Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Oksana Zabuzhko
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.
Question: 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?
Oksana Zabuzhko: 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.”
Question: Is the book auto-biographical?
Oksana Zabuzhko: 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 sing 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?
Question: How does Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex compare to your
previous works?
Oksana Zabuzhko: 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").
Question: You’ve clearly had an impact on other female writers
in your home country. What authors or books have influenced your
writing?
Oksana Zabuzhko: 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!
Question: Have you always wanted to write? What other careers
have you pursued?
Oksana Zabuzhko: I have wanted to be an author since I was five.
Only my parents' blacklisting by the KGB helped keep me from
publishing in my teens. It is the only thing for which I am truly
grateful to the late USSR, for there are few things as certain to
destroy "a career writer" as the premature start.
In my school years, music and theater were two other strong
temptations. Later I studied philosophy, and obtained a degree in
the philosophy of arts. I have also taught at several
universities in Ukraine and abroad (including Harvard, Penn
State, and the University of Pittsburgh in the U.S.), and worked
as a newspaper columnist. Since 1996, when Fieldwork in Ukrainian
Sex was published, I have been living as a freelance writer.
Question: What's next for you? Oksana Zabuzhko: 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 Exclusive: An Essay by Translator Halyna Hryn
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.
