Because We Have No Time: Recent Ukrainian Poetry

In the late eighteenth and during the nineteenth century, the folkloristic moment in Ukrainian poetry became a project, even a kind of political act, to a much greater extent than in Western Europe or even in other Slavic literatures. At the end of the eighteenth century, Ivan Kotliarevsky began to publish his travesty of Virgil's Aeneid (the work took several decad'es to bring out). This in itself, of course, was not new—a century before, a whole slew of such travesties began to appear in Western Europe and, later, in Russia. What was new was that Kotliarevsky's text is a veritable encyclope dia of folklore, customs, even dress and cuisine, of Ukrainian kozaks, villagers and country gentry. And, even more important, the work is written in the spoken vernacular of the common people, as opposed to the highly ornate, artificial bookish language of earlier literature. Although the "common language" had appeared in writ ten literature before, with Kotliarevsky it began to be used exclu sively as a literary vehicle. It is indicative that Ukrainian poetry, by a determinate act of discontinuity, has taken its very medium from the village and, ultimately, from folklore. After Kotliarevsky, practi