Chapter 6 Roxolana’s Memoirs as a Garden of Intertextual Delight

Maryna Romanets

Oscar Wilde’s celebrated statement, “It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything,”^[400] prefigures Roland Barthes’s no less famous conceptualization of every text as a “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”^[401] Barthes defines any creative act as an absorption or transformation of earlier existing narratives and discourses into new configurations.

Yuri Vynnychuk—“one of the groundbreakers of the erotic genre in contemporary Ukrainian literature” (“oguH ³ç ïåðøîïðîõîäö³â åðîòè÷íîãî æàíðó â ñó÷àñí³é óêðà¿íñüê³é ë³òåðàòóð³”),^[403] who was termed, for his creative productivity, its “symbolic phallus” (“ñèìâîë³÷íèé ôàëîñ”) by Andrii Bodnar^[404]— partakes in far-reaching intertextual games.^[405] He consistently displays creative and whimsical anarchy by juggling different conventions, genres, canons, and cultural codes, new and old alike. Having been turned into a space for playing out a dialogic relationship with a number of texts—literary, cinematic, and historical—his Æèò³º ãàðåìíîº [Life in the Harem] (1996)^[406] demythologizes and demystifies one of the Ukrainian cultural icons of ideal womanhood through its hybridization with the conventional Orientalist fantasies of Western libertine pornography. Vynnychuk fabricates a pseudo-autobiographical manuscript of a historical figure, Roxolana (Nastia Lisovska), the most cherished concubine of Süleyman (Suleiman) the Magnificent, who legally married the Sultan and became the first really powerful woman in the Ottoman dynasty. In fact, it is the rise of the political power of Roxolana “that many historians (Westerners and Turks alike) pinpoint as the beginning of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.”^[407]

The spellbinding story of Roxolana, who was captured by the Ottoman vassals during their slave raid into Ukraine in 1520 and donated to the imperial harem by a nobleman (he had bought her at a slave market and was greatly impressed by her knowledge of Greek and Latin),^[408] has exerted its allure on Ukrainian writers, composers, and artists’ imagination. They have been busily creating, especially throughout the last century, their male cult of an eminent Hurrem Sultan.^[409] The escalation of the Roxolana myth, which turned into virtual “Roxolanomania,”^[410] arrived at a new turn of the spiral with the 26-part TV serial monster.^[411] Based, in the best case scenario, on five pages of 50-year-old factual material,^[412] this soap opera has summed up the efforts of literary Roxolaniads to produce a bizarre crossbreed of romantic sexualized patriotism and establish a conspicuous Roxolana stereotype.^[413]

As Oksana Zabuzhko observes, none of these works focused on Nastia Lisovska’s versatile and truly Renaissance personality as an outstanding diplomat, intrigante, benefactor, and reformist,^[414] who prefigured the powerful women of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^[415] Leslie P Peirce writes that the sixteenth century, termed an age of kings, was also an “age of queens—among them Anne Boleyn, Margaret of Navarre, Elizabeth I, Catherine de Medicis, and Mary Queen of Scots.

All of the above factors, to some extent, into Vynnychuk’s Æèò³º ãàðåìíîº [Life in the Harem]. Using Roxolana, who has been admitted to the Ukrainian national pantheon of heroes,^[419] in the harem setting that she truly enjoys, Vynnychuk plays with the cult of Ukrainian cultural symbols. Æèò³º [Life], which the author considers his “most brutal” book,^[420] provides yet another highly peculiar page of his “imaginary history” of Ukraine that seems to explore the possibilities and limits of meaning in the representation of the past. In one of his interviews, Vynnychuk recalls how he decided to turn this project into literary mystification. Prior to the publication of the novel in installments in the now defunct Lviv newspaper Post-ïîñòóï [Post-progress], an article about the discovery of Roxolana’s diary appeared. It provoked an ensuing public scandal around the “immoral” subject matter of the recovered manuscript as Soiuz Ukrainok [‘The Ukrainian Women Union’] wrote an open letter to Vynnychuk, printed in the daily Ìîëîäü Óêðà¿íè [Youth of Ukraine], in which they demanded the immediate termination of the publication of the diary. The enraged patriots argued that the dissemination of the discovery is detrimental to Roxolana’s illustrious image, and they supported their adamant claim by numerous quotations stating that Roxolana’s sole mission in the harem was to enlighten the Sultan about Ukraine.^[421] Vynnychuk’s simulated diary has become a site where literature and ideology become inseparably intertwined, thus provoking a slanted approach to historical events infused by a misplaced “patriotism.” While perusing the discursive field within which the Roxolana myth continues to operate, Vynnychuk engages in a combative relationship with the canonical texts by changing them from something fixed to something modifiable and endlessly open.

Interestingly, this is not Vynnychuk’s first project aimed at disorienting publishers, readers, and, by extension, the system.

While writing his similarly subversive version of Roxolana’s life, Vynnychuk clearly articulates and develops those aspects of Roxolana’s career that evidently captivated his predecessors and contemporaries but that were carefully self­censored and suppressed. He complements and completes the silences of his precursor texts by amplifying their sexual overtones. By producing an erotic manual and thus transgressing a “sacred boundary” of quality literature and its moral stance, the author mounts an attack on repressive social codes and heavy­handed morality, albeit in the process betraying his particular brand of post-Soviet masculinity. In his attempt to provoke the reader to ponder how best to speak of lust and desire beyond cliche, he makes the idiom of “high” porn even higher because his language is opulently stylized through transpositions of an obsolete Ukrainian lexis that simulates the authenticity of the sixteenth-century text in a very self-conscious manner. At the beginning of the memoir, Roxolana explains:

I have read writings about love transcribed from Greek women and also from Saracen women, but never have I heard about a Ruthenian female writing such things.

While featuring Roxolana as the first Ukrainian grand dame of sexual liberation, Vynnychuk, in passing, mimics numerous feminist projects of the discovery and reconstruction of women’s literary tradition, further empowering his narrator through the discussion of taboo subjects. Simultaneously, his narrative runs counter to those produced since the beginning of the eighteenth century, when European travelers’ tales about voyages to the Middle East became a popular genre and images of despotic sultans and desperate slave girls comprised a central part of an emerging liberal feminist discourse featuring the harem as an “inherently oppressive institution.”^[425] Furthermore, Roxolana’s story becomes both an erotic confession of her personal experiences and a set of instructions in lovemaking for public use, utilizing the conventions of Bahname, the Turkish sixteenth-century erotic guide made popular in Europe in the nineteenth century alongside the Indian Kama Sutra and the Arabic The Perfumed Garden.

Having laid out the scene in the Imperial Harem of Süleyman the Magnificent, the writer does not attempt to present it as the locus of power in the Ottoman Empire, with an extremely organized system of administration and hierarchy. Instead, by positioning himself in relation to the imagined conceptual frameworks attributed to the “ideal harem of the generic stereotype,”^[426] Vynnychuk turns it into a lascivious sexual playground in which subordination is broken, and concubines, bored to death, delight in lesbianism and indulge in erotic games with eunuchs. He enacts sexuality as a ritual with a highly elaborate code in the place that has become one of the biggest mystifications of Orientalism, which mirrored Western psychosexual needs and provided the space on which to project fantasies of illicit eroticism. In the imaginary of the dominant Orientalist discourse, the harem figures as a polygamous space animated by different forms of tyranny (from despot to women, from eunuchs to women, from mistress to slave, from favorite to rival); of excess (the multitude of women, the opulence of the interior, the passions of the despot); and of perversion (the barbarity of polygamy, the violence of castration, the sapphism of the women locked up without “real” men and the illicit affairs carried out behind the despot’s back). All these things are found deplorable and enticing by turn.^[427]

The mesmerizing, over-amplified powers of the great seraglio entrenched in the European imagination arrested, as Rana Kabbani writes in her analyses of English translations from Oriental texts, the “perception of even the most gifted scholars” as its “shadow fell heavily on the landscape they traveled through, so that they hardly saw anything at all of the details before them.”^[428] In fact, however, as Peirce contends in an examination of major myths about the Ottoman Empire, sex was not the fundamental dynamic of the harem, which was ruled rather by family politics.^[429] Peirce continues that, according to the “more astute and well informed of European observers[,]... the imperial harem was more like a nunnery in its hierarchical organization and the enforced chastity of the great majority of its members.”^[430]

While playing with one of the most pervasive myths of the West, with the harem as its central symbol, Vynnychuk’s fake memoir draws on the nineteenth­century pornographic convention in the manner of The Lustful Turk (1828) and other “obscene novels obtainable at the seedier bookstalls of Paris, with their moustache-twirling Sultans and cowering slave-girls.”^[431] For example, in The Seducing Cardinal’s Amours (1830) and Scenes in the Seraglio (between 1820 and 1830), the imaginary harem as the “garden of delight” is featured as a staple concept, and the confessional letter is used as a narrative strategy.^[432] Likewise, Vynnychuk adopts this mode of representation that allows him to portray his character as both subject and object of erotic desire. In doing this, he imports the Western tradition, which Ukraine has “missed,” together with sexual revolution and other matters related to the body.

In constructing his genealogies of Ukrainian female sexuality and enacting it on the traditionally masculine arena of Orientalized sexual fantasy, the writer employs, in addition to the use of generic Orientalist tropes, yet another discursive strategy that alludes to numerous captivity narratives that, from the late medieval period through the eighteenth century, provided increasingly detailed accounts of Europeans held captive in the Middle East, America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.^[433] In a warped way, because it revolves entirely around bodies, Vynnychuk’s text seems to follow almost unfailingly main characteristics of the genre outlined by Joe Snader: premium on empirical inclusiveness, on a broad range of experience, and on all the captive “witnessed or heard reported from other captives.”^[434] The first chapter of the novel relates Roxolana’s arrival at Constantinople, vested with exotic mystery; her first impressions of the sumptuously decorated interior of the imperial palace; a spectacular appearance of the chief eunuch in luxuriant apparel; her subjection to a thorough physical examination, including a painful virginity test at the hands of the eunuch; her bathing in an enormous pool, an indispensable element of an Oriental ritual, and literal cleansing, assisted by female slaves in transparent turquerie attires; a supper of exotic fruit, untouched because of her exhaustion; and her blissful dive into sleep.

The next chapter gives a no less meticulous and naturalistic description of the internal cleansing of Roxolana’s body, hair removal from her legs and pubic area with a savage-looking curved knife, massaging her from head to toe with aphrodisiac aromatic oils, and bleaching her teeth with a bizarre substance. All this is crowned by a makeup session—plucking and tinting of eyebrows, applying of lipstick and blush—that highlights her gorgeousness and is instrumental in conjuring her erotic persona and in bringing out this strange and alluring other from her former self. In these textual segments before the appearance of Süleyman, the author alternates the description of unfamiliar, wondrous curiosities with the narration of Roxolana’s personal abject experiences as she is disgraced and debased by being turned into a passive object, assertively and violently acted upon by the harem “beauticians.” Shame and humiliation are powerful, negative emotions that partially structure Roxolana’s account here. Vynnychuk seems to capture the mindset conceptualized by some feminist writers as abjection, which “marks out a landscape of feelings by and about women that places them before, below, and beyond culture—almost outside what can be represented within it.”^[435] Roxolana here is propelled into the world of the abject, which, according to Julia Kristeva, disrupts identity, disturbs order, and destabilizes systems. Abjection is caused by “[w]hat does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”^[436] Existing at the margins of the self, neither subject nor object, the abject consists of those elements, particularly of the body, that contravene and threaten the sense of propriety and are deemed impure for public display and discussion. Having been placed at the threshold of the imaginary boundary into the realm of the author’s pornographic fantasy, Roxolana’s narrative both obliterates the confining codes of femininity that form part of the patriarchal ideology and turns her into the locus for the projection and living out of male sexual anxieties.

Perfumed, bejeweled, dressed in Eastern garments charged with enchantment, sweetness, and seduction, and trembling with the anticipation of the unknown pleasures, Roxolana is ready for her first encounter with the Sultan. Vynnychuk avidly takes up the figures of Orientalist female musicians to provide the backdrop for the amorous scene that evokes a sense of cultivated beauty and pampered isolation. He makes Roxolana gasp at Süleyman’s arrival. The latter, in his turn, is smitten by her stunning appearance, surpassing all his expectations. By playing out this reciprocal infatuation at first glance, Vynnychuk follows Ukrainian and Polish sources, which “extoll Roxolana’s beauty that conquered the powerful Sultan,” as opposed to Venetian reports, which “maintain that she was not particularly beautiful but rather small, elegant, and modest.”^[437] The ensuing dialogue between the two soon-to-be lovers is rather minimalist; however, by attempting to keep the authentic ring to the memoir, the author explains that Süleyman addresses Roxolana in Slovenian, which she has no difficulty in understanding, and furthers the verisimilitude of the Sultan’s use of one of the Slavic languages stating that his mother is Bosnian,^[438] although she was the daughter of the “Khan of Crimean Tatars.”^[439] However, faithfulness to historical detail is not at the centre of Vynnychuk’s attention.

The following several pages depict Roxolana’s sexual arousal, as Süleyman kisses, fingers, and penetrates her. An inexperienced virgin, she readily succumbs to the Sultan’s caresses. Vynnychuk’s representational strategies of lovemaking seem to be borrowed from pornographic movies. The presence of the musicians implicitly enhances the mood and provides the embedded rhythms that complement the movements of bodies, and Roxolana’s involuntary moans of delight add an extra level of sensory perception to the pleasures depicted. Her “confessional frenzy,” to use Linda Williams’s expression,^[440] embodies the will to knowledge and power and places the female body under scrutiny for its innermost secrets. By turning Roxolana into a sexual spectacle, Vynnychuk reveals how deeply he believes in the concept of male mastery. Roxolana’s narrative focuses on Süleyman’s compulsive rounds of her erogenous zones, his concentration on her breasts, his attention to her clitoris with lingual stimulation, and his letting of himself into her vagina. His virtuoso sexual performance, accompanied by an unidentifiable fire rushing through her limbs that makes her tremble, perfectly complies with the conventions of the genre,^[441] and Roxolana’s inviolably ecstatic and orgasmic response to the Sultan’s passionate acts emphasizes the author’s deliberate employment of pornographic regimes of representation. She also discovers the peculiarities of male anatomy, and here, in accordance with pornographic scenarios of erectility and verticality, it is the Sultan’s penis that both scares and magnetically attracts her, that is instrumental in escalating Roxolana’s uncontrollable sexual desire to the point of fainting as he takes her to the edge of ecstasy and back again. The accumulation of all these sexual numbers that should culminate in a “money shot,” which, according to Berkerley Kaite, is the “site/sight of male orgasm signaling not only narrative closure but the mirror reflection of phallic secular logic”^[442] and is necessary to ensure the chapter’s resolution, is deliberately delayed, thus violating the convention because Süleyman is urgently called upon to attend to matters of state—the revolt of the emir of Akhisar.

The subsequent chapter resembles a vignette from popular Oriental genre scenes and conjures up an erotic ideal in seven voluptuous odalisques from Macedonia, Bosnia, and Serbia, dutifully lounged on pillows, who invite Roxolana to a party. It is noteworthy that in his particular codification of gender, Vynnychuk segregates white women (Slavic factor being an additional axis of separation) from racial others. In so doing, he implicitly combines Western assumptions that the “darker races” were always “desirous of white people”^[443] with racial concepts that privilege the fair-skinned body in Orientalist representations of bath and harem scenes,^[444] and with the racism inherited from Soviet society in which it was deeply rooted and that cultivated the fear of racial and cultural pollution. He also changes narrative strategies by shifting focalization and introducing the inlaid stories of other inhabitants of the harem to provide variegated routes for the excursions into the Ottoman “sexscapes.” The story of the Serbian concubine incorporates yet another thematic feature of the captivity genre based on gender and sexual politics that highlights the chastity of a female captive who defends her honor from the amorous advances of a lusty Oriental villain-ruler.^[445] In addition, the story is concurrently related to stock melodramas, which invariably involved aspects of female honor or fall from grace in Orientalism.^[446] In the concubine’s account, the conventions linking sex, violence, and control are stripped bare. The Serbian woman is mercilessly whipped for disobeying the Sultan’s orders and subsequently raped. However, Vynnychuk, in constructing Süleyman’s insatiable sexuality and brutality, conflates rape and seduction, and by the end of the coitus, the odalisque turns into a willing receptacle of the Sultan’s desire and is obsessively longing for future encounters. Because Süleyman seems to loose interest in conventional sex and stops coming to visit the Serbian concubine, she seeks advice from a Greek concubine. Having been instructed, in a double inlaid story, about anal and oral sex, the Serbian manages to regain Süleyman’s attention by putting the acquired knowledge into practice and is represented as experiencing unsurpassable sensations. In this, the text utilizes centuries-long stereotypes of Oriental libidinal excess and inclination to all sorts of perversions and deviant sexual behaviors “firmly wedged in the dominant Western imaginary.”^[447] The party is concluded by the bacchanalia, with eunuchs obediently attending to and enacting odalisques’ sexual whims.

Unlike the indulging concubines, Roxolana is repulsed both by smooth faces and bodies of effeminate de-virilized men and by her fellows’ actions regarding them as decadent and degrading. She has difficulty in identifying with diverse erotic subject positions and desiring diverse objects. In her movement from heterosexual scenes to mixed encounters, Roxolana finds lesbian delights unacceptable and perceives same-sex lovemaking as forced, being a result of neglected female sexual needs. Vynnychuk’s strategy of appropriation and erotic re-inscription of pleasure, which explores the possibility of divergent erotic exchanges in the harem setting, thus draws on heterosexual and homophobic articulation of lesbian identities and inevitably reinforces outdated stereotypes of lesbianism as linked to deviance. Similar treatment of homoerotic desire as debasing and offensive is illustrated by the valide sultan, Süleyman’s reigning mother, who becomes the avatar of compulsory heterosexuality by terming the Turkish rulers’ love for boys an “ancient Greek disease” (“äàâíÿ ãðåöüêà õîðîáà”)^[448] and emphasizing that her son is the first Sultan who is not interested in boys, even though, as Dror Ze'evi observes, in the Ottoman world, “homoerotic or pederastic passion did not bear the stigma of abnormal behavior that it came to bear in modern Western cultures.”^[449]

Roxolana is primarily tutored in how to make the power of sex instrumental in the upward, hierarchical mobility in the segregated female space of the harem. The valide sultan, who used to make a careful selection of those who would be offered to the sovereign as possible consorts,^[450] instructs the novice, whom she has supposedly singled out and designated to the role of Süleyman’s future confidante and advisor, in the art of mastery, submission, and manipulation. Although, according to certain historians, Hafsa Sultan was one of the very few people who might have dissuaded her son from an unprecedented marriage with Roxolana,^[451] Vynnychuk’s valide sultan positions herself as Roxolana’s ally and, moreover, plans the transference of her own power to the young concubine. Her directives inspire Roxolana’s seductive enterprise and, upon the Sultan’s arrival, Roxolana demonstrates an enviable sexual resourcefulness and frantic erotic energy. The representation of her ever-growing sexual enjoyment is structured through parodic displays of sexual excess, and the scene, which elicits the feeling of almost visceral involvement with sweat-moistened flesh and groping hands, culminates with mutual fisting and spectacular orgasm. By positioning Roxolana as a subject of erotic desire, Vynnychuk’s work may represent a confrontation with the oscillating poles of gendered identities and the role of power within them. Her initiation into sexual enjoyment is Roxolana’s rite of passage into the corridors of power.

Vynnychuk also imparts Roxolana’s memoirs with a “literary” element when he brings his protagonist to the altar of love, with the statues of a garlanded penis and bejeweled vagina, and a long roll of Morocco containing poetic names for sexual organs. Roxolana once again impresses Süleyman with her vivid imagination by promptly inventing an extraordinary number of names. Their visit to the altar concludes in reading erotic poetry, sexual characterizations of women belonging to different cultures, and one Bedouin’s scatological observations for comic relief.

Roxolana’s imaginary history ends with the chapter aptly titled “How I Became Haseki Hurrem (The Queen of the Harem)” at the point when she eliminates her major competition, a Circassian woman—the mother of Mustafa (Mustapha) the firstborn. Here Vynnychuk closely follows the 1553 report by the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Navagero, which reveals Roxolana’s “ability to manipulate the protocol of the harem to her advantage” and explains how she won the Sultan’s affection.^[452] According to the ambassador, Roxolana was attacked by the jealous Circassian who scratched her face, ruined her closing, and insulted her. A few days after the accident, Süleyman summoned Roxolana, but she refused to appear before him, saying that she could not come

into the presence of the sultan because, being sold meat and with her face so spoiled and some of her hair pulled out, she recognized that she would offend the majesty of such a sultan by coming before him. These words were related to the sultan and induced in him an even greater desire to have her come to him, and he commanded again that she come. He wanted to understand why she would not come and why she had sent him such a message. The woman related to him what had happened with Mustafa’s mother, accompanying her words with tears and showing the sultan her face, which still bore the scratches, and how her hair had been pulled out. The angry sultan sent for the Circassian and asked her if what the other woman had said was true. She responded that it was, and that she had done less to her than she deserved. She believed that all the women should yield to her and recognize her as mistress since she had been in the service of his majesty first. These words inflamed the sultan even more, for the reason that he no longer wanted her, and all his love was given to this other....^[453]

Vynnychuk recounts the episode in a more emphatic manner, though, through a remarkable stylization of the conversation within this triangle of appropriative rivalry, after which the Circassian, the rival subject, is exiled from the imperial palace, and Roxolana steadily rises to the position of unparalleled power to become one of the mythic, mysterious figures of the Orient.

In addition to the Western Orientalist intertextual dimension in Vynnychuk’s literary counterfeit, a Ukrainian one also exists. This one is linked to Ahatanhel Krymsky, an eminent Ukrainian Orientalist, belletrist, linguist, expert in over thirty languages, student of literature, folklorist, and translator, whose extensive scholarly output on the Orient contains two histories of Turkey—one published in 1910 (vol. 2)-1916 (vol. 1) in Moscow; the other, in 1924 in Kyiv. Krymsky’s studies of the Ottoman Empire under Suleyman’s reign embrace a Slavic and particularly Ukrainian element that addresses, among other issues, the role of Roxolana in Turkish history. In her investigation of the scholar’s work in the framework of nationalism, sexuality and Orientalism, Solomia Pavlychko states that Krymsky’s attitude is ambivalent, or rather antipathetic, towards this historical figure, who combines a powerful mind and charisma with ruthlessness towards her political adversaries. Krymsky’s unprejudiced representation of his famous countrywoman runs counter to the already established reverential portrayals of Roxolana by his Ukrainian contemporaries.^[454] Moreover, his histories of the East, characterized by an interdisciplinary approach and vast range of topics, also include an inquiry into erotic and pornographic Oriental literary traditions as well as into sexual practices and customs. According to Pavlychko, Krymsky’s “History of Turkey abounds with references to sexual mores of sultans’ courts, janissaries, and so on. Krymsky became interested in Eastern sexuality long before it became a separate subject of research in Western scholarship.”^[455] It is notable that his choice of focusing on issues associated with sexuality—in the best case perceived as marginal, in the worst case labeled “bourgeois” and “obscene”—is quite unconventional, even unthinkable, in light of the class-oriented bastardized Marxist methodology as the only analytical tool admissible in the Soviet Union. Most likely, his interest in eroticism has come into play as a factor in speculations regarding his possible authorship of the 1912 anonymous confessional narrative of a Kyivan sex addict,^[456] that typified a veritable explosion of exploratory writing about sex in all its exotic manifestations throughout Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.

Written originally in French by an anonymous Ukrainian author and published in Ukrainian translation by the prestigious press Kalvaria as Ñïîâ³äü êèÿíèíà åðîòîìàíà [The Confession of a Kyivan Erotomaniac] (2004), the work is sur­rounded by an aura of literary mystification not uncommon for erotic literature. Its title and confessional style evoke the spirit of Henry Spencer Ashbee, the unflagging compiler of Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877), the leading authority on pornography in Victorian Britain, and the alleged author of My Secret Life (The Sex Diary of a Victorian Gentleman) (1871) that has long provoked fierce literary debate.^[457] Ñïîâ³äü [The Confession] was sent, as a letter, to Havelock Ellis, the pioneer of sexology who challenged Victorian aversion to public discussions of sexuality; it appeared in 1926 in Mercure de France and was recommended as an “erotic masterpiece” to Vladimir Nabokov by a then exceptionally influential Edmund Wilson, thus becoming yet another proto-text for the psychologically volatile world of the obsessive attraction to a nymphet figure in Lolita (1955).^[458]

By weaving an intricate canvas out of numerous literary and historical texts and traditions, Vynnychuk seems also to pick up unconsciously the line of literary erotomaniac mystifications in the mode of Ñïîâ³äü [The Confession]. To appreciate his radical intertextuality, with its circularity of reference, one should be familiar with its descriptive systems, themes, social mythologies, and histories, and with other texts. However, the reader who does not have this back­ground and whose horizon of expectations is clear will still enjoy the universally recognizable codes, stylistic charm, irony, and eccentric nuances in Vynnychuk’s dynamic prose. Vynnychuk’s playful parody and pastiche, in which he joins, to use Oleksander Halenko’s phrase, a “male harem” (“÷îëîâ³÷[èé] ãàðåì”)^[459] of Roxo­lana’s admirers, is a deviant postcolonial endeavor wherein everything is inverted with postmodern zest and gusto. As Linda Hutcheon writes elsewhere, postmodern parody is a “value-problematizing, de-naturalizing form of acknowledging the history (and through irony, the politics) of representation.”^[460]

A limited number of publications related to pornography in postcolonial critical discourse tends to fix the roles along a habitual axis of colonial power asymmetry: the pornographer-colonizer exercises the power of his gaze over the abusively structured object of erotic desire—the colonized, the “native,” the feminine, and the emasculated—as if each time reasserting the sexual economy underpinning the colonial encounter and colonial rule.^[461] Vynnychuk’s text suggests a more complex dialectics operating along the postcolonial continuum and allows for an approach that places postcolonial pornography outside of the deadlock of the colonizer- colonized binarism by revealing a new consciousness about unavoidable power in sex and of not viewing this power as fixed. By untying a number of fixities, the writer disrupts the inherited totalitarian tradition that neutralized and codified the body in the monographic terms of a de-sexed socialist realism. While reading, misreading, reassembling, and misinterpreting the system of hereditary and learned texts, rules, and figures in the corpus, Vynnychuk self-consciously lets the machinery show, thus demonstrating the fictitious and constructivist nature of any discourse, including the fanatically professed “objectivity” of socialist realism, and opening up the closed symbolic horizon to the play and energy of heterogeneity.

This page has been left blank intentionally