‘We Are the Same, Yet at the Same Time a Little Different’
Said’s 1978 book (‘Orientalism’ by the American literary critic of Palestinian origin Edward Said. – Ed.) in a way changed our understanding of the world, the encounter between East and West — the Occident and the Orient (Occidentalism is the East’s stereotypical view of the West; Orientalism is the West’s view of the East. – Ed.).
Larry Wolff (an American Slavic studies scholar. – Ed.) speaks of Eastern Europe as an orientalised or semi-orientalised part. He says that core Europe discovers Eastern Europe and our territory as the ‘Other’.
Herder (the German philosopher Johann Herder, who lived from 1744 to 1803. – Ed.) said that in the future there would be a new Hellas on the territory of Ukraine. But if you read these reflections, you get the impression that for him this territory is a void: ‘Western civilisation will come there — then there will be a people, civilisation, culture. Otherwise, generally speaking, there are barbarians there.’
In a sense, when we say, ‘we are in Europe, we are Europeans’, we must understand that we are the same, yet at the same time a little different. For instance, we were not really counted as part of the classical Christian heritage.
One of the founders of subaltern and postcolonial studies, Dipesh Chakrabarty (an Indian historian. – Ed.), says that there are different Europes: imagined, invented, other. We have our own idea of Europe. Other peoples do too. In other words, it is about Europe’s diversity.
‘In Ukraine There Are Different Images of Europe’
If we talk about Ukraine, there are different images of Europe here.
For example, Panteleimon Kulish’s ‘khutir philosophy’ (the concept set out in Kulish’s work ‘Khutir Philosophy and Poetry Removed from the World’ in 1879. – Ed.) reflected the search for Ukrainian distinctiveness throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. What is a khutir? Someone will say: ‘our steppe’. Someone else: ‘settled life’.
In his khutir philosophy, Kulish set it against cities, civilisation, the West. Yet he was a translator and cultural mediator who opened Ukraine to the world, and the world to Ukraine. The point is that Kulish had great expectations of Europe. He wanted to see this ideal Europe. But when he went to Germany and saw that way of life, it seemed completely alien to him. The food was different. The people were different. He travelled to Europe as a Westerniser, and returned as the opposite.
And this strengthened the ideal of a khutir Ukraine, of khutir philosophy, with its cultural myth, purity, naturalness, rural character, and much else.
‘Lesya Ukrainka Was a Western Person’
Lesya Ukrainka was a Western person. She spent most of her life outside Ukraine. She had to travel for treatment. It was the tragedy of her life. But she did not shut herself within Ukrainian boundaries.
If she had stayed here, she would have remained within the bounds of populism (an ideological and educational movement of the Ukrainian intelligentsia against social and national oppression; in literature it envisaged depicting peasant life. – Ed.). But she discovered Europe for herself. She went to Vienna. In 1899 she spent more than half a year in Berlin, which became a metropolis. It was a modern city. Lesya discovers all this. She listens to Wagner. She sees new exhibitions. And so a sense of individualism and belonging to the West is born.
Then life throws her to Egypt, where she spends three winters. At the end of the 19th century, besides archaeological discoveries, Egypt becomes a tourist resort. People travel there from all over Europe. And Lesya Ukrainka is there too.
She was a great scholar of the East, an orientalist. She has the poem ‘Ra-Meneis’. It tells the story of Queen Ra-Meneis and, in effect, challenges cultural imperialism. And she also has the poetic work ‘Khamsin’, where she becomes a tourist, and the sand god tells her: ‘Foreigner, do not look! I will cover your eyes with sand!’ Because she is a foreigner here, identified precisely as a European woman. He closes his Eastern world to her so that outsiders do not appropriate it. This points to Western thinking. In effect, it is Orientalism.
Perhaps the tragedy is that Europe did not know us. Now, as I have been told, a series of German-language translations of Ukrainian literature is being published, including Lesya Ukrainka’s prose. Here, this prose is not widely known at all. But there, I was told, readers who read it discovered a new impression. They say: ‘We didn’t have anything like this,’ — it is so interesting, female, emancipated literature.
Lesya Ukrainka is also being rediscovered in America now. English-language texts have begun to be published and productions staged — for example, ‘Cassandra’. It is a complete sensation. Because nobody could even imagine that somewhere in Ukraine there was an author who wrote about such things at the beginning of the 20th century.
‘Kobylianska’s Ecofeminism Was a Shock for German Audiences’
We often say that Olha Kobylianska chose Ukrainian literature, the Ukrainian language. And that is true. But in fact, at the beginning this choice was not so unambiguous. She dreamed of being between two literatures — German and Ukrainian. She not only wrote in German, she was also published.
Some feminist-leaning things were new even in Germany. Her collection of short stories was published in German in Berlin in 1901 (this refers to ‘Ukrainian Novellas’. – Ed.). It was published by Ludwig Jacobowski (a German writer and editor of the literary and scholarly journal Die Gesellschaft. – Ed.). He said, when the German novella ‘The Battle’ about the destruction of a forest came out — ecofeminist in its nature — that it was a discovery and a shock for German audiences. In ‘The Battle’, Kobylianska shows the clash between nature and civilisation — and feminises the forest. In other words, it is about the almost physical rape of the forest, as of a woman. The end of the 19th century saw deforestation. At the time, an idea from German philosophy was popular: this opposition between culture and nature. Kobylianska writes about it.
A work by Marko Vovchok was translated into French — it even made it into textbooks (Marko Vovchok’s novella ‘Marusia’ was awarded a prize by the French Academy; France’s Ministry of Education recommended the work for school libraries. – Ed.).
I think Stus is also genuinely well known by now. What is more, in the West he was translated from the very beginning.
So if our texts were translated more actively, perhaps they would have had an influence (on European literature. – Ed.). But in any case, such projects did exist.
‘If We Reject Works Because of Socialist Realism, We’ll Throw Everything Away. And Others Will Pick It Up’
For a long time we were cut off from the world within the confines of, among other things, the Russian Empire. But today we are active.
I gave lectures at Princeton and Harvard, including a course titled ‘Ukrainian History, Literature and Catastrophes’ — from the First World War to the present. And I wanted to give students the opening parts of Yurii Yanovskyi’s ‘The Horsemen’. Because I believe it is brilliant. It gets dismissed because of socialist realism — frankly, we will throw everything away if we keep discarding things like that. And others will pick it up — I assure you.
In Soviet times, this work was translated by Synhaivskyi (the writer and translator from English and into English Serhii Synhaivskyi. – Ed.). I found this edition in a library in America. I gave the students the first three chapters. And they were enthralled.
In the West, Mykola Khvylovy could have really taken off if he had been translated in time. For example, ‘I (Romance)’, with its split self, its Kafkaesque-Freudian state — it was very modern in that respect.
One of my students (in America. – Ed.), after reading Khvylovy, said it was the strongest, most powerful work of fiction he had ever read. So we do not need to be so modest.
Viktor Domontovych’s brilliant European novel is ‘Doctor Seraficus’. It is a novel of styles, of eras. It is a compendium of European culture. It can be compared with ‘Doctor Faustus’ (an intellectual, philosophical 1947 novel by the German writer Thomas Mann. – Ed.). And it needs to be translated.
‘The Museum of Abandoned Secrets Can Be Compared with Latin American Novels’
I think the window (to the West in the 1990s. – Ed.) was Oksana Zabuzhko’s ‘Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex’. This is a text of an entirely Western kind. An international text. In a way, it resonates with Western feminist literature.
It seems Zabuzhko even references Toni Morrison (an American writer, author of ‘Song of Solomon’ (1977) and ‘Beloved’ (1987). – Ed.). By the way, Zabuzhko wrote this novel in America. But she has the ability to weave the Ukrainian context into the one in which Morrison wrote. She writes about slavery, adaptation to a new world.
‘The Museum of Abandoned Secrets’ is an absolutely postcolonial novel that can very easily be compared with Latin American novels, where there is a magical, eroticised history carried through the body and family generations.
Serhii Zhadan’s ‘Big Mac’ is a fantastic piece. It is Zhadan’s travels in Germany. The 1990s — Europe is still just like us — everything is changing. Zhadan expresses solidarity with Turks on building sites, with travelling priests. A Chinese student. Yogis. Former drug addicts. And so on — all the European marginals, among whom is Zhadan’s protagonist. It is a European work one hundred per cent.
‘We Have Stopped Imitating Others’
We moved through different worlds, travelled, borrowed. It seems to me that now we have come home. We have stopped chasing after others and imitating them. We can take something from them, and they can take something from us. In other words, a completely different world is being born. And they (the West. – Ed.) are taking their cue from us.
