In his foreword, compiler Oleksandr Hrytsenko notes correctly that popular literature is the least studied sphere, although it is the most noticeable component of Ukrainian culture.
Regrettably, says this scholar, all Ukrainian literary studies, all discussions focusing on Ukrainian culture, mostly boil down to literature and highbrow art or studies of traditional folk culture.
Meanwhile, popular elite and folk cultures are very different; primarily due to their distinct purposes, creative, and functional methods. They simply represent “three different types of relationships between the author and consumer,” serving what I would describe as different social needs.
Hrytsenko is convinced that latter-day Ukrainian literature was begot as precisely such popular literature. Proof of this is found in masterful burlesque (e.g., Kotlyarevsky, Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Hulak-Artemovsky, Hrebinka, etc.), tales and stories which would become extremely popular, not only in the Hetman State or Slobozhanshchyna, but also in St. Petersburg.
Mr. Hrytsenko associates the traditional collective approach to popular culture with the name of Panko Kulish who asserted the so-called prophetic buskin elitism tradition which was new for Ukraine but well known in Europe. He called it “culturalism” and took a dim view of Kotliarevsky’s Aeneid, referring to it as an aristocratic whim, a “funny trick pulled off according to the Little Russian standard,” He said that Kvitka-Osnovianeko’s stories “Pan Khaliavsky” and “The Witch of Konotop” were disgusting and stupid, and scolded Taras Shevchenko for lack of propriety. He even tried to edit him.
“This Savonarola tradition,” Mr. Hrytsenko writes, “is traced throughout the twentieth century, ranging from Yevhen Malaniuk’s condescending reviews of Vynnychenko and Sosiura (i.e., the most popular Ukrainian novelist and the only twentieth century elite poet, respectively) to the aggressively humiliating views on modern Ukrainian youth music, the “Long Noses” television series, and “Vira Serdiuchka Show.” Meanwhile we may well attribute this cheap low taste “mass culture” to past decades of purges and persecution, or even to our recent party-controlled censorship when the “high Soviet Ukrainian cultural standard” was carefully maintained, seeing to it that not only highly suspicious Halychyna, but also all those millions of provincial Ukrainian intellectuals, humble schoolteachers, engineers, and other urban residents, devout consumers of Ostap Vyshnia, Vasyl Symonenko, Nina Matviyenko, and Pavlo Hlazoviy, people largely culturally shaped as Ukrainians were subject to restrictions.
Hence the conclusion seems generally well-founded: Ukrainian cultural studies must not be reduced to studying folk or elite or high art. On the contrary, the authors believe that popular culture (mass culture included) should be treated seriously as a factor involved in the formation of the Ukrainian identity – not only ethnic, but also national, on a broader scale.
The notion of culture as “the entire modus vivendi of a given society” is probably the greatest value of the book: thanks to this approach the authors have within their range of vision not only such indisputably cultural phenomena as the cinema, theater, music. Poetry, language, magazines, but also borderline ones like anecdotes, household, soap operas, gardening, Cossack traditions, science, advertising, beau monde gatherings, even erotica, collecting, cuisine/home cooking, standing in lines to buy things, business, etc. All these sketches portray culture as a noteworthy stratum being part of the life of society; by and large, they give a positive answer to the compiler’s assumption, expressed in his foreword, to the effect that the current failures of the Ukrainian national identity are to be explained by the traditional notion of some “abstract people,” while the “true everyday culture” of this real people (rather than all those mythical peasants clad in folk costumes) is very little known, respected, and “has been overgrown with weeds.”
The book’s only serious drawback seems less manifest in its separate sketches than in its introduction: almost completely ignoring the colonial conditions in which the Ukrainian national culture has been forced to evolve. Correspondingly, the line between two different problems, two controversial points in its progress remains blurred. On the one hand, this is something characteristic of all “latter-day” cultures (Hrytsenko calls it “unoriginal in Europe”): the struggle between that which is referred to as “big-time,” “elite,” and “popular”. On the other hand, this is a struggle of colonial discourse and anti-imperial (emancipatory) cultural strategies against such colonial, imperial, integration discourse and strategies. A more flexible, dialectical approach to these controversies in Ukrainian culture would have enabled Mr. Hrytsenko to see that Panteleimon Kulish rejected Kotliarevsky and Kvitka not as creators of “popular culture” (inasmuch as the latter was possible at the time). He rejected them primarily because they created “funny jokes in the Little Russian style” – in other words, he condemned them for objectively enhancing Ukraine’s colonial stereotype (language and culture included), portraying all this as something ensuing from a backwater province, rating condescension and a pat on the shoulder, but never as anything worth a serious approach.
Ukrainian nationalism, initiated by the Sts. Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood (among them Kulish) required lingual, cultural, and political emancipation, freeing Ukraine from Russia’s imperial yoke. Little Russian culture was generally regarded as a stumbling block, an obstacle in the road, in that it did not claim a separate stand and parity with Great Russian culture. On the contrary, it acknowledged its regionalism within the Great Russian cultural framework. For that same reason many Ukrainians still respond in their own way to things like “Long Noses” or Vira Serdiuchka; they respond to such entertainment not only from within, from the standpoint of Ukrainian culture (because this approach makes any self-parody most welcome), but also from without, from the standpoint of another culture which is still prevalent, with age-old traditions of ridiculing the “khokhols” (as Ukrainians are called by Russians), their queer vernacular and rustic manners. In other words, text is not the problem. The problem is the context and this is something Hrytsenko seems to have underestimated. Hence the artificial nature of the antinomy he builds between “popular culture” and its “buskin elitism.” Most Ukrainian cultural champions were egalitarian-populist; they rejected popular culture not because they had any elite objections or conceit. They were simply habitually utilitarian. They wanted Ukrainian culture to be not only generally available, mass, but also useful, educational, and nationally-conscious. Not so long ago a witty reviewer wrote about Oksana Zabuzhko’s controversial novel that her heroine tried to drag the whole of Ukrainian culture in bed with her lover. In other words, the controversy between big-time and small-time Ukrainian culture remains topical, although not so much as that between the propaganda and entertainment levels.
As for popular culture being really needed and useful, all debate should have long ceased, considering that we formally recognize this culture as the modus vivendi of our society, and not merely as the most outstanding accomplishment of man’s spirit.
G. K. Chesterton wrote The Defendant in 1901, a brilliant book. It contains an essay in defense of precisely all those porcelain herdswomen (a symbol of mediocre existence; in Ukraine, each apartment might boast a collection of miniature porcelain elephants and/or swans, ranging in size from big to small, often placed in front of the bedroom vanity. Another essay defends kitsch. And there he says boldly that one’s scornful attitude toward all that kitsch is evidence of our ignorance and underestimation of the way in which the common folk lives. Condemning a modern novel-thriller for literary incompetence is like accusing this literary genre of being inept in terms of chemistry, economics, or astronomy. All this kitsch should not be regarded as vulgar, for it continues to captivate millions. It should be stated for the sake of justice that each such novel can claim about as much literary kudos as a couple of men exchanging remarks after a hearty dinner, relaxing over coffee and brandy – and by the same token its readers stand a very slim chance in terms of literary taste, about as much as their crumbling high-rise apartment buildings can count on going down in local architecture annals. Denying people the chance to entertain themselves with paperback thrillers is like forbidding one to talk to the people next door or live with a roof over one’s head, with a door one can lock. We are losing our sense of reality, expanding on the lower classes. Instead, we should concentrate on mankind (although we constantly count ourselves out of their number). This trivial romantic literature is not kitsch. It is something every normal person wants to read.







