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Cultural historians researching the 1990s Ukrainian culture will undoubtedly come across the literary group known as Bu-Ba-Bu,1 which played an important creative role in that decade. Much has already been written about Bu-Ba-Bu's three members, Iurii Andrukhovych, Oleksandr Irvanets, and Viktor Neborak, the ideas and motives behind their activities and the style of their writings. In their analyses, critics have concentrated chiefly on the group's carnivalized interpretation of life and the parodie nature of its works. I shall discuss a particular aspect of Bu-Ba-Bu that is a key element of its creative philosophy and an important factor in establishing its prominent position in Ukrainian culture of the 1990s, namely, performance. I shall begin by analyzing the idea of performance in Bu-Ba-Bu's poetry and prose and by examining how its members adapted rock'n'roll forms and imagery to express this idea. I shall provide examples of how this idea was implemented by giving a brief history of the public performances of Bu-Ba-Bu in the 1990s. I shall conclude by pointing out how the implementation of Bu-Ba-Bu's concept of performance came to define cultural activity in Ukraine's first decade of independence for many of today's Ukrainian intellectuals and how this established Bu-Ba-Bu as a central phenomenon of this period.
Literary Performance: Concepts and Characters
Bu-Ba-Bu's particular interpretation of the relationship between literature and performance is rooted in the creative philosophy the group fashioned for itself and can be revealed by examining elements of performance that pervade the writings of its three members. From its formation in 1985, Bu-Ba-Bu pursued the collective objective of infusing Ukrainian literature with the carnival spirit, exploding the restrictive seriousness of literature, and redefining the duties of the Ukrainian writer. Besides wearing literary masks in their poetry (in order to play with the idea of subjectivity), Andrukhovych, Irvanets, and Neborak openly experimented with the Ukrainian language by cutting it up and reassembling it. Rabelais' tragicomic literary celebrations and Mikhail Bakhtin's interpretation of them inspired Bu-Ba-Bu and the two authors were adopted as "godfathers" by the young Ukrainian writers who set out to change the traditional lugubrious image of Ukrainian literature in society.
In his interview with Liudmyla Taran, Neborak described Bu-Ba-Bu's attempts at redirecting the attention of poets from internal subjective states to...