The novel that most shaped independent Ukraine's first fifteen years was a feminist provocation
When philosopher Oksana Zabuzhko published Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex in 1996, critics and readers erupted. A decade later a poll named it the book that had most influenced Ukrainian society since independence, and it has become the most widely translated work of new Ukrainian prose, available in 15 languages.
Zabuzhko was born in Lutsk on 19 September 1960. Her father, a teacher, critic and translator, had suffered repression under Stalin, and she says her grounding in language and literature came from home. When a new crackdown on the Ukrainian intelligentsia began in September 1965, the family left Lutsk, settling in Kyiv from 1968. She studied philosophy at Kyiv University and earned a doctorate in aesthetics in 1987. In the 1990s she taught in the United States, first as a visiting writer at Penn State and then, on a Fulbright from 1994, lecturing on Ukrainian literature at Harvard and the University of Pittsburgh. She works at the Hryhori Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy in Kyiv.
The scholar Uilleam Blacker identifies two threads running through her writing: national identity and gender. Her debut novel follows a narrator chafing against a social order in which women are subordinated both by traditional patriarchy and by totalitarian rule. Critics have read it through postcolonial theory and compared it with Jamaica Kincaid and Angela Carter, noting how a lyrical voice and an analytical one twist together, and how it draws on the idea of writing from the body.
The literary scholar Tamara Hundorova places her in a post-Chornobyl generation, for whom the 1986 disaster marked the collapse of Soviet ideology's legitimacy and the birth of a literature free of socialist realism. Her work is deliberately turned outward, written to be accessible to Western readers.
Her later novel, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets of 2009, moves between the Second World War, the 1970s and the early 2000s, and was voted best Ukrainian book of 2010. Her best-known non-fiction, Notre Dame d'Ukraine of 2007, examines the poet Lesya Ukrayinka and the ideals of her generation. From 1995 to 2010 she served as vice-president of the Ukrainian branch of PEN International.
Source: Oksana Zabuzhko
