Ukrainian writer Dibrova among authors at international festival in Toronto (10/21/01)

Ukrainian writer Dibrova among authors at international festival in Toronto

by Oksana Zakydalsky

TORONTO - Prominent Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Dibrova will take part in the 22nd annual International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront in Toronto on October 17-27. A novelist, short story writer, dramatist, literary critic, translator and teacher, Mr. Dibrova was born in 1951 in Donetsk, Ukraine, studied and worked in Kyiv, and is now living in the United States.

Mr. Dibrova will read from his works on Tuesday, October 23, sharing the stage with best-selling British novelist Margaret Drabble and Arab writer Hanan al-Shaykh.

Mr. Dibrova follows in the footsteps of some of Ukraine's best known writers and poets who have been participants of the annual International Festival of Authors in earlier years.

Preceded by other Ukrainian writers

Ivan Drach, who read in 1989, was the first Ukrainian writer to participate. He was followed in subsequent years by Ihor Kalynets, Vasyl Holoborodko and Mykola Vorobiov - all of whom started to publish in the 1960s, during the period of a relative thaw in Soviet Ukraine.

The most recent participants, Oksana Zabuzhko and Yuri Andrukhovych, are writers who achieved prominence in the 1990's and fitted more comfortably into the festival milieu, where there are many opportunities for mingling with the other participants, usually 40 to 50 writers from all over the world.

The first visitors from Ukraine usually spoke no English and would frequently escape into the embrace of the local Ukrainian community rather than network with other writers. With English-speaking Ms. Zabuzhko and then Mr. Andrukhovych, other participating authors became acquainted with the literary scene in Ukraine.

Mr. Dibrova, who first came to the United States in December, 1989 as chief of the press office of Narodna Hazeta, the Rukh newspaper, in Washington, has taught at the Harvard University Ukrainian Summer Institute, beginning in 1992 and returning several times. In 1995 he was a visiting assistant professor under the Fulbright program at Penn State University and since 1996 he has worked at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard.

Mr. Dibrova's first short stories, "Texts With and Without Titles," were published in 1990; his "Beatles' Songbook," which came out in Kyiv in 1991, became the literary hit of that year. But, according to critic Maksym Strikha writing in the magazine Krytyka, the stories published in the 1990s actually belong to the "underground alternative" of the 1970s.

Conformity or "internal emigration"

When writers born in the 1950s made their debut, the period of stagnation and censorship had begun in Ukraine. The choice for them was conformity - to becoming "engineers of human souls" - or "internal emigration." Those who chose the latter created an underground alternative culture, writing "for the drawer." They wrote without any expectation of having their works published under the censorship then in force and their texts were passed hand to hand in a narrow circle. They publicized their writings among their friends at informal group gatherings, some of which were regularly held and quite long-lived. Mr. Dibrova headed one such group which met at a Kyiv artist's studio.

Mr. Dibrova's novel "Burdyk" (published by Geneza, Kyiv, 1998) is about this alternative scene of the 1970s generation. When freedom and independence came in 1991, many of the 1960s writers were spent as authors but, because they had established themselves before the repressions came, were prominent enough to go on to play significant roles in the new state.

The new writers, the 1980s generation of Mr. Andrukhovych's fictional Stas Perfetsky, felt right at home in the newly accessible Europe and North America. Members of the 1970s generation, of whom Mr. Dibrova's alter ego, Burdyk, is a representative, were nowhere. They had not yet realized themselves when censorship fell on them. The novel Burdyk ends with the hero falling under the wheels of a trolleybus, but it is never made clear whether he actually dies.

Works written by Mr. Dibrova in the 1970s and early 1980s - "The Beatles' Songbook" and "Peltse" - are parodies of the existence of everyman in a totalitarian society through, what Mr. Strikha called "an able deconstruction of the various myths surrounding the life of Soviet man." His heroes are what can be called the Soviet lumpen-intelligensia. The inspiration for this "underground alternative" literature was the then-forbidden Western modernist texts of writers such as Beckett and Ionesco. (Mr. Dibrova's translations of their works were finally published in the late 1980s.)

Latest book of novellas

Mr. Dibrova's latest book, "Zbihovyska" (Get-Togethers, published by Krytyka in 1999) includes four novellas, three of which were written in Kyiv at the beginning of the 1980s and only recently edited for publication, while the fourth was written in the United States in the mid 1990s.

The first three take place when, supposedly, Burdyk was still alive. Each takes place at a different gathering - a christening, a New Year's party and on the eve before Easter - and deals with the same milieu of the "lumpen-intelligensia" of the 1970s.

The fourth novella takes place "after Burdyk's death" - in a provincial American university where a philologist from Ukraine, invited to the university, thanks to a Ukrainian professor there, is celebrating his 40th birthday. The celebrations are seen through the same absurdist prism Mr. Dibrova applied to Soviet society, this time focusing on both the Americans and the transplanted Ukrainians.

The mystery remains. Did Burdyk - the 1970s lumpen-intelligent - really die? Mr. Strikha claims that there is some doubt. Maybe in his future writings Mr. Dibrova will give readers an answer.

The only available translation (by Halyna Hryn) of Mr. Dibrova's works - the book "Peltse and Pentameron" which includes "Peltse," a story from "The Beatles' Songbook" and the novella "Pentameron" - was published in 1996 by Northwestern University Press in the series "Writings from an Unbound Europe."

At the authors' festival in Toronto, in addition to reading from his work, Mr. Dibrova will take part on October 24 in an on-stage interview conducted by Marc Glassman.

On October 22 Mr. Dibrova will also be the subject of a discussion about his work led by Dr. Marko Stech of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Prof. Taras Koznarsky of the University of Toronto at a program organized by the Shevchenko Scientific Society.

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