ABSTRACT
In his essay “At the Crossroads of the Century,” Ukrainian literary scholar Mykola Ilnytsky concludes that “the development of Ukrainian poetry in the twentieth century has testified to the European orientation of Ukrainian culture, which has made it possible for it to preserve its identity despite political pressure from various countries” (Ilnytsky 72). Before its independence in 1991 and the more recent Orange Revolution, Ukraine had been for most of its modern history under the rule of politically more powerful neighbors—the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, Tsarist Russia, and the Soviet Union. Under the rule of the relatively benign Austro-Hungarian Empire, Western Ukrainian writers had immediate interlocutors in their German-speaking neighbors and a natural window to literary and cultural developments in Europe. Soviet rule later was to slam that window shut. The highly repressive Tsarist and Soviet colonizations of Ukraine led to the establishment of what Ukrainian literary scholar John Fizer aptly has coined “coercive intertextuality,” a process that induced indigenous Ukrainian literati to take a subservient role and to extol the language and culture of the colonizers. 1 Mykola Khvylovy’s call under Soviet rule to look toward the West for literary models during the Ukrainian Literary Discussion of 1925–1928 ended with his suicide in 1933, shortly before the Stalinist terror inevitably would have engulfed him. Émigré literary critic Iurii Lavrinenko was later to term this wave of persecutions of Ukrainian literati and other intellectuals the “executed renaissance,” 2 which eradicated several hundred of Ukraine’s cultural elite.
