Two Lands, New Visions: Stories from Canada and Ukraine

Rolf Hellebust is a professor of Russian language and literature at the
University of Calgary.

What is it that brings the two halves of this fascinating book together?
What divides them? And what do these comparisons tell us about the
condition of being Ukrainian at the end of the 20th century? These are
inevitable questions for the reader of this anthology of short stories,
10 from post-Soviet Ukraine (admirably translated by Marco Carynnyk and
Marta Horban) and 10 from contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian writers. In
other words, it is a book with a mission—ethnographic, historical, and
political—that goes beyond the anthologist’s usual aesthetic focus.

In this pairing of nation versus hyphen, nobody can be too surprised
that differences outweigh similarities. The most obvious one of those
mentioned by Janice Kulyk Keefer, the book’s editor on the Canadian
side, is that the Ukrainians do not share the personal concern for
ethnicity that unites most of their Canadian counterparts. The latter
ask “Who am I?”—usually by way of “Who were my parents?” The
question for their colleagues in Kyiv and Ivano-Frankivsk (if it arises
at all) is rather “Where am I?”—i.e., what is the nature of the
geographical, temporal, and cultural borders that set off present-day
Ukraine from the Soviet Union, from Russia, from the rest of Central and
Eastern Europe, and from the West?

An important difference neglected by Keefer, but implicit in the
contrast between her introduction and that of Ukrainian scholar Solomea
Pavlychko, is less directly related to ethnicity. Although Pavlychko
emphasizes the “creative chaos” of the current literary scene, her
remarks, and—more importantly—the preponderance of weighty, public
themes (Afghanistan, homelessness, the mass media, perversions of the
new democracy, etc.) among her chosen authors, prove that there still is
a scene. In other words, Ukrainians retain their embattled belief (from
the Soviet era and before) in the centrality of literature in defining
the nation’s destiny. If the themes of the Canadians represented in
this collection are exclusively private, it has nothing to do with their
particular ethnicity, only with the diffident social function of
literature—especially the genre of the short story—in Canada as a
whole.