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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

TOTALITARIAN METAPHOR

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

The Ukrainian reader does not like assiduous author's introductions ("do not think, dear reader," "any sort of resemblance," etc.). Raised on the classics, either read avidly or by force of the curriculum, he has for centuries been accustomed to narrative-confessional prose. It is thus not surprising that in the current postmodern period he satisfies his epic tastes watching soap operas and reading gossip, political, and police columns. Today's literature is paying a dear price for all the time when hard realism was neglected. Now it is given different epithets, including "post-totalitarian" and it should make good use of the latter. We are still thrilled to know what has become of us in this tempestuous century. We can only hope that our literati will not pass up the opportunity. The reader needs stories: there are plenty in our everyday life, yet their number in print is dwindling. Literature encroaches on the commentator-stylist — maybe according to Proust, Joyce, Kafka, or Borges — so that at times interesting stories (like Oksana Zabuzhko's Field Researches on Ukrainian Sex, Oles Ulianenko's Stalinka, or Yuri Andrukhovych's Recreation) are rather a mythological interpretation of the past. Postmodern prose, shedding social and folk color, suddenly lost its readers, taking up forward positions not in human souls but in the cultural domain, strictly speaking. Playing with culture, history, and mythical symbols seems interesting only to the players who increasingly often come up with angry statements like "There are no readers" or "Books don't sell."

The Ukrainian reader is looking forward to some "horrifying truth" about the past and present. And he gets none. The problem of epics and narratives has been pushed into the narrow corner of latter-day discussions smacking of good old sociology. Nostalgia for totalitarianism, even with its conventional, paradoxical hierarchy of literati and the arts, is firmly rooted in our cultural consciousness. One is tempted to use post-socialist realism instead of the saccharine postmodernism; authors continue to cultivate slang, sexuality, crime, and retain their moralistic posture, afraid to tell the truth about themselves. There is a cohort of memoirists (one of the most popular genres these days), each trying to prove that a certain author was not "guilty" at a time when being innocent was simply impossible. An increasing number of literary "victims of totalitarianism" appear or, in other words, more lies. The reader eagerly absorbs the heaps of confessions and then with embarrassment returns to the television serials and newspaper columns, never admitting that, craving something real, he leafs through St. Augustine or Abelard. And if this reader (and citizen) is content with stories about vengeance (like the last elections) without giving much thought to its consequences, his relationship with the printed word becomes much more complicated.

Given the opportunity to visit spacious and richly stocked libraries or watch television series based on old and modern classics, this reader would find himself engrossed in authors like Nechui-Levytsky, Svydnytsky, and Kvitka-Osnovianenko, allowing the most modern authors the luxury of answering an old but still relevant question: Who are you with and against? I will not attempt prophecy, but I will assume that "people's literature," whether it likes it or not, will emerge from newspaper columns and will not forget its narrative-confessional form bequeathed by our "patriarchal" order.

 

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