in extreme gendered, sexualized, and cyborgish modalities. The etno-pop celebrity’s public and commodified body, then, becomes a generative site through which the sovereignty of a body becomes bound to broader political sovereignties.
To begin, I return to the premiere of the 2002 megaklip of the song “Znaiu Ya” (“I Know”).
IN THE KNOW
In 2002, Ruslana’s guests to the newly renovated downtown cinema in L’viv were treated to back-to-back screenings of the five-minute megaklip of “Znaiu Ya” (“I Know”), the first single released as part of her Hutsulian Project (and later, the first track on the 2003 Ukrainian-language album Dyki Tantsi). The evening also included a live performance by a trio of Hutsul musicians who had traveled from the mountains that day, a performance by Ruslana herself, and speeches by local politicians and tastemakers. Attendees were told that the evening marked a trailblazing achievement by Ruslana and for Ukraine: as the biggest budget endeavor to date in Ukrainian popular music at the time, the “Znaju Ya” video brought in two hundred fifty specialists from seven companies in four countries (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Finland), who utilized state-of-the-art camera and special effects. The video was the first Ukrainian cinematic product filmed on color 35 mm film in high definition and adhering to the sonic standards of Digital Dolby. The project included a fleet of ten helicopters, and at least one Hummer. Scenes were filmed in the Carpathian and Crimean Mountains, and in Belarus. In the village of Kosmach, the team filmed a “folk” Hutsul wedding. (The press release noted that it is “interesting, that the Hutsuls, their costumes, and the wedding itself are real,” though of course the locals I spoke to disputed this account.) Press highlighted Ruslana’s daredevil stunts (scaling rocky crags to get an “unparalleled vista”) and sense of innovation (such as the rock concert stage built into a waterfall, where Ruslana performed “without any security”). One thousand people reportedly traveled to witness the concert-on-the-waterfall.
Years before her victory at Eurovision, the hullabaloo around the advent of the Hutsulian Project marked a substantial shift in Ruslana’s status among the pantheon of post-Soviet Ukrainian popular musicians. Born in 1973 in L’viv, Ruslana Lyzhychko completed her studies in classical piano and conducting at the Lysenko Academy of Music in L’viv. In 1996, she was awarded first place at the Slavic Bazaar music competition in Belarus with the performance of the folk song “Oi Letily, Dyki Husy” (which was made famous throughout the Soviet world in the 1970s folk-pop rendition performed by Nina Matvienko). Ruslana’s first album, Myt’ Vesny (A Moment of Spring, released in 1998) contained small ethnic gestures such as melodies played on sopilka (wooden recorder), but mostly aligned itself stylistically with the saccharine aesthetic of Soviet estrada pop ballads. It was not until 2002, with the release of “Znaiu Ya” and her Hutsulian Project, that Ruslana differentiated herself from scores of other singers reared on Soviet-style popular forms.
The hit single “Znaiu Ya” has a clear and seductive message: Ruslana has uncovered the secret wisdom of Hutsul culture, and now she earnestly wants to share what she knows with you, the audience. The video opens with a crackling campfire. Fireside, Ruslana sits with a computer in her lap. She types in “The Lost World” (in English), and the computer begins “searching …” as she gazes into the distance. She then types “Znaiu Ya” (in the Cyrillic alphabet). When she presses “enter,” the scene dissolves into a cosmic panorama, which zooms out to reveal the end of a trembita, played by a man, soft focus, in folk dress.3 Another trembita blares in response. Winds rustle through mountain grass as the frame widens onto trees, forests, and sweeping mountain vistas. Ruslana enters the frame, dressed in a modest leather pantsuit, and sings lyrically, in Ukrainian, of a “beautiful land, that flies in the stars.” The rubato introduction culminates in the words “Znaiu Ya,” and the song revs into a propulsive rhythmic groove reminiscent of traditional Hutsul dance tunes. A sopilka, the Hutsul wood recorder, features prominently in the mix. The lyrics enumerate all of the knowledge that Ruslana has derived from the high mountains (“There is no real love in the valleys … only on the peaks,” and “You don’t know how the wind sings for us … but I know!”). The video proceeds by juxtaposing symbols of ancientness and rurality against emblems of modernity: Ruslana on horseback, hitting a weathered tambourine; Ruslana splashing through a mountain stream at the helm of a Hummer; elderly women washing laundry in the river; Ruslana white-water rafting in a colorful inflatable vessel; a traditional wedding; men circle dancing around a raging, flickering bonfire; an elderly Hutsul woman puffing on a pipe; Ruslana gesturing as she sings with a traditional bartka (ceremonial ax) used by male carolers to mark time as they sing; Ruslana firing a pistol into the sky; then, a rock concert on the river with fuming, glittering pyrotechnics.
At the megaklip premiere in L’viv, Ruslana’s affirmations that “I know” expanded to place the audience, to borrow an English-language colloquialism, “in the know.” It appeared to me that this well-heeled audience, who were impressed with the technical achievements of the video and also attracted to the mystique of Hutsuls, felt secure in their shared intimacy with Ruslana and her Hutsulian Project. Grounded in the territorialized identities of the Hutsuls, the song invited this Western Ukrainian audience to share in the special kind of knowledge that Ruslana had unlocked. The staged wedding, theatricalized as it was during the Soviet period, is key to the narrative of “Znaiu Ya” and rehearses images of the authenticity of rituals in this community that were quite distinct from the Hutsul weddings that I attended in Ukraine.4 Equally important for “Znaiu Ya” ’s claims about knowledge, however, are the various icons of modernity utilized by Ruslana, who was depicted as a twenty-first-century rock star. Demonstrating repeatedly that she is someone who lives in the contemporary world, in the video Ruslana expertly mediates between the local knowledge of Hutsuls and the world of the urbanite, the tourist, the outsider whose portal to knowledge is, after all, the internet.
The song lyrics, some of which were cited earlier, further suggest that anyone to whom the lyrics are intelligible is now in the know about the ethnically intimate space of the Hutsuls. This allows Hutsuls to recognize themselves in the caricatured depictions of their traditions, but also gives non-Hutsul Ukrainian speakers the privilege of feeling in the know. Thus, the ethnic intimacy of a particular group is expanded outward, aligning with Lauren Berlant’s observation, “Intimacy poses a question of scale that links the instability of individual lives to the trajectories of the collective” (1998, 283). In “Znaiu Ya,” the pop star makes her treasured knowledge of a historically exoticized ethnic borderland group stand synecdochically for the shared knowledge of a larger collectivity—one that is Ukrainian. In other words, she attempts to refigure ethnic intimacy as cultural intimacy.
I interpret “Znaiu Ya” and this iteration of the Hutsulian Project as an initial attempt to elevate the Hutsul exotic as a form of postcolonial Ukrainian national culture, demonstrating how “the peasant (or subaltern) perspective may be assimilated into a national discourse that portrays ‘the peasant’s world’ as representative of an idea of national culture” (Bhabha 1990, 297). In the earliest iteration of her Hutsulian Project, Ruslana’s appeal was made to a domestic public, one that would pridefully recognize and embrace the particular Western Ukrainian rusticity of Hutsuls as their own. In situating her first articulation of Wildness in the predominantly Ukrainophone and nationalist-leaning west of Ukraine, the project reified the link between the cosmopolitan cities of the former Hapsburg Empire and its isolated villages inhabited by picturesque “folk.” The project depicted a community based on qualities of essentialized Wildness but exclusive of other groups prevalent in Western Ukraine, many of whom also endure histories of objectification (this includes Jews, Roma, Poles, Armenians, and others). Therefore, “Znaiu Ya” lines up with a kind of vision of nationhood premised on theories of etnos that, as Serguei Oushakine notes, “became … a major analytic device for conceptualizing the continuity of post-Soviet nations … at the turn of the twenty-first century” (2009, 83). Some of the Hutsuls who would later reject Ruslana’s Eurovision depiction of Wildness could still manage to embrace this early iteration pridefully, since
