Reconstruction of the literary canon in independent Ukraine (90s of the twentieth century)

Abstract

The article reveals the peculiarities of the national literary canon changing during the beginning of 1990th, which we also called the transitional period. It was a time of radical break of social and cultural life of Ukraine. It was necessary to ensure the completeness of the national culture, which it had previously been deprived of due to its colonial status. This proved to be a difficult task that could be realized only in a longer time perspective. That task needed the efforts of several generations which represented different regions in their writings. A fundamentally new configuration has emerged in the literature of the period of independence of Ukraine. This configuration is embodied by several distinctive features of this time. Firstly, we are talking about the literature of socialist realism. For a long time, it was functional and dominant in the reader’s perception. Those texts have lost their significance. Secondly, we had a situation when an understanding of the global literary context emerged. The reason for this had become the numerous significant works from the West and from neighbouring Central European countries, which were translated, published and discussed in Ukrainian and which reflected the postcolonial thoughts. Thirdly, an impressive retrospective of national literature was opened. There much of literary works had not been known or properly appreciated before. Fourthly, a new discourse began to fill in. It was provided by the literary texts of Yurii Andrukhovych, Oksana Zabuzhko, Ihor Rymaruk, Leonid Kononovych, Volodymyr Danylenko, Oles Ulianenko, Yurii Gudz, and many others. That discourse contributed to the accumulation of the aesthetic quality that will become the way for creating a new national canon of literature. The creation of such a canon began at the beginning of the XXI century, when real prerequisites emerged at the level of school and university literature teaching. Also, the basis of the new canon is clearly manifested in the content of modern textbooks and anthologies that represent contemporary Ukrainian literature.