Oksana Zabuzhko, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, trans by Halyna Hryn, AmazonCrossing, 2011.
"Called “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence,” Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex became an international phenomenon when it shot to number one on the Ukrainian bestseller list and remained there throughout the 1990s. The novel is narrated in first-person streams of thought by a sharp-tongued poet with an irreverently honest voice. She is visiting professor of Slavic studies at Harvard and her exposure to American values and behaviors conspires with her yearning to break free from Ukrainian conventions. In her despair over a recently ended affair, she turns her attention to the details of her lover’s abusive behavior. In detailing the power her Ukrainian lover wielded over her, and in admitting the underlying reasons for her attraction to him, she begins to see the chains that have defined her as a Ukrainian woman – and in doing so, exposes and calls into question her country’s culture of fear and repression at the very time that it wrestled its way toward independence."
“Language – any language – that’s what I would call the capital love of my life: nothing else has the power to synthesize music and myth, two things without which the world would be a totally unlivable place.” – Oksana Zabuzhko
"It was the way their affair was described that shocked readers in 1996, when this debut novel was published. Zabuzhko took the Ukrainian language, so fiercely protected by its speakers through centuries of colonial denigration and prohibition, and lovingly ravaged it, producing a chaotic interior monologue in which gender, sex and national identity are constantly intertwined (.....) Ukrainian literature had never seen such a frank expression of female bodily experience" - Uilleam Blacker
“Oksana Zabuzkho’s poetry effervesces with the joys of inwardness--irony, sorrow, compassion and that aching sense of love that ‘turns bones into flutes.’” – L.A. Times
“Oksana Zabuzhko is a well-known Ukrainian poet of the younger generation as well as a literary critic and translator. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, her debut in the genre of the novel, marks the emergence of a powerful new voice in Ukrainian belle-lettres. This work immediately strikes the reader with its novelty of form and with the original way it presents eternal issues like love, life, and creativity, intertwining them with uniquely Ukrainian themes.” – Slavic and East European Journal
"Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is an unusual work—it is not light fiction intended to entertain (although it can certainly do that); rather it is an urgent, inspired exposition of one woman’s fight to catch her bearings, land on her feet, after life had thrown her a particularly nasty curveball. At the heart of the story is a failed relationship, and here the author’s unflinching courage in dissecting the how-and-why is most gripping. What makes us love so that we overlook the abuse (and is it really abuse?) that ultimately makes our love unsustainable? What do we do with the shame? At the time and place of its initial publication (post-Soviet Ukraine, 1996), this book indeed had the effect of a bombshell, but it continues to make us uncomfortable even now. Praise and opprobrium have tended to fall along gender lines in Ukraine. It will be interesting to see the response to the English language version.
The larger story that envelops the love affair is, of course, the story of Ukraine itself, so unexpectedly liberated with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, coming to grips with its suppressed history, martyrology, searching for its identity together with the heroine. The conceit is a series of lectures in which the heroine explains herself and her country to a North American audience. The task is not easy: Zabuzhko’s sentences go on for a page or more at a time; she demands both trust and sustained effort, and it is up to each reader how far they are willing to travel along this road. Translation is not merely a matter of words: it opens windows into an entirely unfamiliar way of contemplating the world. (When you see a sports match where you don’t know the players: is your instinct to cheer for the winners or the losers? Does supporting the losers strike you as absurd?)
I have read with great interest the reader reviews that have been posted on the Amazon site. They show the full range of an intelligent reading audience and allow me to see what was successful and what was not in my own translation. The “stream of consciousness” long, pulsating sentences have frustrated some. I had decided not to destroy this basic architecture of the work in the translation, although it does do pose a challenge for both translator and reader. Word order is somewhat different in Ukrainian: in these long sentences the last word of each phrase is the crucial link to the subsequent phrase and so it must go at the end whether it’s the natural place for it in English or not, otherwise the link is broken and the edifice collapses. Hence the somewhat foreign cadence that some have noticed. Likewise with pronouns: in many European languages the verb endings make the use of personal pronouns redundant. In English, however, they need to be reinstated so that we know whether I, you, he, she, it or they “are speaking”—add the politically correct “he or she,” “him or her,” and several rounds of editors, and the final effect can be less than optimal. I appreciate all your comments and will be happy to respond to any questions.
For me, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is a thoughtful, exhilarating and ultimately brilliant literary text, and I am proud to help bring it to the English-speaking reader. I hope you will feel the same." - Halyna Hryn
"Since the it was first published in 1996, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex has become one of the most controversial and best-selling novels in Ukraine in the last twenty years. Oksana Zabuzhko is a poetic genius (and she is foremost a poet), and Fieldwork reads as if it were one long poem. The novel is not divided into conventional chapters. Instead serpentine, run-on sentences fluidly slide into side-thoughts contained in brackets and small passages of verse, so the reader enters and re-enters the book in an endless series of apparently chaotic yet somehow seamless stream-of-consciousness thoughts.
Fieldwork, finally published in English last year by AmazonCrossing, Amazon’s new in-house translation imprint, has largely been heralded as an autobiographical novel by critics, though Zabuzhko maintains it is anything but autobiography. The protagonist, a clever, highly talented and nameless poet, does echo Zabuzhko herself (for example, the poet narrator travels from Ukraine to America as Zabuzhko has done), but that’s where the similarities end. On the surface, the plot is very simple: the narrator tells the story of her recently ended relationship with a Ukrainian artist. However the text becomes more complex, swells and spreads like a bruise, as the poet delves into the abuse she suffered as well as the love she felt during the relationship. She struggles to come to terms with her complex grief, and as she does so she begins to unravel also the intricacies of her Ukrainian identity. The history of the affair is mapped out in the context of the history of the Ukraine, and the cartography of cultural influence and identity is perhaps more clearly revealed than the successes and failings of the relationship itself.
Zabuzhko blends the art of writing a novel with the art of poetry in a manner reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s also poetic novel Coming Through Slaughter. The unconventional form of the poetic novel may turn off some readers as it is more intensely intimate, difficult, captivating and implicating than the popular conventionally realistic novel. Experiencing Fieldwork is not an exercise in reading for entertainment but rather reading for discovery, reading for a sensual feeling of pain and proximity, and reading to learn about and hold the immediacy of contemporary Ukrainian culture and language and its historic burdens.
Zabuzhko has said, “…poets are and will always remain the guardians of a language, which every society tries to contaminate with lies of its own. Unlike novelists, who may be pigeonholed as opinion-makers, poets are seldom interviewed by media on political and moral issues, yet in the end it’s they who remain responsible for the very human capacity to opine. They keep our language alive.”
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is about keeping a language and culture alive — one the narrator desperately tries to revive, to heal as if it is a diseased body. The ramifications of the state of Ukrainian culture play out on the narrator’s body, a fractured body – pieces of her immediate self are referred to in the third person; her own body, read as metaphor for her country, is like a strange, alien “other” that she must try to revive over and over despite the history and trauma that encroach on her and try to consume her.
To read Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is to be constricted and devoured by a serpent. Beautiful, shining scales and the soft, rippling muscle of the snake surround you, slide against your skin, light refracting like off gasoline on water, and suddenly the crushing weight of remembered cultural history is upon you and unbearable, and you can feel yourself collapsing into it, devoured by it, and truly becoming a part of it — Ukrainian history and cultural identity eats you alive, because after all, “Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you.”
Ukraine has a long history of being divided and re-united again and again. Parts of modern-day Ukraine were once considered, by turns, Russian and Polish and German. Ukrainian language after the demise of Soviet rule was nearly dead — a complication for many when, after independence, it was suddenly made the official language once more. Ukraine has been called “the bloodlands,” the slaughterfield between Hitler and Stalin in WWII. More recently it has become known as a radiated wasteland after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
As a woman born into a Soviet-ruled Ukraine and who watched the fall of the USSR and the birth of Ukrainian independence, Zabuzhko’s undertaking in analyzing what it means to be Ukrainian through her novel is both excruciating and stunning. The analysis is largely accomplished via metaphor; the narrator’s overriding concern is her tumultuous, passionate and abusive relationship and her final escape from her Ukrainian male lover. Her narrative style is unconventional — Zabuzhko slides between first, second and third person narratives throughout, a tactic that echoes the fragmented self and fragmented identity of every Ukrainian. The three points of view also mirror the id, ego, and superego of Freudian psychology — and this is a psychological novel.
Zabuzhko is highly aware of this psychological aspect, the dark and repressed parts of Ukrainian history and identity, and yet she is equally aware of a the transformative potential. Culture, after all, is always subject to change even when burdened with the weight of a past. In an interview with Ruth O’Callaghan in Poetry Review, Zabuzhko said :
I argue that telling the truth — bringing to the spotlight of people’s consciousness what’s been previously in shadow, whatever it may be — has been, and will always be, a risky job, for as long as human society exists: if only because, in pronouncing certain truths for the first time, you inevitably attack the whole set of psychological, mental, and verbal stereotypes which were disguising it.
Of course, many Ukrainian critics have vilified Zabuzhko for her assault on the subconscious dark side of Ukrainian identity, but others all but canonized her. Fieldwork has been called a Ukrainain Feminist Bible (Zabuzkho has been called the Ukrainain Sylvia Plath). But Zabuzhko herself has said she prefers to not differentiate her readers along gender lines. Her approach in the novel, although undeniably from the perspective of a woman and certainly bleeding with feminist thought, is broader in scope. “What I attacked,” she once said, “was, basically, a system of social lies extending to the point of mental rape, and affecting both men and women.”
The narrator’s abusive love affair reflects the abusive nature of historical cultural norms and imposed values in Ukraine. It symbolizes a generation’s struggle to free itself from the past, to forge its own identity, and yet hold onto the best parts of the former identity, the traditions and historical moments that made independence worth fighting for despite years of being suspended between wars, languages, identities, and hostile neighbours that would crush, assimilate or extinguish them. Thus the narrator reflects on the tenderness and love that was present in her relationship as much as the painful parts, the destructive parts, and the unbearable and everlasting scars that remain.
So much of the novel is frantically looking for an exit, some way to escape a collective cultural past by turns shameful and exhilarating. Zabuzhko’s narrator, like the reader, ultimately discovers a home in her culture and language despite its lethality:
…obviously her mother tongue was the most nutritious, most healing to the senses: velvety marigold, or no, cherry (juice on lips)? strawberry blond (smell of hair)? …it’s always like that, the minute you peer more closely the whole thing disintegrates into tiny pieces and there’s no putting it back together; she hungered for her language terribly, physically, like a thirsty man for water, just to hear it — living and full-bodied with that ringing intonation like a babbling brook at at distance…
The way language is described here — as sensual nourishment, as healing, and yet fragmented and longed for — is typical of the novel as a whole. The longing for something loved and dangerous is at the book’s core. And yet are not all cultural identities like this? Do they not all have their destructive, oppressive and damaging histories that we must embrace and attempt to transform?
Fieldword opens a wound within the reader. Suddenly, the historical trauma passed down from generation to generation becomes clear and inescapable. Although the word “Gulag” is only used twice, in one of the small snippets of poetry peppered throughout the novel, the vast system of Stalinist concentration camps is present, quiet and ghost-like, throughout the narrative.
We are all from the camps. That heritage will be with us for a hundred years.
And, though the crux of the novel is Ukrainian identity, the book is not exclusively about being Ukrainian. It’s about being on your knees under the weight of any culture. The narrator wryly observes the same struggle in America. “… the Great American Depression from which it seems that about 70 percent of the population suffers, running to psychiatrists, gulping down Prozac, each nation goes crazy in its own way…”
This is a novel that digests its reader; you feel as if you are becoming fluid — dissolved into something at once more complete and yet more disjointed. The novel consumes you until it is fat with you, until you become subsumed in its pain and sensuality and it is about to burst with you (and not the other way around) — because it is rich with poetry and consciousness and what it means to be human. The effect is not pleasant completely, it is intense, a half-surrender to something, a journey or a quest for a meaning you can’t find and don’t understand." —Brianna Berbenuik
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex tells the story -- in first, second, and third person -- of a Ukrainian writer (named, liked the author, Oksana) who is part of the semi-itinerant international literary community (she has a gig teaching at Harvard, for example (as did the author)) but is unmoored, her native country newly independent yet still dealing with an identity-crisis and inferiority complex that is shared by many of its citizens. This type of eastern European novel of the immediate post-Soviet future -- a future not of limitless possibility but of great uncertainty -- faced abroad by a writer isn't something new; Drago Jancar's Mocking Desire (1993) or the works of Dubravka Ugrešić are notable examples in the by now well-worn genre, while Zabuzhko-compatriot Yuri Andrukhovych has offered creative (and more domestic) spins on it in works such as Perverzion and Таємниця
Zabuzhko's narrative is just short of stream-of-consciousness, its headlong rush appropriate for the protagonist searching, somewhat desperately and somewhat frustratedly, for something. There is a sense here of constant flight, but also an effort to get somewhere. Men are part of the problem: she lets herself be carried away by passion, but she certainly can't find the right one.
Her identity as Ukrainian -- and more specifically as a Ukrainian writer -- is also a burden, but one she knows she has to work with. So, for example, she knows she has: "no choice but to write in Ukrainian, although this is probably the most barren choice under the sun at present", as Ukrainian language and literature is as peripheral as any (as it remains fifteen years after the original publication of this novel, as demonstrated by the fact that Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex appears to be the only literary work originally written in Ukrainian to be published in English translation in 2011).
Indeed, she suggests:
the Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you, and that all of our hapless literature is merely a cry of someone pinned down by a beam in a building after an earthquake -- I'm here ! I'm still alive ! -- but, unfortunately, the rescue teams are taking their time and on your own -- how the hell are you supposed to get out ?
Then there's also her identity as poet and writer, as she wonders not just what the use of it all is if the best she can hope for abroad is the stray publication in some literary magazine, but also about the (artistic) responsibility of the author. For example:
might it not be time to stop and ponder over the question of authorial rights -- over what we truly can do, and what we shouldn't?
Addressing, in part, an American audience (literally, in parts of the novel, since she is a lecturer, after all), Oksana relates her very foreign experience, but does not find a viable alternative here either: she remains a stranger in a strange land (and largely defined by her strong sustained ties to that even stranger land she comes from).
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is very much a book of its times -- though the place and dates it was written, noted at the end ("Pittsburgh, September-December, 1994") are also significant (tellingly, too, Pittsburgh is not a major locale in the novel itself; instead it is mainly only the place of its writing): it is a book whose writing clearly required sufficient distance from her homeland. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex also charts a poet adapting to prose, and a woman trying to figure out her female role -- as lover and loved one -- in a time of rapid change that ranged from the political to gender roles; as both the novel and the current Ukraine suggest, these transitions have not only been far from seamless, they have been (and continue to be) very messy.
A strong and what feels like a very honest voice, as well as a quite creative touch make Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex a worthwhile work of fiction, though obviously its impact is not as great as it might have been a decade or more ago (or in Ukraine, where it obviously hits much closer to home). Still, it is certainly still considerably more than a mere literary-historical curiosity, and Zabuzhko is clearly a writer worth paying attention to." - M.A.Orthofer
"First published in the Ukraine in 1996, Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex unleashed a storm of controversy and propelled the author to international fame. It topped the bestseller list in Ukraine for more than ten years, making it the most successful Ukrainian-language book of the nineties in every regard. Today Zabuzhko is one of the few authors in Ukraine (and the only Ukrainian-language writer) to make a living exclusively from her writing.
Intrigued by her success and her book, which PEN American Center has called “a brilliant, suggestive portrait of the heretofore suppressed private lives of Eastern European women,” our editors sat down with Oksana Zabuzhko for an exclusive Q&A.
Your book was considered controversial for its provocative and “taboo” topics when it was first released in 1996—in many ways it provoked in the Ukraine a similar response as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique did in the United States in the 1960s. What drove you to write this book?
- My having been born and grown up as a woman in the Soviet Ukraine. When you turn 30, you inevitably start reconsidering what you have been taught in your formative years--that is, if you really seek your own voice as a writer. In my case, my personal identity crisis had coincided with the one experienced by my country after the advent of independence. The result turned explosive: Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, the story of one woman’s "personal revolt," provoked the top literary scandal of the decade. Now, 14 years after its first publication, the novel is regarded as a "contemporary classic," the milestone in new Ukrainian writings etc., but when I was writing it, it felt simply like a case of "write or die.”
Is the book auto-biographical?
- The narrator bears my first name, and was given a lot out of my own life experience. I guess Fieldwork can be called confessional literature. Of course, it is, in many ways, an autobiographical novel (and which novel is not—starting with Madame Bovary?), but it can hardly be regarded as a pure documentary, a non-fiction (no one but myself knows how many things in there are in fact “the products of the author’s imagination,” whatever this formula may stand for!). The reason for giving the narrator my first name, as well as much of my own biography (literary career, teaching at American universities, growing up under the Soviet regime in a Ukrainian dissident’s family) was at first merely intuitional—nearly all my friends who had read the manuscript suggested that I “change the names,” but I stubbornly rejected that advice. It wasn’t until the simultaneous outbursts of ecstasy and indignation came, and the reading public split into two opposing camps, that I said to myself: Hey, woman, weren’t you right! For you see, if the novel was to articulate certain things which Ukrainian literature has never articulated before, and be heard, all these dark and dirty secrets HAD to be pronounced “in the first person,” as a part of the author’s most personal existential experience. Or, to put it briefly: to win the reader’s trust, you sometimes need to pay with your own blood. In the end, that’s what literature is all about, isn’t it?
How does Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex compare to your previous works?
- It is generally regarded as my first "commercial book," even though I had previously published three collections of poetry, stories, and a literary study. For me, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex has become an act of my personal liberation, not the least of the linguistic kind--since with this novel I knew for sure I was a "language writer." For Ukrainian literature, it turned out to be a book which has dramatically changed the literary landscape, and brought to life a whole new generation of women authors (dubbed by critics as "Zabuzhko’s daughters").
You’ve clearly had an impact on other female writers in your home country. What authors or books have influenced your writing?
- I am afraid I might now confuse my own memories with the influences ascribed to me by critics (this book has been translated in some 12 countries, and from country to country the set of "the names of influence" varies). The most immediate challenge was Milan Kundera: I used to admire his skill to use sex as a tool to both portray the characters and construct the plot, yet I have always found his macho attitudes annoying. My ambition was to try a similar "sex game" on a woman’s part. This is why, of all the praise this novel has received, the one comparison which made me the happiest was a Czech review in which I was named "Lady Kundera." So, I made it work after all!
What's next for you?
- I have in my mind quite a list of things which I want yet to write about, yet, despite the fact that over the past 15 years I did manage to cross several lines off as "done," the list keeps growing. For example, while I was doing research on my recently published novel, The Museum of the Abandoned Secrets, I came upon some documents which pressed the button for long-silenced memories to surface. But I’d rather not discuss my next work until the title is set—this is one of my writing superstitions." - Amazon.com interview
Excerpt
Excerpt 2
Belletrista recently interviewed Professor Michael Naydan about the emergence of literature written by Ukrainian women over the last several decades
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