Beyond the Novel: Satire in Eastern Europe and Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen (2019)

ABSTRACT

This essay’s theoretical goal is to examine the possibilities of conceptualizing literary cultures of Eastern Europe as a world-literary region in its own right. This region, formerly part of the so-called “Second World,” has virtually disappeared from the comparative literary scene after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. At the same time, the end of the Cold War coincided with the renewal of the debates about “world literature,” where the old opposition between “West” and “East” has been redrawn along the lines of “North” and “South.” This article focuses on a particular case in-between – Eastern Europe – as it takes on the double issue of “internal Orientalism” within Europe and the homogenizing effects of the privileged status of the novel in world-literary theory today. I draw on contemporary Ukrainian fiction to critique what I term a homogeneric vision of the contemporary world-literary field.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It should be noted that the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) is developing a more nuanced distinction between the semi-periphery and periphery (see, e.g., Deckard et al.) but this typology’s current uses in the realm of literary theory do continue to pose a number of challenges – however, without diminishing its explanatory potential.

2. Katarzyna Bartoszynska in her Estranging the Novel (2021) calls for “a more inclusive vision of the novel on both geographical and formal terms” (12) so that the texts, previously excluded from the history and theory of the novel – such as examples from Irish and Polish literatures, can be considered under this heading. Amongst others, she cites works by Jonathan Swift, Ignacy Krasicki, Samuel Beckett and Witold Gombrowicz and notes: “The texts I discuss are anomalous enough that the question regularly arises whether they are even novels. What else would they be?” (127).

3. I thank Matti Kangaskoski for this term.

4. This is an extension of the argument put forward by the WReC about a particular formal and aesthetic sensitivity of (semi-)peripheral literatures toward the workings of the contemporary historical system of capitalism, taken as a world-literary horizon (20–21). The novel is this system’s key literary form.

5. Compare also Brian McHale’s argument about the link between narrativity and the “novelistic” quality. McHale implies that a typical novel means a narrative text that tells a story of some number of fictitious characters – it has “an eventful plot, well-defined characters, a theme or point” (237).

6. Genres, as Siskind reminds us, depend on “the production and reproduction of the critical discourse around them” (2011, 353).

7. Although, some of his targets are less well-chosen than others: Taking the social pressure to approach female characters in a non-essentializing way as a threat to artistic freedom, Lyubka makes Roman’s whole plot trajectory about rating of his current and former lovers to establish who’d be the best wife material.

8. However, given its shape, topics, literary agents and the international interest in Ukrainian fiction tragically boosted by the recent Russian invasion, Sophia Andrukhovych’s Amadoka “appears poised to become one of the most translated Ukrainian novels in recent years” (Horbach). Elianna Kan, one of the agents, says this about their successful tour of the European book fairs: “people were asking us, are you the one with this big Ukrainian novel?” (qtd. in Horbach).

9. See also Stephen Owen: “the novel is so often considered a marker of progress toward modernity, a condition that Europeanists guard jealously as their own. Literary cultures that do not produce a novel on their own have to suffer the indignity of receiving the genre as an import during the age of colonialism (1390).

10. A knowledge of Russian in Ukraine was a must during the Soviet era – for various reasons, including career. Rafeyenko’s grandmother, an engineer, stopped using her native Ukrainian when she moved from the village to the big city (Hlushchenko). Her own children and grandchildren grew up using Russian as their first language.

11. Protection of the Russian speakers in Ukraine was Kremlin’s official pretext for orchestrating the 2014 invasion. The bogus claims on which this reason rested, unfortunately, took on a very tangible reality of their own, not in the least because of the role of mainstream and social media. In 2022, with the start of the open war, even such insightful scholars as Michael Löwy would reproduce these statements, now perceived as facts: “One could level many criticisms at present-day Ukraine: the lack of democracy, the oppression of the Russian-speaking minority, ‘occidentalism,’ and many others” (Musto). Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen can be read, in part, as a satirization of such state of things, when language takes over, when facts are not rooted in the social reality but constructed on the basis of the previously existing discourse.

12. In this Mondegreen resonates with the Ukrainian classic “essay-novel” by Maik Yohansen – Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with his Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta (1932; English translation forthcoming).

13. It is also one continuous language game, a series of puns and linguistic allusions, oftentimes impossible to translate into English (which, for example, doesn’t have a vocative case). However, according to Lillian Posner, Mark Andryczyk’s translation “leaves the reader not with a sense of loss but with a feeling that over the horizon there is a tantalizingly rich and vibrant world that one can only access if they too learn Ukrainian”

14. “Mare’s Head” is abbreviated as “MR” in the text. Why? Because “let’s just keep it as MR” (Rafeyenko; 166).

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Natalya Bekhta

Natalya Bekhta is Senior Research Fellow at the Tampere Institute for Advanced Study (Finland), where she is working on a book project called “After Utopia: A World-Literary Reconstruction of the Former ‘Second World’”. Her research interests currently combine Utopia, narratology, world-literary theory and contemporary Ukrainian fiction.