A woman of Renaissance-scope talent
Oksana Zabuzhko, once considered the enfant terrible and femme fatale of contemporary Ukrainian letters, has been an unusually versatile poet right from her first collection, writes Vitaly Chernetsky in this consideration of the poet’s oeuvre. “It is, however, her third collection of poetry that emerged as an epistemological breakthrough, due to the prominent function of the allegoric paradigm in its construction, on both the national and the global plane.”
Oksana Zabuzhko, a woman of Renaissance-scope talent, is responsible, together with several colleagues, for an unparalleled revitalization of feminist consciousness in Ukraine and a recognition of the close ties between the personal and the political traumas and struggles of Ukrainians, both men and women. She also deserves considerable credit for drawing literary and critical discourse in the country to broad public attention while simultaneously endeavoring to bring it in contact with current international debates.
Zabuzhko is a philosopher by training and the author of a number of influential scholarly monographs, but she received major recognition in her country and beyond initially as a poet, particularly with the publication of her third collection, Avtostop (Hitchhiking; 1994). Then the release of her novel Pol’ovi doslidzhennia z ukrains’koho seksu (Field Work in Ukrainian Sex; 1996) created a considerable controversy and brought Zabuzhko the reputation as an enfant terrible and as the femme fatale of contemporary Ukrainian letters.
Her early poetry is predominantly introspective or made of ‘painterly’ visual vignettes; however, already in the second collection of her poems, Dyryhent ostann’oï svichky (The Conductor of the Last Candle, 1990), the intense emotionality of the lyrical monologues that was already present in some of the early works reaches new dimensions when coupled with existential and historical exploratory forays. The shock of the Chernobyl catastrophe permeating the first section of the book, the horrors of the totalitarian past are tackled next to philosophical reflections and a number of provocative rewritings of historical heroes and traditional plots; a central presence is accorded to love lyrics that are simultaneously unbridled comments on gender relations. It is, however, her third collection of poetry that emerged as an epistemological breakthrough, due to the prominent function of the allegoric paradigm in its construction, on both the national and the global plane.
In a number of poems in Avtostop, this allegorical impulse is combined with the strategy of figuration. Zabuzhko turns to figures from other times or spaces, or even pages of past literary texts, and reinterprets, reimagines, reevaluates them. One of the most powerful instances of this kind is the poem that envisions a possible alternative life path for Lesia Ukraïnka. Zabuzhko tries to imagine what might have happened if Ukraïnka's fiancé, instead of dying from tuberculosis in 1901, recovered, and the couple settled into a conventional marriage. Instead of a writer embarking on a challenging, precarious path of modernist literary experimentation combined with a virtually unprecedented feminist challenge to the canon we are offered a portrayal of a seemingly happy housewife and young mother that, however, is disturbed by an unarticulated but irrepressible longing. At the end of the poem she is staring into emptiness, unable to sleep, while the “fiery angel” of inspiration waits in vain at a downtown Kyiv coffeehouse. Instead of Ukraine’s greatest woman of letters and its greatest playwright, in this alternative reality Ukraïnka becomes an unrealized, unfulfilled “Shakespeare’s sister”.
Next to such ‘figurational’ texts, one finds in the pages of Avtostop texts apparently anchored in contemporary lived experiences, which undergo, however, a transformation into a vision that ranges from the hyperreal to the surreal. These texts, like Zabuzhko's novel, are characterized by an intense focus on the corporeal. One of them, tellingly titled ‘Dorohoiu do pekla’ (‘On the Way to Hell’), is set in a packed rush hour bus. This topos, frequent in late Soviet women’s writing, particularly in the stories of Petrushevskaia who gives it more of a naturalist coloring, is transformed in this text into a kind of latter-day Bosch painting. The heroine’s corporeal discomfort gives way to her experiencing her own body and mind as fragmented and blending with her surroundings, as she is no longer sure whether she is thinking her own thoughts, or is turning into “a public toilet of spite and despair” (hromads’ka vbyral’nia zloby ta bezsyllia); there seems to be no escape. She wants but is unable to scream, as she feels her tongue metamorphosing into a ticket about to be punched.
In another text, ‘Lyst iz dachi’ (‘Letter from a Summer House’), the outwardly cheerful tone is subverted almost immediately by the mention of acid rain, leading to an escalation of odd imagery; the world around seems to be going mad and the heroine wonders how, for instance, mad trees might behave, as she relates that the neighbor woman has given birth to a mutant child, and casually remarks that she now goes to bed with an axe and that she finds all the languages she knows worn out. The poem renders powerfully the disturbing feeling of the post-Chernobyl environment that deceives the senses while turning the mind obstinately towards the apocalyptic.
The title poem in Avtostop offers an idiosyncratic fusion of these two textual modes, and in its focus on displacement is linked to Zabuzhko’s novel. The poem, subtitled ‘a prayer at the end of time’ (molytva kintsia chasiv), takes us to the US, more specifically a Greyhound bus in the fields of the Midwest. The autobiographical heroine is a passenger looking out the bus window at a working-class Hispanic woman, her skin “the color of buckwheat honey”, who has just gotten off the bus, while the passenger next to her, a thin white man who looks like a drug addict, dozes off, his head falling on her shoulder. The context of her displacement, of her surroundings, of her fellow passengers (most of them non-white), inspire a stream-of-consciousness text much of which is a meditation on the violence that pervades this world, and on the social and ecological devastation that has befallen much of our planet – the result, she feels, of the vain and misguided pursuits of the white race. The meditation fuses with a prayer, the woman she is looking at is transformed into a latter-day incarnation of Virgin Mary, while the neighbor on the bus looks more and more like her son. Apocalyptic reflections on the end of the millennium elicit a message of peace and seem to yield to a cathartic experience – when the bus makes a sudden turn and heads into a tunnel.
In the poems of Avtostop, as in Zabuzhko’s novel, the preoccupation with place and displacement, with the vestiges of the empire and the fragments of national past shapes the identity-always-in-the-making of a nomadic postmodern intellectual, where both the nation-based and the gender-based aspects are objects of continuous negotiation grounded in a survival-through-text.
Undaunted by the public controversy, Zabuzhko continued to publish poetry, fiction, and essays, many of the latter collected in the volume Khroniky vid Fortinbrasa (The Fortinbras Chronicles; 1999) which offers an excellent introduction to this aspect of her talent. Zabuzhko’s poetry and essays have been widely translated; a volume in English was published in Canada in 1996.
Adapted from the article ‘Ukrainian literature at the end of the millennium’, first published in World Literature Today, spring 2002.
