Politics of Style: The Vestiges of Modernism in Ukrainian and Jewish Writing in the 1930s

This dissertation explores how prominent modernist writers responded to the onset of Stalinism in the early 1930s and highlights modernist artistic practices, such as the technique of ventriloquism and the descriptive grotesque as means of parody and the grotesque aesthetics, which were a common feature of the poetry created by Ukrainian poets Pavlo Tychyna and Mykola Bazhan in the early 1930s. It reveals a similar artistic trend, and specifically, parody and self-parody in the poetry of the Jewish author Osip Mandelshtam from the same period. The introductory chapter engages in the scholarly debate regarding the relationship between modernism and socialist realism. It offers a discussion of existing scholarship on modernism in Ukrainian and Russian literatures as well as a comparative analysis of the Soviet policies towards Ukrainian and Russian literatures and cultures in the late 1920s – early 1930s. It provides a historical and theoretical background for the following three chapters on Tychyna’s, Bazhan’s and Mandelshtam’s later poetry, respectively. In addition to close reading, each of these chapters provides historical and literary context for the artistic practices employed by the selected authors. For instance, the second chapter’s discussion of the descriptive grotesque technique in Bazhan’s three long poems “Ghetto in Uman’,” “Hoffmann’s Night” and Blind Bards is put in the context of the development of the grotesque in Western art and literature. In the third chapter’s discussion of the technique of ventriloquism and its carnivalesque grotesque framework in Pavlo Tychyna’s poetry books Chernihiv and Party Leads, the dissertation highlights a similar use of this formal technique in Aleksandr Blok’s poem “The Twelve,” which belongs to the modernist Russian literary tradition. This chapter offers a radically new approach to Soviet Ukrainian literature and culture by breaking through established ethical and ideological taboos in a significant reassessment of Ukrainian political poetry in the 1930s, its aesthetic and ideological value. It challenges the extant scholarship on Tychyna by asserting that his poetry in the early 1930s should primarily be viewed as modernist rather than socialist realist. The fourth chapter reveals how manipulations with the lyrical “I” as well as parody and self-parody in Mandelshtam’s Moscow Notebooks signal the late modernist project in Jewish writing in the early 1930s. Overall, this dissertation re-evaluates the significance of modernism in the USSR in the early 1930s by highlighting the late modernist aesthetics in Jewish writing as well as the vestiges of modernism in Ukrainian literature that have been previously overlooked.

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