style="font-size:15px;"> Inspired by Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo’s (2012) call that scholars situated in the West must strive to “learn to unlearn in order to relearn,” I offer this prefatory note to situate myself within this musical ethnographic study of Wildness and sovereignty, in the hope that it lays bare the continuing process of my own (re)education.1 In Ukraine, people who get to know me well have sometimes referred to me as nasha Amerykanka (our American).2 I have long recognized that this term of intimacy, while endearing, risks obscuring just how different my lived experience and horizons of opportunity—as a middle-class American citizen who was working toward and eventually earned a PhD at a prestigious university in New York City—were from the limited conditions I often encountered throughout Ukraine. At the same time, my inability to pass fully as Ukrainian in many contexts made me a target of suspicion (I was accused of being a spy on a number of occasions), derision (especially for those Ukrainians who had soured on the diaspora and its interventions in Ukraine’s internal affairs), or hostility (when my inability to speak Russian fluently—I was raised speaking only Ukrainian, which remains rare—was interpreted as evidence that I was a nationalist zealot who must be refusing to switch to Russian). Marked through my upbringing and affiliation with the North American Ukrainian diaspora, sanctioned by the knowledge-production frameworks of the Western academy, this book represents a reckoning with my own assumptions about what I thought Ukraine was before beginning this research.
My parents left Western Ukraine to flee westward across the “bloodlands” of World War II (Snyder 2010a). With their families, they spent years in displaced persons (DP) camps after 1945, before they won visas that allowed them to emigrate to North America (my mother’s family to Coaldale, Alberta; my father’s to New York City).3 Born in the 1980s, I was instilled with an intense and politicized nostalgia for what I understood to be my ancestral homeland of Ukraine. My childhood idea of Ukraine was articulated in a prewar Western Ukrainian dialect that I took to be unmarked. It was informed by the sensibilities of a cohort of refugees who had largely been among the urban intellectuals and religious leaders of pre-Soviet Western Ukraine, many of whom believed they were keeping the “real Ukraine” alive during a period of intense Russification and Sovietization.4 My imagination of Ukraine centered on the literary culture of L’viv and the Carpathians and Eastern-rite Catholicism; images of yellow wheat and blue sky; the bright red boots and billowing sharovary pants of the folk dance costume; pysanky (batiked Easter eggs); stories of lionhearted Kozaky (Cossacks) battling marauding Tatar hordes and Russian imperialists; the unquestioned evil of the Soviet Empire; the lachrymose nationalism of the romantic poet-hero Taras Shevchenko; meals of varenyky (pierogies) and borsch. The Ukrainians I knew lived in the East Village of New York and summered in the Catskill Mountains, or in the Ukrainian diaspora communities of Munich, Innsbruck, and Vienna (where parts of my widely dispersed family who did not win the DP camp immigration lottery settled). My Ukraine was a Ukrainian scouting summer camp held in the wooded outskirts of an Ohio Amish town, where we sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” with Ukrainian lyrics around the nightly campfire and patriotic Ukrainian anthems every morning (“When we grow up big / brave soldiers / we will defend Ukraine / from enemy hands”).5
In the summer of 1991, my family secured Soviet visas and prepared to travel to Ukraine. Leaving from Vienna on a massive, fume-filled train, we rumbled eastward on August 24, 1991, the very day that Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union. At the age of ten, I could not comprehend the scale of historical events that we had stumbled into, but I remember bottles of champagne when we arrived at the train station in the Western Ukrainian city of Truskavets; my father’s tears upon reuniting with family that he had not seen since the 1940s; the grey shops with prosaic names (“Milk,” “Bread”) and bare shelves; the black market machinations my mother undertook to acquire a toothbrush; the visit to a family village where there was no running water; and the rock-bottom prices of hand-whittled souvenirs that my brother and I bought for our friends back in the United States. When we left Ukraine after that first trip, I was inconsolable as the train lurched out of the L’viv train station and all of my new uncles, aunts, and cousins waved goodbye to their American relatives. I discovered on that trip that my childhood Ukraine had been a mirage: the real place was alien, full of real people with complex and disadvantaged lives. In it, I was a strange misfit speaking an archaic dialect imprinted with privilege and distance. And yet, I wept at leaving.
As an American teenager, I staged my rebellion against a Ukrainian-American diaspora culture that I found stifling, and deepened instead my interest in Ukraine proper. Determined to question the Cold War logics that underpinned my upbringing in the diaspora, I traveled back after graduating from high school in 1999. I spent three months exploring the country, a trip that broadened my eyes to its regional diversity. It was on this journey that I first encountered Western Ukrainian mountain music, performed by Hutsul highlanders in the village of Rakhiv, and that I first learned about the Crimean Tatar repatriate community fighting to reestablish itself in Crimea. I listened to the cool new bands that were emerging seemingly everywhere. I got acquainted with a team of young ethnomusicologists based at the L’viv Conservatory, and joined them for a field expedition in the Bukovina region. The trip was cut short by rains that flooded out our fieldsite, but it gave me my first sense of what motivated much of post-Soviet Ukrainian ethnomusicology at that time.
When I entered graduate school at Columbia University, I was trained in the style of North American ethnomusicologists, who are expected to conduct lone immersive fieldwork over extended periods. During my doctoral fieldwork in 2008–2009, I spent eighteen months traveling between several sites in Crimea and Western Ukraine, timing my arrivals and departures to coincide with key social events in both communities. At the same time, I started to develop contacts at the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine in Kyiv and began to learn about the Central and Northern Ukrainian vocal styles that were part of a broader urban revival of village styles often glossed as avtentyka. My presence in host communities was, often, more disruptive than I intended, in part due to the symbolic capital I embodied as an American citizen whose presence and interest offered validation for many locals. Since many people knew me as a musician as well as an ethnographer, I was (often spontaneously) called to perform at community celebrations: I once sang a traditional Crimean Tatar song for a bride and groom as revelers danced around me at a wedding palace outside of Bakhchisarai, was featured playing the banjo on Crimean Tatar television and in Hutsul newspapers, and was asked to sing Gloria Gaynor’s hit “I Will Survive” for a young Hutsul couple at their wedding dinner.
After 2009, I have returned to Ukraine whenever professional and personal circumstances have allowed. In 2010 and 2012, I had the occasion to visit as a performer in a variety of musical and theatrical projects. Since 2014, I have conducted interviews with Crimean Tatars who had relocated to Kyiv and L’viv. I returned to post-annexation Simferopol for a brief visit in the summer of 2015. Additionally, in recent years I deepened my study of avtentyka singing practices and pedagogy. My research in this area has been guided primarily by Yevhen Yefremov, a senior professor of ethnomusicology at the National Music Academy of Ukraine, whose ethnographic research in the region of Kyivan Polissia that is now better known as the “Chornobyl Zone” formed the raw material for the Chornobyl Songs Project, a performance-based project that we developed collaboratively in 2011.6
Through Professor Yefremov and other avtentyka teachers, I have learned a bit about distinct regional and local village styles of Northern and Central Ukraine and how they have been studied and differently valorized by Soviet versus post-Soviet ethnomusicologists. As part of this research, I made a pilgrimage to the village of Kriachkivka, a famous Soviet-era “singing village” in the Poltava region that has also been symbolically important for the urban avtentyka revival. Opening up this third area of inquiry warmed me to communities with perhaps less overt investments in Ukrainian statehood than many of the Hutsuls or Crimean Tatars I had spent time with in 2008–2009. Though I cannot profess to represent the views of the Ukrainians who enthusiastically side with Russia in the ongoing war (I have done no research in the Donbas or Luhansk regions, but had some exposure to pro-Russian Crimeans before the annexation), the world of avtentyka
