Andrukhovych’sSecret: The return of colonial resignation

Since the period of glasnost in the USSR and, after 1991, the emergence of independent nation states on its former territory, the Ukrainian poet, prose writer and essayist Yuri Andrukhovych (b. 1960) has attended in the majority of his writings to geography and its relationship to geopolitics, to the persistence in central and eastern Europe of old colonial power structures, and to the nature of the relationship between his homeland and various conceptions of “Europe”: central and eastern Europe, and Europe as “the west”. Andrukhovych’s novel-length text Taiemnytsia 2007; Secret subtitled “instead of a novel” and structured like a series of interviews, adopts a position of pessimism with regard to the likely emergence of a humane and just state of affairs in a Europe where western prosperity, coupled with indifference toward the east European Other, confront material want and an enduring deficit of liberty. The book constructs a world-model where the exercise of colonial or neocolonial power (economic, political and cultural) is so ubiquitous that even the colonized are not innocent of exercising it.