THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: “You can say you belong to world culture, but knowing it without understanding the local culture will not make you more clever,” said Ukrainian novelist and independent thinker, Andrey Kurkov. He was speaking on the topic ‘The transition from Soviet to post Soviet literature’, a lecture organised by the English department of the University College on Wednesday.
According to Kurkov, it took courage and time to understand that your own literature is more important for the country.
“Because Marquez would not write for Kerala or Jeffrey Archer would not write about Delhi. Everyone writes about what he knows and his exoticism is appealing,” said the author of bestselling book Death and the Penguin.The writer spoke about literature in post-Soviet Ukraine and gave a picture of cultural colonisation Ukraine faced at the hands of Russia in the post-Soviet era.
“Many Ukrainian writers were forgotten in post-Soviet era. Literature of intellectuals was taken over by the literature of masses. Media was on a different tangent and there was a cultural vacuum,” he said. There were only a few Ukranian writers who could write differently but that was not enough.
According to him, cultural reflections on reality was needed for survival and it was lacking. Russian books on science fiction and novels started filling the bookstores of Ukrainian bookstalls.
He termed it as a cultural colonisation. “It was a painful period for Ukrainian intellectuals. Writers can turn countries into superpowers. Unfortunately, people trust foreign writers more than their own,” he said. Kurkov though considered as one of the most successful Ukrainian authors in the post-Soviet era, struggled to get his works published in the beginning. A writer who dabbles in black humour, he had many unpublished works which he used to read out during social gatherings.
He said the young writers in Ukraine were not getting readers as they write on modern Ukraine with their generation mind. But the new generation is keen on computers than on literature and the older generation exposed to other kinds of literature are not keen on new topics, said Kurkov.