Wild Music. Maria Sonevytsky

Ukrainian cultural intimacy. (Imagine, as an analogue, that the Eurovision Song Contest entry from Greece featured choreographed plate-smashing or a prideful song about sheep-stealing, to borrow from Herzfeld’s famous examples.) In Ukraine, these critiques were often articulated by invoking the Ukrainian slang term sharovarshchyna (шароварщина).

      Sharovarshchyna can be defined as the mixing of regional symbols and caricaturing of folk culture that was originally made manifest through Soviet cultural policies. (Sharovary refers to the billowing red pants that became the official costume for male Ukrainian folk dancers in Soviet times.) Critiques of frivolous or cynical reappropriations of Soviet-era symbols are often framed as sharovarshchyna, though, in the post-Soviet era, the term has become shorthand that merges a Ukrainian critique of “world music” postmodern banality with specific reference to the Soviet institutionalized culture regime that dominated Ukrainian expressive culture for most of the twentieth century.

      An article on sharovarshchyna by Vlad Trebunia (who is also known as “Mokh,” the impresario behind the Hutsul-punk band Perkalaba) in the erudite Western Ukrainian online journal Halytskyi Korrespondent opened with the following definition of the term:

      The term sharovarshchyna has a negative meaning. That’s the term we apply to culture of a low quality, which speculates on national motifs. It was especially active in developing and being cultivated by the government in the Soviet times. The motivations of the regime were understandable: on one hand, complete control over creativity, on the other—throw a bone to those who still want to hear, see and create his or her native art … Today’s times are different. Ukraine is independent, there is no control over creativity. Nevertheless, sharovarshchyna, as the unprincipled Hutsuls sing, “lives and flourishes” [жиє й процвітає]. (Trebunia 2010)

      The ending phrase—“lives and flourishes”—is a rich and sarcastic double entendre, an example of the shift in “authoritative discourse” that characterized late socialist speech, which privileges formulaic structures over literal meaning (Yurchak 2005). To Ukrainophone ears, the phrase “lives and flourishes” rings with Soviet slogans that endlessly celebrated the enduring socialist revolution, the Communist Party, or Lenin’s immortality (cf. Yurchak 2015). This bloated rhetoric is partly undermined, however, by the dialect form of the verb “to live”: in literary Ukrainian, this would be zhyve (живe); the author’s rendering (zhye / жиє) is in rural dialect, and acts as a tragicomic suggestion of how sell-out (“unprincipled”) Hutsuls might utter the phrase. Trebunia criticizes the way that money and resources are diverted to support projects tainted by sharovarshchyna. He continues with a provocative question: “But, then again, if the development of pseudo-Ukrainian culture hadn’t been organized in Soviet times, then would artists have had the opportunity to create and develop at all? It was at least a chance to step onto stage, in front of an audience.”

      The remainder of Trebunia’s article consults with “experts”—writers, public intellectuals, musicians—to assess whether there are any benefits to the “pseudo-Ukrainian culture” called sharovarshchyna. Of these experts, the analysis most relevant to our discussion of Wildness came from Yurko Izdryk, a well-known poet and essayist based in the Western Ukrainian town of Kalush. He wrote about sharovarshchyna as a particularly Ukrainian iteration of a broad cross-cultural “identifying code”: “Though so-called ‘sharovarshchyna’ belongs to culture, it is not itself a full-worth cultural phenomenon. It is, rather, a cultural code, an identifying code. This is the code that puts a substantial part of identity on the nation-bearer and performs a representative function—it is an original calling card of the nation for emergence into the world. In this sense, ‘sharovarshchyna’ is no different from similar codes of other nations—‘tsyhanshchyna,’ ‘Russian matryoshka-caviar-vodka,’ ‘Argentine tango,’ ‘French chanson,’ ‘Latin lovers,’ etc.” (Trebunia 2010, italics in original). However, Izdryk believes that the Ukrainian “identifying code” is in a “sorry state” due to its contamination by previous generations of folklorizing discourse. He bitterly identifies Ruslana as the current paragon of what he sees as a lamentable trend:

      The only shame is that sharovarshchyna absorbed only the totally poor assortment of oblmuzdramteatriv and odious societies like “Prosvita.” The trouble is not that sharovarshchyna begs poorly stylistically; the trouble is that it unsatisfactorily performs the identifying function. I don’t know how it seems to the miner from Donetsk, but to me, for example, it is very hard to identify myself with the pederastic youth in raspberry-colored pants, with their sado-mazo bracelets, their oseledets’ flapping in the wind, doing some cosmopolitan dance move in the background of the national deputy to Ukraine, the winner of some kind of Eurovision, Ruslana Lyzhychko. Now then, here’s the definition: “Sharovarshchyna—this is a kind of lyzhychka.”¹² (Trebunia 2010)

      Izdryk cleverly manipulates the pop icon’s rarely used last name, Lyzhychko, into a neologistic synonym for sharovarshchyna. By equating the most prominent contemporary purveyor of Ukrainian etno-muzyka with sharovarshchyna, Izdryk shrewdly eulogizes the state of popular expressive culture in Ukraine in the twenty-first century.

      To critics who accused her of tokenizing and exploiting the historically exoticized Hutsuls, Ruslana denied that her project succumbed to the banality of sharovarshchyna. She responded to critics by explaining that “We turned to etnos, not to sharovarshchyna […] I am a contemporary singer with ethnic interests who has seen [ethnic material] through fresh eyes” (Koskin, quoted in Pavlyshyn 2006, 480). Still, after the success of Eurovision and “Wild Dances,” Ruslana’s interests largely shifted away from the specificity of her “ethnic interests.” As she toured internationally, and took on the roles of Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, the anti-trafficking spokesperson for the OSCE, and member of the Ukrainian parliament, she reinvented herself as an infrastructural activist who championed Ukrainian renewable energy as the path to future state security and prosperity. With the introduction of post-Soviet environmentalist rhetorics into her press materials and songs, she reframed the Hutsul etnos as a more generic “ecologically noble savage” whose proximity to wilderness assumes a special Indigenous knowledge (Ellingson 2001, 357). Thus, she again re-signified Wildness, no more as a term of ethnic intimacy or auto-exoticism, but toward the future-oriented metaphor of “wild energy.”

       WILD ENERGY AND INFRASTRUCTURAL ACTIVISM