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and post-modern satiation, along with all other attendant philosophies and personal experiments. Ukrainian authors are trying to find their place in world culture. Symptoms of post-modern awareness are obvious in the youngest generation of Ukrainian writers, although on the whole the development looks paradoxical, taking into consideration the fact that Ukrainian literature has not managed to produce a mature modernist tradition. However, similar situations already occurred before. Ukrainian romanticism also never challenged the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment as, for obvious historical reasons, these never took place in Ukraine.

Language

In the final years of the Brezhnev era, when the General secretary of the Communist Party was granted membership ticket number one in the All-Soviet Writers Union, the language used by Ukrainian writers became totally contrived. Poems and novels were written in a beautiful, stylistically perfect but unreal idiom good only as material for lexicographers. Reams of attention were devoted to increasingly trivial subjects. In reality, the work was composed in a language spoken neither by the writers themselves nor even by the professors of literature. The party elite used only Russian, with the famous strong Ukrainian accent of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachov and many others noticeable and annoying to native Russians. On the street, slang was spoken, a barbaric Russian-Ukrainian mixture, blistered with profanities. Only in Western Ukrainian cities did an urban Ukrainian milieu exist with a more or less developed spoken Ukrainian urban dialect. But it never found its way into literature. Nor was real life an object of Ukrainian writing. Short stories by Hryhir Tiutiunnyk, who committed suicide in 1980, may be the single exception. Heroes of Ukrainian novels never made love, they never mentioned the existence of ever-present KGB and informers who infiltrated the whole society; never pointed out the banality of party rituals; they never listened to «enemy radio voices» at night, never told dirty stories. They were, in fact, pathetic, loyal, and totally unreal.

Prose was doomed to be a secondary genre in the Ukrainian literary hierarchy. A realistic urban novel in Ukrainian could not have been written. There was barely enough substance for a short story. «Village prose» was central, not because of primitive populism and the patriarchal spirit of its authors, but because its language had something to point to. The village had not been Russified. Under the Soviets, historical novels flourished. They were even quite popular, although they were heavily censored, and were supposed to reflect the official version of national history.

The new generation of prose writers who emerged in the mid 1980s bring to literature an urban drive and a deliberately shocking naturalism. The biggest concern of the new generation is to appropriate new layers of the language, never used in written texts. Sex, for instance, which appeared on the pages of literary texts for the first time several years ago, is often there merely to give the artist an excuse for exercising new vocabulary. The generation born in the 50s and 60s tries to describe situations which have never been written about before.

Poetry

Until recently poetry dominated the literary landscape. Romanticism, which came to life in the 1830s and flourished in Shevchenko’s works, never really ended. Recently it seemed that 2 out of 3 writers were poets, and prose suffered from a debilitating tendency to poeticize.

The younger generation of poets came on the scene determined to bury «the sweet Ukrainian style» as well as to put an end to the poetry of populist slogans and pathos. Yuri Andrukhovych, Oleksander Irvanets, and Victor Neborak — three poets from Western Ukraine (which is also not accidental) — founded in the mid 1980s a group called Bu-Ba-Bu (standing for Burlesque, Bunk, Buffoonery). In contrast to their predecessors, their poetry relied heavily on language games, where words, which had never before found their way into poetry, suddenly took on primary importance. The three poets are extremely sarcastic. They parody literary traditions, and, especially, all aspects of the poetic embodiment of the national project.

Their even younger followers and successors — members of numerous avant-garde (as they all call themselves) groups, took further steps toward wiping away the poetic vocabulary. For example, it appears that the aesthetic purpose of another group of poets called Propala Hramota (The Lost Certificate) is to shock the listener or reader with swear words and narratives describing the most unpoetic of situations.

Volodymyr Tsybul’ko, a poet from Kyiv, goes his own way. His work subverts grammar, spelling, orthography. His poetry challenges not only the rules of rhetoric but also of syntax, and the written word itself. It is essentially nonsense verse. The inner crisis of culture, disharmony and the confusion of the soul, growing out of profound psychological and social change, cannot be expressed through a harmonious current of masterly rhymed metaphors. His sabotage of the language is creative: his language games compensate for what may be seen as a universal sense of displacement.

The three members of the Bu-Ba-Bu group and their followers declared that the age of poetry has passed forever. The very notion of poetry suggested a provincialism and moral hypocrisy. They practically suggest it is shameful to write poetry of any kind. Vet they are themselves poets. Their own writing, however, has become part of a psychological hang-up. In a recent interview, Yuri Andrukhovych, on the occasion of his 33rd birthday, said he rejects the conventional view which regards poetry as being there to serve some social function. For him, poetry has only one duty and that is its obligation before the language. In this he finds support in the well known ideas of T. S. Eliot. Performing this function, he simultaneously fulfills his task before the people, the state, and humanity. But it isn’t his job to think about this. Then he offers his recipe on the subject of what a poet must and must not do: «… A poet must protest, must be unsatisfied with society, must insult it, etc., but he should be treated as a necessary evil.»