Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko

Translated by Halyna Hryn
Published by Amazon Crossing, June 6, 2011
ISBN 978-1-6110900-8-6
164 pages
 
Review by Uliana Pasicznyk
 
This book rattled Rozmova readers. Reactions differed, as did understanding and opinion, but none of us who read Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex came away indifferent or unconcerned. Given its provocative title, there was reason to think this book would be sensational—and so it is, but not as we might have expected.
 
Zabuzhko’s book is no precursor to Fifty Shades of Grey. Yes, there is eroticism here, but it is just one element in an astoundingly rich and very personal story. It is, in fact, the psychological odyssey of a talented, clever, ambitious, and supremely self-absorbed Ukrainian woman, told in the first person and in a style bearing comparison to Joyce’s Ulysses. The story focuses on a relationship that has come to an end. Both the heroine, Oksana, and her lover, Mykola, are artists—she a writer, he a painter and sculptor—and both appear here as creative and dynamic people. But this is wholly her story, and she tells it intimately and powerfully. As a writer, her world is one of language and literature. She conveys that world, together with the story of her feelings for Mykola and what has happened between them, in language that is at once expressive, evocative, and searingly intense. The narrative requires close attention, for it shifts between layers of time and place. The setting and action switch between Ukraine and several cities in the eastern U.S., and the time is the early 1990s, the first years of Ukraine’s independence. Our narrator and heroine passionately addresses matters ranging from social conventions to literary motifs to philosophical ideas, but underlying everything she says is anguish and grief over the obsessive relationship that has dominated her life. As her story with Mykola unfolds, it becomes clear that she cannot comprehend her lover or herself without recalling and examining their separate lives. In confronting what happened to each of them as individuals and to the society to which they belong, she realizes that their lives have been shaped by a painful historical past that also determined how they could relate to one another.
 
When this book appeared in 1996, Oksana Zabuzhko was already an acclaimed poet and literary critic. This, her first novel, became a best-seller and remains one today. In Halyna Hryn, her work found a gifted translator who has produced an English edition no less expressive and evocative than the Ukrainian original. The translation, a paperback of 164 pages, was published by AmazonCrossing and is available online. Like most good literature, this book both beckons and challenges its readers. If the experience of our Rozmova group is any gauge, those who take up the challenge will not leave it unmoved. For some readers, it may well be a revelatory experience—an insight into a nation’s pervasive past through the telling of one woman’s unique story.