Chuck DarwinIn her 1996 novel, 🔸Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex🔸, #Oksana #Zabuzhko wrote that for Ukrainians,
“Fear was passed on in the genes.”
Zabuzhko, one of the most important living Ukrainian writers, was referring to the childhood fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person in the Soviet era.
Anyone who approached you could be spying for the KGB, and if you let a careless word slip, the bad men would come “and put Daddy in prison.”
But that line captures what Zabuzhko’s novel is about:
the inherited fear of oblivion born between the hungry jaws of empire, or what she calls the ♦️“eternal Ukrainian curse of nonexistence.”♦️
