Topos of the Province in Ukrainian Literature: Post-Soviet Discourse
Topos of the Province in Ukrainian Literature: Post-Soviet Discourse

Summary/Abstract: The article looks into Soviet and post-Soviet identity episodes in contemporary Ukrainian prose and offers models to interpret this phenomenon. In Ukrainian literature, this phenomenon is described in stories of characters returning to the places of their childhood and youth, that is, to the province. The province shows up as an important specific model with “Soviet leftover” vestiges that has proved to be extraordinarily stable and that Soviet everyday life has hardly changed. The authors of Ukrainian prose Serhiy Zhadan (novel “Voroshilovgrad”) and Artem Chech (novel “District D”) embody two models of analysis of the Soviet past. The first model suggests the regeneration of a simulacrum identity that does not maintain any links or connections with the family history. The second model mirrors the acceptance of the Soviet reality as the Other / Alien and the awareness of oneself as the Other. In both cases, the Soviet past is desacralized.

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