Oksana Zabuzhko

According to Uilleam Blacker, Oksana Zabuzhko’s work has two main preoccupations: national identity and gender. Zabuzhko’s first novel, Field Work in Ukrainian Sex, published in 1996, was met with great controversy both by the critics and by the readers. With its publication, the Ukrainian readership and the intellectual community faced innovative, provocative and complex feminist writing.

Oksana Zabuzhko’s first novel, Field Work in Ukrainian Sex, is one of the key texts in post-Soviet Ukrainian literature. It caused great controversy upon its publication, due the fact that the narrator expresses dissatisfaction with the established order of relationships between sexes, where a woman is subject to oppression, social and sexual, both by the traditional patriarchy, as a gendered subject, as well as a subject of totalitarianism. The novel was analyzed from the point of view of postcolonial theory. It also inspired a number of comparative studies, where Zabuzhko’s novel was compared to the writings of Jamaica Kincaid, Assia Djebar, Angela Carter, Nicole Brossard, and others. The novel was also studied on account of its prominent style, with the «poetic» voice and the «intellectual» voice intermingling and creating an intricate structure. The novel engages some elements of écriture féminine, notably, writing (from) the body.

Oksana Zabuzhko’s second novel, Museum of Abandoned Secrets, deals with Ukraine’s resistance and opposition to the Soviet colonial regime in the 20th century. The novel presents the reality of the relations between the countries that within the structure of the USSR were seen by the West only in the context of the myth of the «friendships of nations», the myth that Putin’s Russia would still like to perpetuate.

Oksana Zabuzhko’s most famous non-fiction book is Notre Dame d’Ukraine. It focuses on the Ukrainian writer of the fin-de-siècle era, Lesya Ukrayinka (1871-1913), but is also a study of the Ukrainian intelligentsia of that time and their cultural values. More specifically, in this groundbreaking volume Zabuzhko shows Ukraine’s European legacy in regard to the tradition of chivalry and the ways in which it shaped the Ukrainian literature and mentality.

As a trained philosopher and cultural critic, Zabuzhko publishes essays and non-fiction works. Zabuzhko also turns to the Ukrainian history. Her most recent novel, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2009), deals with three different epochs (World War II, 1970s, and early 2000s), and, in particular, the topic of Ukrainian Insurgent Army, active in Ukraine in the 1940s and 1950s, and either demonized or silenced by the Soviet historiography.

Her book Let My People Go won the Korrespondent magazine Best Ukrainian documentary book award in June 2006, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets — Best Ukrainian Book — 2010.

Oksana Zabuzhko belongs to the generation that Tamara Hundorova, a literary scholar, calls «post-Chornobyl». The Chornobyl catastrophe (1986), according to Hundorova, is not only one of the biggest calamities of the modern times, but also a «symbolic event that projects post-apocalyptical text […] into the post-atomic era». Most importantly, Chornobyl also marks the end of the Soviet Union, at least the end of any legitimacy of its ideology, and the beginning of the new Ukrainian society and new Ukrainian literature, free from socialist realism or consciously dismantling its legacy. One important feature of Oksana Zabuzhko’s writing is that it is «turned outward» to the world, to be accessible to the Western reader.

Born 19 September 1960 in Lutsk, Ukraine, Zabuzhko studied philosophy at the Kyiv University, where she also completed her doctorate in aesthetics in 1987. In 1992, she taught at Penn State University as a visiting writer. Zabuzhko won a Fulbright scholarship in 1994 and taught Ukrainian literature at Harvard and the University of Pittsburgh. To date, Zabuzhko works at the Hryhori Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.