is, rather, a cultural code, an identifying code. This is the code that puts a substantial part of identity on the nation-bearer and performs a representative function—it is an original calling card of the nation for emergence into the world. In this sense, ‘sharovarshchyna’ is no different from similar codes of other nations—‘tsyhanshchyna,’ ‘Russian matryoshka-caviar-vodka,’ ‘Argentine tango,’ ‘French chanson,’ ‘Latin lovers,’ etc.” (Trebunia 2010, italics in original). However, Izdryk believes that the Ukrainian “identifying code” is in a “sorry state” due to its contamination by previous generations of folklorizing discourse. He bitterly identifies Ruslana as the current paragon of what he sees as a lamentable trend:
The only shame is that sharovarshchyna absorbed only the totally poor assortment of oblmuzdramteatriv and odious societies like “Prosvita.” The trouble is not that sharovarshchyna begs poorly stylistically; the trouble is that it unsatisfactorily performs the identifying function. I don’t know how it seems to the miner from Donetsk, but to me, for example, it is very hard to identify myself with the pederastic youth in raspberry-colored pants, with their sado-mazo bracelets, their oseledets’ flapping in the wind, doing some cosmopolitan dance move in the background of the national deputy to Ukraine, the winner of some kind of Eurovision, Ruslana Lyzhychko. Now then, here’s the definition: “Sharovarshchyna—this is a kind of lyzhychka.”12 (Trebunia 2010)
Izdryk cleverly manipulates the pop icon’s rarely used last name, Lyzhychko, into a neologistic synonym for sharovarshchyna. By equating the most prominent contemporary purveyor of Ukrainian etno-muzyka with sharovarshchyna, Izdryk shrewdly eulogizes the state of popular expressive culture in Ukraine in the twenty-first century.
To critics who accused her of tokenizing and exploiting the historically exoticized Hutsuls, Ruslana denied that her project succumbed to the banality of sharovarshchyna. She responded to critics by explaining that “We turned to etnos, not to sharovarshchyna […] I am a contemporary singer with ethnic interests who has seen [ethnic material] through fresh eyes” (Koskin, quoted in Pavlyshyn 2006, 480). Still, after the success of Eurovision and “Wild Dances,” Ruslana’s interests largely shifted away from the specificity of her “ethnic interests.” As she toured internationally, and took on the roles of Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, the anti-trafficking spokesperson for the OSCE, and member of the Ukrainian parliament, she reinvented herself as an infrastructural activist who championed Ukrainian renewable energy as the path to future state security and prosperity. With the introduction of post-Soviet environmentalist rhetorics into her press materials and songs, she reframed the Hutsul etnos as a more generic “ecologically noble savage” whose proximity to wilderness assumes a special Indigenous knowledge (Ellingson 2001, 357). Thus, she again re-signified Wildness, no more as a term of ethnic intimacy or auto-exoticism, but toward the future-oriented metaphor of “wild energy.”
WILD ENERGY AND INFRASTRUCTURAL ACTIVISM
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