Reading in Ukrainian: the working class and mass literature in early Soviet Ukraine

Abstract

This article examines the working-class audience in Soviet Ukraine and the changes in its reading appetites during the 1920s. Under the Soviet nationalities policy of korenizatsiia introduced in 1923, the print-runs of Ukrainian-language literary products increased significantly. Nonetheless, as this article argues, those numerous publications often did not reach Ukrainian readers and if they did, they could hardly satisfy the interest appetites of an ever-growing Ukrainian audience. As the book reviews collected in the second half of the 1920s showed, the worker readers were interested in a certain type of literature -entertaining, easy to comprehend, dealing with contemporary issues and characters -that was not yet available in Ukrainian. Nevertheless, once that literature began to emerge in the late 1920s, the interest in contemporary books in Ukrainian increased. By examining every aspect of reading in Ukrainian -production, dissemination and consumption of the printed word -this article highlights the decisive role of Soviet readership in determining future official Soviet Ukrainian literature. The case of Soviet Ukraine emphasises regional specifics and introduces an important language component to the Bolshevik reading revolution of the 1920s-early 1930s, largely ignored in the scholarship.

Mykola Khvyl’ovyy and the making of Soviet Ukrainian literature

“…In the first cycle of pamphlets, entitled Thoughts against the current [Думки проти течії], Khvyl'ovyy simply associated "Europe" with high standards of artistic work and set it against literary outputs created by the members of state-funded mass literary movements. These writers produced torrents of low-quality literature, which had inundated the republic's bookstores and libraries during the 1920s (Liber 1982;Palko 2019). The concept of "psychological Europe" was used to counterweight provincialism and epigone art, initiated by those mass literary movements.…”