Out of the Soviet Closet: Yurko Pokalchuk’s “Erotomaniac” Fictions

Abstract

As a reaction to totalitarian constraints, after the break-up of the Soviet Union an astounding eruption and incorporation of sexually explicit imagery and iconography into diverse cultural forms occurred in Ukraine. These newly emerging discursive practices subverted the prescribed and officially enforced prudery of the sterilized Soviet society, which profoundly eroded any comfortable sense of the body in the sphere of representations that constitute social identity. While examining Yurko Pokalchuk’s Ukrainian “foundational” pornographic fictions, this article explores how the writer’s representations of sexuality are articulated through the dual discourse of erotic desire and transgression, focusing on the link between sexual transgression, the transgression of conventional discursive norms and regimes, and the subversion of social values, all of which are working against various social and cultural fixities. Pokalchuk’s “erotomaniac” fictions, radically departing from totalitarian paradigms persistently promoted by socialist realist literature, are capable of invoking transgression through their imbrication of the public and private discourses of power and pleasure, of politics and the erotic. By employing the pornographic—the consumption of which in itself is still widely regarded as a socially transgressive practice—as the engine of transgression, he releases the sexual bodies that have been securely kept in the closet of dominant ideologies and literary conventions, public morals and societal prohibitions, uncertainties and self-censorship, into the representational sphere.