Her kitchen is stuffed with old polka dots pans and decorative plates hang on the wall.
She does not know where tea is kept in her own kitchen and often uses this part of the flat to store her luggage after her latest trip.
If the kitchen is said to be the most important place for a Ukrainian woman, the same cannot be said about Oksana Zabuzhko, the most famous female writer in Ukraine. Her living space is mainly a room filled with some 5,000 books, a table with a computer, an armchair for a guest and a chair for her.
Zabuzhko, a charismatic and energetic woman, spins around from side to side in her chair, emphasizing her words by gesticulating wildly.
Zabuzhko became famous after her first novel, “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex,” was published in Ukraine in 1996. The book devoted to woman’s sexual and personal freedom created a big scandal – and big success.
Author Oksana Zabuzhko at home with her book collection. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
The older, Soviet-raised generation was angered by the writer’s experimental style and offensive breaking, as they saw it, of taboos. The book was republished plenty times and became Ukraine’s first long-running bestseller.The novel was later translated into a dozen languages, including English.
An English language version of the novel became available on amazon.com, the world’s biggest Internet book store, on June 4 this year. Since then, more than 5,000 copies of the novel, both paper and electronic, have been sold all over the world.
She opened up Ukrainian modern literature to the global English-speaking audience.Zabuzhko still keeps in mind the transformational moment in her life which influenced her as a woman and a writer.
You can imagine what it is like to be 26, when a fire is burning in your eyes, you are full of energy and know for sure that you will change the world.
– Oksana Zabuzhko
As a 26-year-old Ph.D. student of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, she came to an academic secretary to schedule a defense of her thesis. Zabuzhko was immensely proud of her scientific discoveries at that time.
“You can imagine what it is like to be 26, when a fire is burning in your eyes, you are full of energy and know for sure that you will change the world,” she recalled.
But a middle-aged academic reacted with a sexist remark: “Such a pretty woman and managed to write a thesis!” Zabuzhko recalled him as saying.
“A thesis is also pretty,” her scientific supervisor, who was also present during conversation, briefly replied.
For Zabuzhko it was a moment of self-awareness which later motivated her to write a novel. While she did not change the world she managed to change Ukrainian literature.
In 1992 Zabuzhko won a Fulbright scholarship sponsored by the American government and spent almost two years researching and teaching at the universities of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Pittsburgh. It was also the United States where the idea of her first novel germinated. She wrote a story about a Ukrainian female scholar who came to the U.S. and ended up with painful sexual relations she was trying to recover from.
Zabuzhko’s character was trying to understand why she is so addicted to a person who made her suffer, an allusion to a broader, complex of power relations between a post-colonial nation and its colonizer, the USSR.
“I translated all these national issues into body language,” Zabuzhko said of the deeper layer of meaning in her book. “Of course it was a shock and a strike on people’s mentality.”
Zabuzhko’s book had a major impact on Ukrainian literature. Sex and gender issues became no longer a taboo topic in fiction, while female authors started flourishing. But this one book was not enough to emancipate a society.
Zabuzhko said that Ukrainian women are still not taken seriously in all spheres of life because the nation has missed out on the feminine revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, an important part of the modernization process, which most Western nations passed through.
“It is still hard to be a woman in Ukraine,” she said. “We are still referring to the problem of the country which did not go through feminism, and where women are walking on high heels even in the heat,” she added.
The writer recalled an incident that happened to her last summer. On a hot sunny day she was walking along a street wearing an open T-shirt, shorts and plain sandals.
“Girl, you should wear high heels, and then it will be nice,” Zabuzhko, now 51, suddenly heard from a male stranger passing by and giving her an appraising glance. “Did he really think that I should wear high heels in the 40 Celsius degrees heat, only to be liked by him?” the writer asked herself rhetorically after the incident.
After “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex” was published, Zabuzhko wrote several other books. But the most important for the author was “The Museum of Abandoned Secrets.” The 800-some pages family saga, which went into print in Ukraine at the end of 2009, had two interlacing story lines.
One historical line tells the story of simple Ukrainians who participated in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during and after the World War II. Another story line depicts a modern female journalist Daryna, her career and relations with men.
Even though Zabuzhko called her last novel something of “a textbook on Ukraine and Ukrainian history,” she said readers found personal interest in it. A Swiss female journalist once shared with Zabuzhko: “Daryna’s talk with her boss could have been my talk with my boss.”
Last year German’s publishing house Droschl published “The Museum of Abandoned Secrets” and has already sold some 5,000 copies of the book. The novel will be soon published in Russian, Polish, Czech and Serbian languages.
Meanwhile, Zabuzhko is looking ahead to a busy winter during which she will proofread the release of English-language translations of “The Museum of Abandoned Secrets” and “Sestro, Sestro,” a collection of novels and short stories, which are supposed to come out on Amazon next year.
Anyone who thinks about interrupting the writer’s train of thought should pay attention to a skull and crossbones drawn on a piece of paper and tacked to the door of her cabinet: “Don’t go inside! Dangerous for life!”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Faryna can be reached at [email protected].
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