Віктор Петров: мапування творчости письменника ред К. Ґлінянович, П. Крупа, Й. Маєвська (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Віктор Петров: мапування творчости письменника ред К. Ґлінянович, П. Крупа, Й. Маєвська Matteo Annecchiarico (bio) Віктор Петров: мапування творчости письменника / ред. К. Ґлінянович, П. Крупа, Й. Маєвська. Краків: TAiWPN Universitas, 2020. Алфавітний покажчик прізвищ. ISBN: 978-83-242-3712-8. This volume is the result of the international scientific conference Wiktor Petrow-Domontowycz – mapowanie twórczości pisarza (Viktor Petrov-Domontovych: A Mapping of the Writer's Oeuvre) organized by the Institute of East Slavic Philology of the Jagiellonian University and held on July 6–7, 2019.1 Viktor Petrov, who also published under the pen name V. Domontovych, was a Ukrainian writer, ethnographer, and literary critic active in the mid-twentieth century. The conference proceedings were published in 2020, coedited by Katarzyna Glinianowicz, Pawel Krupa, and Joanna Majewska. The volume consists of an introduction coauthored by the editors and nineteen chapters grouped into five sections, reflecting the multifaceted personality and intellectual interests of Viktor Petrov: Auto/biographies, Deconstructionist in the Museum, Nomads through the Ages, Concepts and Contextualization, Archive [End Page 228] of Texts and Contexts. The map metaphor seems very appropriate for a comprehensive discussion of such a versatile figure. The collection's structure serves just this goal: mapping Petrov's diverse interests against the traditional classification of the cultural sphere – onto those pertaining to literature and literary studies, philosophy, social anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, and history – as well as mapping his life trajectory, which spanned Soviet Ukraine's first half century and traversed much of the territory in which Ukrainian culture was present, within the Soviet borders and in the diaspora. In the introduction, the editors acknowledge that the many aspects of Petrov's personality inspired the volume contributors and enabled them to pursue a variety of approaches to deciphering his personality. The first section of the volume, "Auto/biographies," opens with recollections of Petrov by his junior colleague at the Institute of Archaelogy in Kyiv, Valentina Korpusova. Focusing on Petrov's formal academic activities, she tries to refute many rumors and legends that still surround his name. One of the mystifications connected to Petrov is tackled in the next essay, by the leading Ukrainian literary scholar Viacheslav Briukhovetskyi. Among Petrov's many other occupations, he was a secret agent of the NKVD (Soviet security service). In 1942, he was dispatched to the German-occupied territory of Ukraine and over the next seven years he played an important role in Ukrainian anti-Soviet circles. In April 1949, Petrov suddenly disappeared from Munich, and nobody knew that he had secretly returned to the USSR. In 1951, a Toronto-based Ukrainian magazine New Days published the article "Screaming Silence," signed by a certain Pavlo Krechet, who showed an inexplicable familiarity with the circumstances of Petrov's life and disappearance. Briukhovetskyi points to many similarities in the writing styles of Petrov and the mysterious Krechet, suggesting the possibility that Petrov was the article's real author. The volume's second section, "Deconstructionist in the Museum," includes five chapters. George G. Grabowicz discusses Petrov the novelist, specifically the author of the novel Doctor Serafikus (1929, published in 1947). Grabowicz inscribes the prominent figures of Ukrainian literary modernism – Pavlo Tychyna, Mykola Kulish, Maik Yohansen, Leonid Skrypnyk, and Mykola Khvylovyi – in the history of world modernism, which he traces back to Miguel de Cervantes, who deconstructed the established literary canon through parody and satire. Grabowicz considers Petrov's Doctor Serafikus a fine example of [End Page 229] Ukrainian modernism, characterized by improvisation that reminds one of jazz music; cubism-inspired collages of images and mixing of different writing styles; and the metanarrative fusion of fiction and real life in several temporal dimensions (P. 91). According to Grabowicz, Petrov's coordination of different genres in the novel had an impact on modern Ukrainian literature, especially on the poet Yurii Kosach (1908–1990) and the writer Ihor Kostetskyi (1913–1983), to name two. Viacheslav Levytskyi continues the discussion of Doctor Serafikus by focusing on the modes of depicting Kyiv in the novel and the trope of urbanism in Ukrainian literature of the first half of the twentieth century in general. The revolutions of 1917 triggered the Ukrainization of imperial cities. Levytskyi writes that Kyiv's literary renaissance of the 1920s soon yielded to the pressure of traditionalism. In that period, many authors thematized the urban space of Kyiv in an attempt to...