Did she know they were making a film?
HALYNA: Yes, but, you see, they said for what? Why turn the cameras to show our fingers? Like we don’t wash! … They were so mad, even that one fellow Futivsky, he said it was really not good, said they made us into clowns, with horns …
OKSANA: No, well, the thing is that there is progress! She couldn’t have just given us the same old thing—then it wouldn’t be her song! Let the troisti muzyky (traditional trio ensemble) set up and play; that’s one style and hers is a different one—
HALYNA: That’s what I’m saying—this is modernity [сучасність]!
OKSANA: But I think we made an important project! And the fact that people get so upset about these Dyki Tantsi, I tell them, “Good people, we should be proud that we’re dyki, that our nature here is wild, so let us be wild in that sense, as in primordial [первозданними]! But our people, they say, “We’re not wild, we’re like this, we’re like that.” But why should we be ashamed? … See, and even now, she’s so proud, she’ll die of hunger before she takes macaroni.
Oksana articulated another viable interpretation of Ruslana’s Wildness, in which it stands as a trope of resistance to the commercial, urban industrialized world (even as “Wild Dances” is made significant due to its commercial success). For Oksana, Wildness emphasizes the obvious fact that Hutsuls live in rural conditions, or as Ruslana would have it, in “wild nature, high in the mountains” (press materials, 2005). Later in the same conversation, Oksana pointed out that the women featured in the video should not be ashamed of having the dirty fingernails and weathered hands of a farmer or shepherd, since the traditional values and lifestyles that Hutsuls take so much pride in maintaining are based on agrarian, subsistence living.
The local mol’far (shaman) Mykhailo Nechai articulated a position similarly sympathetic to Ruslana’s depiction of Hutsul Wildness. As a public figure in his own right (known for being the “Last Living Carpathian Mol’far”), he acted as a spiritual consultant to Ruslana when she was developing her original Hutsulian Project, and remained a trusted advisor until his tragic death in 2011: “She took the strength of Hutsulshchyna and showed the whole world! Beautiful women, outside and inside, Hutsuls’ wild and active dances. She was in seventy countries of the world, and she showed the artistry of our Hutsuls, that the whole world watched and marveled, not only those seventy countries of the world, but even more. So she’s a woman deserving because, you understand, she showed the history of our Hutsulshchyna” (personal communication, February 2, 2009).11
Outside of Hutsulshchyna, some accounts of Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” rehearsed romanticized notions of Hutsul “wildness” in celebratory, sometimes naïve terms. One Western Ukrainian reviewer rhapsodized that “Wild Dances” was “an attempt to touch the soul of the people, which has always been in harmony with the universe. Consciously or not, Ruslana has brought to life a deep, strange layer of genetic memory […] that is able, ultimately, to explode with revelation: yes, I am a Ukrainian, these are my lands, my mountains, my people” (Koval’, quoted in Pavlyshyn 2006, 482).
Perhaps it is no surprise that the kitschy nationalistic pageant of Eurovision would cultivate such prideful feelings in Ukrainians who saw Ruslana’s depiction as embodying a deeply entrenched truth about their culture. Yet such attempts to draw the line from a conceptual and essentialized Ukrainian Wildness through the Indigenous Hutsuls to Ruslana’s polysemic Wild Dances resulted in a variety of reactions from Hutsuls whose intrinsic Wildness was purportedly being represented on the global stage. Why? In part, because at the heart of this debate over Wildness lies the perennial question about affiliation in Ukraine, a nation forever occupying a liminal position as the historical crossroads and battleground of empires, and now the borderland between the exclusive European Union and Russia. By activating the stereotype of Hutsul Wildness for the benefit of the Eurovision-consuming public, Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” provoked anxious discourse among Hutsuls about whether Ukraine could be taken seriously as a “European” state if it portrayed itself as a cradle of ancient, primitive expressive culture. To many of my Hutsul interlocuters, “Wild Dances” represented an obstacle on the path to Ukraine’s integration into the European Union.
Many Ukrainian intellectuals echoed this critique, bemoaning the fact that Ukraine’s most visible post-Soviet cultural export to date came ensconced in leather and metal, hyping ethno-kitschy popsa (попса) (the genre term used, often as a pejorative, to describe low-brow popular music). Once Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” became known internationally, her exploitation and reinvention of folk symbols represented, to many intellectuals, an embarrassing public display of post-Soviet Ukrainian cultural intimacy. (Imagine, as an analogue, that the Eurovision Song Contest entry from Greece featured choreographed plate-smashing or a prideful song about sheep-stealing, to borrow from Herzfeld’s famous examples.) In Ukraine, these critiques were often articulated by invoking the Ukrainian slang term sharovarshchyna (шароварщина).
Sharovarshchyna can be defined as the mixing of regional symbols and caricaturing of folk culture that was originally made manifest through Soviet cultural policies. (Sharovary refers to the billowing red pants that became the official costume for male Ukrainian folk dancers in Soviet times.) Critiques of frivolous or cynical reappropriations of Soviet-era symbols are often framed as sharovarshchyna, though, in the post-Soviet era, the term has become shorthand that merges a Ukrainian critique of “world music” postmodern banality with specific reference to the Soviet institutionalized culture regime that dominated Ukrainian expressive culture for most of the twentieth century.
An article on sharovarshchyna by Vlad Trebunia (who is also known as “Mokh,” the impresario behind the Hutsul-punk band Perkalaba) in the erudite Western Ukrainian online journal Halytskyi Korrespondent opened with the following definition of the term:
The term sharovarshchyna has a negative meaning. That’s the term we apply to culture of a low quality, which speculates on national motifs. It was especially active in developing and being cultivated by the government in the Soviet times. The motivations of the regime were understandable: on one hand, complete control over creativity, on the other—throw a bone to those who still want to hear, see and create his or her native art … Today’s times are different. Ukraine is independent, there is no control over creativity. Nevertheless, sharovarshchyna, as the unprincipled Hutsuls sing, “lives and flourishes” [жиє й процвітає]. (Trebunia 2010)
The ending phrase—“lives and flourishes”—is a rich and sarcastic double entendre, an example of the shift in “authoritative discourse” that characterized late socialist speech, which privileges formulaic structures over literal meaning (Yurchak 2005). To Ukrainophone ears, the phrase “lives and flourishes” rings with Soviet slogans that endlessly celebrated the enduring socialist revolution, the Communist Party, or Lenin’s immortality (cf. Yurchak 2015). This bloated rhetoric is partly undermined, however, by the dialect form of the verb “to live”: in literary Ukrainian, this would be zhyve (живe); the author’s rendering (zhye / жиє) is in rural dialect, and acts as a tragicomic suggestion of how sell-out (“unprincipled”) Hutsuls might utter the phrase. Trebunia criticizes the way that money and resources are diverted to support projects tainted by sharovarshchyna. He continues with a provocative question: “But, then again, if the development of pseudo-Ukrainian culture hadn’t been organized in Soviet times, then would artists have had the opportunity to create and develop at all? It was at least a chance to step onto stage, in front of an audience.”
The remainder of Trebunia’s article consults with “experts”—writers, public intellectuals, musicians—to assess whether there are any benefits to the “pseudo-Ukrainian culture” called sharovarshchyna. Of these experts, the analysis most relevant
