ABSTRACT
The Kapranov brothers’ engagement in intertextual dialogue with Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, who has had a profound influence on Ukraine’s cultural and intellectual continua, is the focus of Chapter 6. It examines their transgressive “re-emplotment” of nineteenth-century classics. On the one hand, their explicit gesture of epigonality points toward dependence on the discursive and textual possibilities of tradition. On the other, there is a carnivalesque inversion, through intense erotic relationships involving assortment of popular genres and slippages into Ukrainian demonology, featuring witches, succubi, and vampires. Fundamentally restaging readers’ horizon of expectations, the authors devise strictly gendered politics of pleasure, epitomized by the division of the book into female (soft) and male (hard) sections. Although the Kapranovs’ representation of hierarchically ordered sexual agency betrays an apparent discomfort with the body, it still suggests movement toward counter-repressive ideologies.
