Characters and Masks: Counter-Discursive Strategies in the Poetry of Yuri Andrukhovych
Characters and Masks: Counter-Discursive Strategies in the Poetry of Yuri Andrukhovych

Summary/Abstract: Ukrainian poetry of the 1990s deals with the Soviet past in different ways – there are official rhetoric parodying, poetic clichés ironical rethinking, and Soviet narratives in-depth working out. The last way is used by Yuri Andrukhovych in his Yarmarkovi patrety poem collection. Andrukhovych creates the portrait gallery of outcasts, losers, and victims, and this works for hierarchy destruction, established meanings dissemination, and a refusal to maintain the black and white Soviet worldview. In his Yarmarkovi patrety, Andrukhovych refers to the Soviet heroic discourse within which numerous heroic role models have been created. In his dismantling of the heroic discourse, Andrukhovych uses different strategies. The strategy of inversion is based on the narrative perspective shift, resulting in a character’s dislocation – there is moving from the heroic national pantheon to that of the traitors, and vice versa. In Andrukhovych’s poetry, the strategy of inversion is applied to historical figures and political acts. According to the strategy of substitution, a hero is replaced by a criminal, but with saving in the narrative all the formal qualities of the heroic biography. There is the carnival and burlesque criminal pantheon parodying canonical one and calling into question the relevance of the last. The strategy of cancellation destroys the binary totalitarian paradigm within which heroes / non-heroes dichotomy is presented.

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