Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko was first published in 1996 by Zhoda in Kyiv as Pol´ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns´koho seksu.- Translated from the Ukrainian by Halyna Hryn. First published in English in 2011

 Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko was first published in 1996 by Zhoda in Kyiv as Pol´ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns´koho seksu.- Translated from the Ukrainian by Halyna Hryn. First published in English in 2011

Over the past ten years or so I have posted upon a number of authors originally from what is now known as the Ukraine. These include Gogol, Clarice Lispector and Josepth Roth as well as Yiddish Language authors. All of them left the Ukraine as soon as they could, most to escape pervasive Anti-Semitic pograms. Of course they are long since deceased. 

Early this month I posted upon my first reading of a work by a contemporary Ukrainian writer,Sweet Darusya:A Tale of Two Villages by Maria Matios -2003- 159 pages- translated from the Ukrainian by Michael M. Naylan and Tytarenko-2016.  

Today I am posting upon a very highly reviewed work by a second contemporary Ukrainian author, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko, first published in 2003. I will mostly just make a few observations. I cannot help but relate the struggle of the narrator to deal with men who use her sexually to what is happening in the Ukraine now.  

I am glad to have read this famous work but also glad I am done with it. I am pretty much in agreement with these remarks I found on a review:

"Reading Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is like having bad sex. You’re not enjoying yourself but you don’t necessarily feel like stopping. Your mind wanders, you wonder how long until it’s over, and you may even fake a response just so it’ll stop. After all, it’s late and you need to get some sleep." 

 I was kind of reminded of a conversation in a Seinfeld Episode, The Mango-Season 5-Episode 1. Elaine earlier in the show told Jerry she facked all her orgasms with him. Talking later in her office to a female coworker she asks if she had ever "faked it" with her husband. She says sure "I mean some times enough is enough and you just want some sleep".

The narrator’s abusive love affair mirrors the historical cultural norms and imposed values in Ukraine. It symbolizes a generation’s struggle to free itself from the past, to forge its own identity, and yet hold onto the best parts of the former identity, the traditions and historical moments that made independence worth fighting for despite years of being suspended between wars, languages, identities, and hostile neighbours that would crush, assimilate or extinguish them. Thus the narrator reflects on the tenderness and love that was present in her relationship as much as the painful parts, the destructive parts, and the unbearable and everlasting scars that remain.

"…obviously her mother tongue was the most nutritious, most healing to the senses: velvety marigold, or no, cherry (juice on lips)? strawberry blond (smell of hair)? …it’s always like that, the minute you peer more closely the whole thing disintegrates into tiny pieces and there’s no putting it back together; she hungered for her language terribly, physically, like a thirsty man for water, just to hear it — living and full-bodied with that ringing intonation like a babbling brook at at the historical trauma passed down from generation to generation becomes clear and inescapable. Although the word “Gulag” is only used twice, in one of the small snippets of poetry peppered throughout the novel, the vast system of Stalinist concentration camps is present, quiet and ghost-like, throughout the narrative.

And, though the crux of the novel is Ukrainian identity, the book is not exclusively about being Ukrainian. It’s about being on your knees under the weight of any culture. The narrator wryly observes the same struggle in America. “… the Great American Depression from which it seems that about 70 percent of the population suffers, running to psychiatrists, gulping down Prozac, each nation goes crazy in its own way…”

This is a novel that digests its reader; you feel as if you are becoming fluid — dissolved into something at once more complete and yet more disjointed. 

Oksana Zabuzhko was born in Lutsk (Ukraine) in 1960. Her novel ‘‘Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex’’, translated into sixteen languages, made her well known on the international literary scene in 1996. She has published eighteen other books, including the award-winning novel ‘‘The Museum of Abandoned Secrets’’ (2009). She is also a leading public figure in Ukraine.

I hope to read her The Museum of Abandoned Secrets soon.