The early 1960s as a cultural space: a microhistory of Ukraine's generation of cultural rebels

Abstract

This article analyzes the early stage of the Ukrainian “sixtiers” movement as a semi-autonomous space of cultural expression that was tolerated by the authorities and defined, developed, and inhabited by young Ukrainian intellectuals. In contrast to present-day Ukrainian representations of the sixtiers as a force acting in opposition to the Soviet regime, the spatial angle employed here reveals an ambiguous relationship with official institutions. The Ukrainian Komsomol organization in particular appears to be both a controlling and an enabling agent that, together with the Writers' Union, provided meeting venues for the sixtiers until the mid-1960s. This complex symbiotic relationship continued even after some creative youth pioneered the first attempts to claim public space for cultural events without the authorities' permission. The cultural terrain inhabited by young Ukrainian intellectuals was not fully separate from mainstream Soviet Ukrainian culture or in opposition to it, although their vibrant cultural space also reached into a world of non-conformist culture unregulated by the state. A series of government crackdowns beginning in the mid-1960s dramatically shrank this open, ambivalent space of semi-free cultural expression, imposing firm boundaries and forcing intellectuals to make political choices.

Keywords:

• Ukraine
• “sixtiers”
• Komsomol
• writers
• cultural space

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude to Oksana Shchur and Dariya Orlova for their assistance in obtaining the sources for this article and to Zbigniew Wojnowski and Svitlana Frunchak for the invitation to take part in the conference at the University of Toronto, for which this article was originally written. Comments from conference participants helped me decide on the direction of subsequent revisions. I also thank Marta D. Olynyk and Julie Ruch for editing the text.

Notes

1. Of course, a similar Russian term, shestidesiatniki, became popular after the literary critic Stanislav Rassadin used it in the title of his article about Soviet poetry, which appeared in the journal Iunost in December 1960 (http://polit.ru/news/2012/03/20/rassadin/).

2. For a useful warning about the nature of the Soviet memoirs genre in general, with its customary tropes and frequent idealization of intelligentsia martyrs, see Walker (2000).

3. Scholars think that the tradition was actually revived in 1959 (Kasianov 1995, 18), so Zhylenko is confused either about the date or about the fact that this was the first episode of caroling.

4. In January 1964 Zhylenko wrote the following about Kostenko: “I am in love with her forever and without bounds. She is my idol and I will always look at her with amazement and delight” (Zhylenko 2011, 235).

5. Korohodsky concurs:Alla was an amazing creature. She did not simply treat her friends well. She loved them. She gave them faith in themselves and inspired them. Alla knew the strong and weak sides of her friends. And she helped all of them. (Korohodskyi 1996, 169)

6. Dziuba also emphasizes the importance of the Polish press for the sixtiers, calling it “a little window on the Western world” (Dziuba 2004, 107). Kotsiubynska remembers first reading the works of Kafka and Camus in Polish translation (Kotsiubynska 2004a, 183). However, Zhylenko reads Kafka in Russian (Zhylenko 2011, 384).

7. Here a comment is warranted on the contradiction between the actual gender roles among the sixtiers, where urban women fulfilled many leadership roles, and the vestiges of the nineteenth-century romantic, nationalist mythology in the form of a symbolic marriage with the “true Ukraine” represented for some male sixtiers by women from the country's western, least Russified, regions. Of course, in reality these western Ukrainian brides could be just as emancipated and urbanized as eastern Ukrainian female sixtiers, but they symbolized the authenticity of Ukrainophone culture.

8. For more details on the Dnipropetrovsk club that grew out of the literary workshop at the local Palace of Students, see Zhuk (2010, 36–40).

9. For more on Antonenko-Davydovich's role, see Kotsiubynska (2004a, 165–166; 2004b, 291–302).

10. Honchar was probably aware of this attitude, which was painful to him. One of his diary entries for 1967 reads: “We should continue supporting the young, this is our duty. Still, one cannot help noticing that our youth displays emotional deafness. They hear themselves too well and others barely at all” (Honchar 2002, 420).

11. Informal gatherings near the Taras Shevchenko monument in Kyiv on 22 May (the day when the poet's remains were brought to Ukraine and buried there in 1861) apparently did not yet play an important symbolic role for the early “sixtiers.” Zhylenko mentions only one of them, in 1964, and in a contemporary letter to Drozd rather than in her diary or later memoiristic fragments (Zhylenko 2011, 306). Likewise, few other memoirists elaborate on such early meetings. One exception is Valerii Shevchuk, who claims to have launched the tradition of gathering at the monument with a group of other students in 1960 (Shevchuk 2002, 136). Such unsanctioned meetings became the principal site of a stand-off between the political “sixtiers” and the authorities in 1966 and, especially, 1967 (Kasianov 1995, 70–73).