Carnivalesque Mystifications, National Icon, and Orientalist Dreams: Zhytiie haremnoie [Life in the harem] as Historiographic Metafiction

Chapter 4 inquires into Iurii Vynnychuk’s playful postmodern “historiographic” pastiche in which he demythologizes and demystifies one of the Ukrainian icons of heroic womanhood, Roxolana. The author crossbreeds the story of her rise to a position of great power as the wife of Süleyman the Magnificent with conventional Orientalist fantasies of Western libertine pornography. Fabricating a pseudo-autobiographical manuscript that profiles Roxolana as the first Ukrainian grand dame of sexual liberation, Vynnychuk draws on a vast and diverse repertoire of Orientalist discourses, including the Imperial Harem as a masculine arena of exotic sexual fantasies, Eastern erotic guides, generic captivity narratives, and life-writing genre, among others. They all offer a variety of routes for excursions into his imaginary land of sexual delight, subverting Ukrainian cultural symbols and the professed “objectivity” of socialist realism.