Finally, high as the Chornohora mountains is my appreciation for my family. A network of guardian aunts supported me through various stages of fieldwork: Ira Lasowska in L’viv, my safe harbor in Ukraine; Marta Bilas in Austria, who, among other things, helped me buy the beat-up Mazda that became key to my fieldwork; and Natalia Sonevytsky, my inspiring strianka. My late father, Rostyslav Sonevytsky, diligently practiced the piano every morning before going to work. This model of creativity and discipline has informed my life as a musician and a scholar. Words fail to express my debt and gratitude to my mother, Chrystia Sonevytsky, whose kindness appears to be infinite. She set an example of how to balance career with family; I thank her for her sustaining love for me and my family. My children, Lesia and Artem, teach me every day about the wild possibilities of human connection. And Franz Nicolay—my first reader, my worthy adversary, my companion, and my love—thank you for accompanying me on this adventure.
NOTE ON NAMES AND TRANSLITERATION
This book contains translations and Romanizations from three different languages with complex and politicized relationships to orthography and transliteration. Where possible, I have included the original Cyrillic for readers familiar with that alphabet.
For Ukrainian, I generally follow the transliteration standards adopted in 1996 as the Ukrainian national system. I prefer to use the Ukrainian transliteration of places located in Ukraine, even when norms of transliteration into English favor the Russian transliteration. For example, I write Kyiv (from the Ukrainian Київ, rather than Kiev), Chornobyl (Чорнобиль, rather than Chernobyl), and L’viv (Львів, rather than Lvov). When Romanizing Russian, I use the ICAO system that was adopted in 2013, in part to minimize the use of diacritics in the text. I hold to these standards unless an individual or group represents their names or terms using different systems of transliteration. In such cases, I follow their lead.
The Crimean Tatar language presents some especially complex issues. Typically, in this book, I transliterate from the Cyrillic system that was adopted in the mid-twentieth century because the majority of texts I depended on were either produced during the Soviet period, or in post-Soviet publications that favored Cyrillic over Turkic (or Arabic) rendering of the language. However, I do occasionally transliterate terms to connote the specific sounds of Crimean Tatar that are difficult to convey with strict transliteration from Cyrillic, so instead of the term “Khaytarma,” (rendered in Cyrillic frequently as “Хайтарма”), I opt for the transliteration as “Qaytarma,” which indicates that the initial phoneme is a voiceless uvular stop. (In Cyrillic, this phoneme is better approximated with the combination of “К” followed by the hard sign from Russian, “ъ.”)
A final note: some activists have moved to refer to themselves as “Crimeans” (in Ukrainian: Кримці or Krymtsi; in Turkic: Qirimli or sometimes Kirimli) rather than “Crimean Tatars.” I have not observed these practices due to the fact that “Crimean Tatar” remains the dominant internationally recognized ethnonym for the group. For this reason, I also write “Crimea” instead of Krym or Qirim. That said, I acknowledge the importance of the campaign to jettison the vague and colonial term “Tatar,” which was applied as the generic term for all Muslim subjects living on the territory of the former Russian Empire.
The vast majority of the formal and informal interviews for this project were conducted in either Ukrainian or Russian and have been transcribed and translated on the basis of field recordings. When I have reconstructed dialogue from field notes, I do not represent speech in quotation marks, unless I jotted it into my fieldnotes with quotation marks. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.
I present the identities of my interlocutors in various ways. In some cases, with their permission, I include full names. In others, in cases of more sensitive information, I do my best to fully anonymize sources. When I write about well-known musicians and bands, I typically use the full names of individuals if there is other information presented that would make them identifiable. In the case of celebrities, since my access to such individuals was for the most part restricted to their publicly available speech, I use full names.
Wild Music
INTRODUCTION
On Wildness
Wildness cannot tell because it frames telling as another tool of colonial rule. Wildness cannot speak without producing both the colonial order that gives it meaning and the disruption of that order through temporal and spatial and bodily excess and eccentricity.
J. Jack Halberstam, Wildness, Loss, Death
An audience of thousands wave national flags in a riot of color. Onstage, four dancers stand in a circle of red, pulsating light. The arena resounds with the sampled blare of the trembita, the massive slender horn associated with the Western Ukrainian mountain highlanders known as Hutsuls. Each dancer slowly raises a trembita so that the horns radiate outward from the circle. As the blurting opening sounds of the horns become more recognizable as melodies, they are interrupted by an orchestral hit, and a pop star—Ruslana, wearing a long fur draped Tarzan-like over one shoulder—enters from the back of the stage. She and five dancers wearing identical fur cloaks storm toward the audience. With each thunderous orchestral hit, they roar “Hey!” Bursts of flame erupt on the projection screens encircling the stage, as the dancers flank Ruslana in pyramid formation. They rip off their furs to reveal skin: tan midriffs, leather microskirts, and tall heeled boots with metal-studded seams. Their muscular tattooed arms bear Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” insignia. As they turn, the tinny sound of tsymbaly—the hammered dulcimer also prevalent in rustic Hutsul music—momentarily cuts through the thumping electronic tune, and the dancers jump into synchronized choreography that recalls mid-1990s Janet Jackson more than Western Ukrainian village dance. The observer confronts a rapid stream of ambiguous yet redolent gestures: flashes of Xena the Warrior Princess or Britney Spears, Scythian gold or Celtic crests, the amped-up oom-tzah of a discotheque, an echoing Carpathian yodel, global sex, local folk, Amazons, Genghis Khan.
The performance of this song—called “Wild Dances”—took place in 2004 and signaled post-Soviet Ukraine’s emergence into the arena of international pop music. It was Ukraine’s second year participating in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), the televised song competition that has for decades staged European harmony and discord through the extravagant battle of folk-pop singers representing their countries (Tragaki 2013; Raykoff 2007). While trembita and tsymbaly samples in “Wild Dances” sonically marked the song as having something to do with the Western Ukrainian borderlands, other features skewed toward the generic dance-pop conventions of the early twenty-first century. The song’s lyrics juxtaposed Hutsul vocables (shydy-rydi-da-na) with vague desires (“I want you to want me”) sung in both English and Ukrainian. When “Wild Dances” was televoted to Eurovision victory, fans and media interpreted the song and its performance as an allegory of Ukraine’s tortured post-Soviet geopolitical position. In interviews, and in her own (brief) political career following her Eurovision stardom, Ruslana herself supported such an interpretation, framing her victory as evidence that Ukraine was a European state that had finally left the orbit of Russian influence.1 But if “Wild Dances” was a message about Europe-facing aspiration, why voice that message using a lexicon of exoticism?
There is more to this Eurovision story—about how the pop singer’s triumph was variously received within Ukraine with pride, with ambivalence, or with embarrassment—especially as Hutsuls were forced to have a “rueful” reckoning with entrenched stereotypes of their “wildness” that had suddenly become internationally visible (Herzfeld