Andrukhovych’s Secret: The return of colonial resignation

Abstract

Since the period of glasnost in the USSR and, after 1991, the emergence of independent nation states on its former territory, the Ukrainian poet, prose writer and essayist Yuri Andrukhovych (b. 1960) has attended in the majority of his writings to geography and its relationship to geopolitics, to the persistence in central and eastern Europe of old colonial power structures, and to the nature of the relationship between his homeland and various conceptions of “Europe”: central and eastern Europe, and Europe as “the west”. Andrukhovych’s novel-length text Taiemnytsia [2007; Secret] subtitled “instead of a novel” and structured like a series of interviews, adopts a position of pessimism with regard to the likely emergence of a humane and just state of affairs in a Europe where western prosperity, coupled with indifference toward the east European Other, confront material want and an enduring deficit of liberty. The book constructs a world-model where the exercise of colonial or neocolonial power (economic, political and cultural) is so ubiquitous that even the colonized are not innocent of exercising it.

Keywords:

• Yuri Andrukhovych
• Ukrainian literature
• postcolonialism
• cultural geography

Notes

1. Unless specified otherwise, all translations are mine. Transliteration of the Ukrainian follows the Library of Congress system, except for the name of Yuri Andrukhovych which, in the main text only, appears with the spelling that has become conventional in English.

2. Nine years after the publication of their frequently cited Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, in their Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, did not seek to regulate the meaning of the terms “colonial”, “anticolonial”, “neocolonial” or “postcolonial” when used attributively. Their glossary proposed, rather, histories of the (unstandardized) usage of the nominal correspondents of these terms (respectively, 45–51, 14–17, 162–63 and 186–92).

3. See for instance Böttiger, par. 8; Leister, par. 2; Straszecka, par. 3; and Vladymyrova, par. 4.

4. A. uses a Ukrainian translation of the title under which the book appeared in Russian (Ramacharaka, Osnovy mirosozertsaniia). The name under which William Walker Atkinson published the book was Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism.