry, commodity, and the market of mass performances.

In this book, I want to sketch the main tendencies and directions taken by the postmodernist thinking in Ukrainian literature at the end of the twentieth century. I am also convinced that postmodernism does not appear in Ukraine suddenly, as an imported exotic fruit. Among the factors that contributed to its arrival are the experimental works of the Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1920s; MUR’s intellectual prose fiction of the 1940s, which was saturated with Western existentialism; the Pop Art-inflected New York School poetry; Ukrainian whimsical prose—an offshoot of Latin American magic realism; and the adventurous, grotesque, and apocalyptic culture of the underground, which was incubated in the womb of socialist realism.

Finally, I took care to sidestep the traditional victimizational perception of Chornobyl. A quarter of a century after the event, it has acquired a new meaning, not only real-tragic but also symbolic and global. We live in a post- Chornobyl situation, in a postapocalyptic time, and this has turned out to be in Ukraine the gestation period of not only a new state but also of a new post-modern outlook and a new Ukrainian literature. This literature, polyphonic and polylingual, reformulates the whole history of the national cultural development; it teaches us to see otherness alongside identity; and it both offers itself to and receives from the vast intertext that is world culture. Thus, both life and literature exist in the nuclear age.

In some higher ironic sense, Chornobyl also bears witness to the fact that local tragedies and terrorist attacks are more frightening than a global catastrophe, and that, rejuvenated on the outskirts of civilization, the Chornobyl zone sometimes resembles the primeval Eden. It is postmodernity that has taught us to see such inversions.

Footnotes

1. Viktor Ber, “Zasady poetyky (Vid ‘Ars poetica’ I. Malaniuka do ‘Ars poetica’ doby rozklade-noho atoma),” MUR 1 (1946): 21.

2. John Barth, “THE END: An Introduction,” in On with the Story: Stories (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1996), 15.

3. Ibid., 28–29.