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ONE

Wild Dances

Ethnic Intimacy, Auto-Exoticism, and Infrastructural Activism

In the very heart of Europe in the majestic kingdom of the Carpathian Mountains there live an ancient people, the Hutsuls. Their riches are unique mystic rituals, mountainous rhythms and dances. Ruslana visited them and revealed their mystery. Europe will learn about … Ukrainian ethnic originality, brightness of the highlander’s rhythms mixed with the modern music of the youth … Ruslana is experimenting with genres. There is no right name for it, but it could be either called Hutsul rap or kolmiyka’s hip-hop. In any case … you are reminded that even though “Wild Dances” come from ancient times, they are still the product of the 21st century. DJ dance mixes on the songs of the album make you feel like at the dance floor in night club … Ethnic motifs with electronic elements of house and drum-and-bass make the music sound fantastic. And it also makes us think that hundreds of years ago the progressive young people were dancing to the same beat [sic].

www.ruslana.ua/en, accessed April 28, 2005

Provoked to curiosity by the rhetoric of the pop star Ruslana’s press materials, I embarked to reveal the mystery of the majestic kingdom of the Carpathian Mountains for myself. It was a hot day in July 2005, and my small entourage was nearing the end of a long journey to a village represented as the end point of a slender serpentine line on my large road map of Ukraine. We were en route to Kosmach, a village in Hutsulshchyna, the southwestern mountainous region of Ukraine that borders the northern edge of Romania. Despite earlier journeys on equally remote and similarly pockmarked dirt roads in this region of the world, a feeling of naïve expectance overcame me as the car lurched toward our destination. That morning, I had revisited the press materials first released at Ruslana’s “Знаю Я” (“Znaiu Ya,” or “I Know”) etno-muzyka video premiere in the chic Western Ukrainian capital of L’viv in 2002, where I was fortunate to be in attendance. That event kicked off her “Hutsulian Project” and featured a music video that was touted as a history-making megaklip (rather than a klip, the term for an average music video). The megaklip had been filmed largely in the village of Kosmach. The press materials told the story of how Ruslana had traveled “high in the mountains, where the people live in [a] different time and dimension,” to find her “source of inspiration.” Familiar with the long history of Hutsul romanticization by L’vivan urbanites, and as someone who thinks of herself as allergic to exoticizing rhetoric, I nonetheless briefly entertained the possibility that maybe, somehow, this would be “the place,” as the press release boasted, “where you find true Ukrainian exotics!”

As my friend negotiated the unpaved mountain roads in his small tank-like Soviet Lada, I sat in the back seat and imagined that Kosmach might actually be different from scores of other Hutsul villages that I had visited earlier that week and on previous trips—it was, after all, the end point of the thin, snaking line on the map. After hours passing through scenic mountain vistas and roadside villages, we finally rolled into Kosmach, where a large Ukrainian Orthodox church and a few small cafés framed the center of town. As it started to drizzle, we ducked into the only café that appeared to be open. Inside, three teenagers—two girls and a boy—sat sharing a Snickers bar and text messaging each other with their cell phones from across the table. In my field notes, I jotted the observation that, while Kosmach was geographically remote, its isolation did not preclude such technologically sophisticated—if also technologically alienating—forms of modern teenaged flirtation.

We introduced ourselves, and I shared that I had come to Kosmach to investigate the source of inspiration for Ruslana’s brand of etno-muzyka. One of the teenagers, Lida, who was also the daughter of the café’s proprietors, leaped forward with an opinion that was echoed with differing degrees of intensity, but a notable amount of consistency, by the majority of the Kosmach villagers with whom I spoke later that week. She explained, “Ruslana came in with a huge crew; it went well. We dressed up in our folk costumes for her and staged a wedding. Everything was fine. But I can’t say that people are happy about it—especially about the name of the project, Dyki Tantsi (Дикі Танці, meaning Wild Dances).¹ How, in what way, are we wild (дикі)?” My video footage from that summer cuts from Lida to a scene that followed just a few minutes later: a wedding band called Kosmats’ka Pysanka (Kosmach Easter Egg)—composed of many of the same musicians Ruslana had hired for her project—led a wedding procession through the center of town. They waved at us, an invitation to join the parade of partygoers in festive, but not folkloric attire. I fell in line and spent the next two days at the wedding party gathering their perspectives on Ruslana’s representation of their village in her Hutsulian Project.

Now to the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) held in Istanbul one year earlier. In 2004, Ukraine was the tenth country to take the stage at the ESC, a forum that “notoriously mingles kitsch with geopolitics” (Heller 2007, 199). Ukraine was thought to be in a statistically unfavorably placement, sandwiched between Albania and Croatia in the middle of the competition. It was also one of the two newest participating countries in the 49th annual ESC, having entered for the first time in 2003. Over one hundred million viewers in thirty-six countries were reported to have taken part in the 2004 televised contest, making it the biggest televoted contest in world history at that time. As described in the introduction to this book, Ruslana gave an energetic performance of her song “Wild Dances,” which drew on familiar sonic and visual gestures of Hutsul exoticism, repackaging them as a message of Wildness with a European-facing aspiration. After all of the thirty-six participant national broadcast companies reported their countries’ televoting results, Ruslana and her squad of Wild Dancers were proclaimed victorious. The win rocketed Ruslana to heights of international stardom unprecedented for a post-Soviet Ukrainian pop musician in the early twenty-first century (see Fig. Intro.1).

In addition to the specifically Hutsul stereotypes of “wildness” represented in “Wild Dances,” the performance also trafficked in generic tropes of exoticism. In some cases, it blurred the lines between what was supposed to index Hutsuls specifically, and exoticism globally. This was most evident in how Ruslana’s sartorial choices were perceived. In the aftermath of the competition, her aesthetic was compared frequently to Xena the Warrior Princess, the protagonist of the popular fantasy television show of the mid-1990s. Xena’s violent, ambiguous, and kinky sexualized presentation has been noted (Morreale 1998); Ruslana was careful to distinguish the pacifism of her Wildness: “Ruslana—who has always maintained her work is entirely innovative and original—admitted she could see the parallels between her ‘Wild Dances’ costumes and those worn by US TV character, Xena the Warrior Princess. However, she maintained that unlike Xena, the ‘Wild Dancers’ are not hostile, merely ‘wild in style’” (Eurovision press release, 2004).

Other connections to Ruslana’s depictions of Wildness were made after the competition. One effect of the attention given to the discursive presence of Wildness in Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” was that it persistently configured Hutsuls in relationship to discourses of Wildness through musical performance in complex ways that muddled the global and local. In some ways, the song simply revived old discourses of the archaic Wildness of Hutsul music, making those discourses accessible to fans of Eurovision who had never considered Ukraine as a space of such enticing exoticism before the ESC. In other ways, it diluted the specificity of Hutsul positionality and their unique history of being represented as “wild.”

Ruslana’s capitalization on Wildness—as it echoed generic conceptions of “otherness” and as it was negotiated in daily use as a result of her numerous “wild projects”—is one theme of this chapter. I examine, in turn, Ruslana’s initial musical experiments exploiting tropes of Hutsul Wildness, the reception of this Wildness by the Hutsul community that bears the stigma of a deep history of objectification as the “wild folk” of Western Ukraine, and then Ruslana’s shifting ideas about and politicization of Wildness in recent years. This chapter, then, provides an overview of how one celebrity musician’s wild music exploited different tropes of exoticism for the benefit of different audiences in order to make different political claims over the span of a decade bracketed by popular revolution.

The force of Ruslana’s celebrity and her widely circulated depictions of Wildness also offer some insights on emergent sovereign imaginaries between the Orange and Maidan Revolutions. After the ESC, Ruslana’s new visibility as Ukraine’s premiere pop cultural export endowed her with authority as the promoter of what she called “the Ukrainian image” for international audiences, a role in which she reimagined the meaning of Wildness and its relationship to Ukrainian-ness in accordance with shifting visions of Ukrainian statehood between the Orange and Maidan Revolutions. When Ukraine plunged into political turmoil with the start of the Orange Revolution in late 2004 following rampant electoral fraud in the contest for the presidency, Ruslana allied herself with the pro-Western reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who was eventually elected to the presidency. In the winter months during which Ukrainian state activities were effectively frozen due to the enormous protests that paralyzed the Ukrainian capital, Ruslana performed “Wild Dances” and other hits on the revolutionary stage that was erected in central Kyiv.

After the Orange Revolution, Ruslana was appointed to be Ukraine’s first Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2005. In March 2006, she was elected to the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, as a representative of President Yushchenko’s Nasha Ukraina (Our Ukraine) coalition (a position she relinquished in June 2007).² Meanwhile, she became the spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) campaign against female trafficking in Europe, appearing in television commercials in Ukraine and throughout Europe. In 2008, she premiered what she called the “social single” titled “Not for Sale,” which she composed as the anthem for the anti-human-trafficking league based in Vienna, Austria. She also used it to tease her new album, Wild Energy, which featured Missy Elliott and T-Pain, two prominent US hip-hop artists, as guests on two tracks. In recent years, Ruslana has been photographed with former First Lady Michelle Obama, and has performed for audiences throughout Europe, North America, and South America. Along with other post-Soviet musical luminaries, Ruslana has been a judge on the popular televised reality TV singing competition in Ukraine known as Holos Kraïny (Voice of the Nation), which I take up in Chapter 4.

During the 2013–2014 Maidan Revolution, she sang the Ukrainian anthem nightly to motivate protestors through the cold winter nights, and played John Lennon’s “Imagine” on the upright piano (painted yellow and blue, the colors of the Ukrainian flag) that had become a symbol of that revolution’s somewhat quirky creative energy (see Figure 1.1). Billing herself as a “humanitarian pop star,” Ruslana has never again reached the meteoric heights of fame that accompanied her 2004 ESC win, yet she remains a permanent fixture at the nexus of Ukrainian cultural policy, activism, and popular music.

From her first success as a “wild dancer” influenced by the traditions of the Hutsul minority of Western Ukraine, to her later rebranding as a social activist invested in “wild energy,” the “wild projects” mirror contemporaneous changes in Ukrainian coalitional politics, as earlier post-Soviet ideologies of ethno-nationalism gave way to new ideas about citizenly belonging within the state, including—in some corners of Ukrainian society—an emergent idea of civic nationhood (Plokhii 2016). Early in her career, as Ruslana reconfigured the source of her Wildness from a concrete local language attributed to Hutsuls to an aspirational category that dissolved specifics and let a more inclusive notion of Wildness stand in, Wildness morphed from a term of ethnic intimacy, to marketable auto-exoticism, to one of eco-conscious infrastructural and civic activism. This transformation maps onto broader Ukrainian political concerns following the Orange Revolution, as revolutionary fatigue and disenchantment with the revolutionary government’s failures paved the way for the emergent civic-oriented and pragmatic sovereign imaginary that would eventually come to motivate the Maidan’s politics of dignity.

FIGURE 1.1 Ruslana Lyzhychko plays the blue and yellow Maidan piano during a concert organized for Maidan activists. Photo by Sergii Kharchenko/NurPhoto/Sipa USA via AP Images.

This chapter follows Ruslana’s transformation from a marginal figure of post-Soviet Ukrainian estrada to a global “ethno-pop” (etno-pop) star, and then to a political activist with ambitions to transform state policy and redefine Ukrainian futurity. I observe this transformation through an examination of three songs that mark this trajectory: “Znaiu Ya” (Знаю Я / “I Know”) (2002), the ESC winner “Wild Dances” (2004), and “Wild Energy” (2008). However, rather than represent three disjunct nodes in this pop star’s career arc, I elucidate how the hybrid influences present in “Znaiu Ya” and “Wild Dances”—despite the discourse of ethnic purity that marked them—anticipated the project of civic belonging announced by “Wild Energy” by drawing together diverse national myths, including those of Scythian primordialism and post-Soviet categories of femininity. This chapter also returns questions of representation in Ruslana’s Hutsulian Project to Hutsuls themselves, allowing them to evaluate Wildness on their own terms.

In this chapter, I introduce the term “ethnic intimacy” as a minor variant of Michael Herzfeld’s influential coinage “cultural intimacy,” in part to emphasize that the utilization of Hutsul motifs represents a regional collective space that overlaps with ethnic identification but bleeds across state borders; this distinguishes it from the nationally bounded collective space within which cultural intimacy is articulated. In this example, Hutsul ethnic intimacy is nested within the national imagined space of cultural intimacy, though it also exists in latent tension to the state’s political sovereignty, since Hutsuls also inhabit villages in modern-day Romania. Like cultural intimacy, the space of ethnic intimacy is also one in which stereotypes operate as the identifying codes of communities. In the Ukrainian case, the historical uses of “Hutsul-ness” have particular resonance as a kind of post-Austro-Hungarian imperial formation of the “authentic folk,” and therefore have little in common with other regions of Ukraine that were shaped through different imperial regimes. That said, Hutsul-ness becomes deployed as a form of (national) cultural intimacy—when the borderland “folk” became elevated to the status of national symbol, as happened in Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” performance on the Eurovision stage.

This chapter assesses how Wildness has been defined by Ruslana in shifting post-Soviet sovereign imaginaries that draw upon nested and varied histories of postcolonial representation and geopolitical affiliation. Through Ruslana’s controversial use of tropes of exoticism, we observe how Wildness becomes metonymic for shifting sovereign imaginaries between the Orange and Maidan Revolutions, that is, Wildness as sovereign imaginary. First, Wildness is represented in the service of a vision of Ukrainian statehood rooted in ethno-nationalism (drawn in particular from the exotic representation of Hutsuls and later exported to both domestic and international audiences). Then, in a later iteration, Wildness becomes a trope of wilderness and eco-activism rooted in a civically minded pragmatic patriotism. Through her wild music, Ruslana, the pop-star-cum-political-activist, dreams of distinct visions of statehood. She enacts these visions of statehood in part upon her own body as she toys with self-representations 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 it fit into a sovereign imaginary that validated their ethnic identity at its core.

Just as the press releases on opening night predicted, the “Znaiu Ya” video sparked massive interest among viewers on Ukrainian television. The success of the “Znaiu Ya” single led to Ruslana’s signing with Comp Music, the Ukrainian affiliate of the global music label EMI. This was followed by an invitation to produce an album of songs from her Hutsulian Project at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in England, a famous locus for hit “world music” albums. The Dyki Tantsi album recorded there consists of ten original songs with an additional remix version of the hit single “Znaiu Ya.” Most of the songs incorporate token Hutsul sounds such as the iconic trembita (alpine horn), tsymbaly (hammered dulcimer), drymba (jaw harp), and a variety of wooden flutes and recorders (sopilka, floiera, telynka, dentsivka). Many songs use the scansion and declamation associated with the Hutsul song form known as kolomyika.

On the album Dyki Tantsi, the lyrics are exclusively in Ukrainian and marked by Ruslana’s urbane, L’viv-based pronunciation, though she stresses well-known Hutsul tropes by pronouncing key terms in dialect, or by dropping the ends of words (as is the convention in village-style performance). Rhythmically, the songs emphasize syncopations associated more with male Hutsul foot-stomping dances than the regular oom-pah played by Hutsul bubon drummers, though the rhythmic dimension of much of the album evokes a generic “tribal” world music quality more than anything specifically Hutsul. Less than six months after the album was released in June 2003, it reached platinum sales in Ukraine, breaking another record for Ukrainian commercial music. The commercial success of the album led to Ruslana’s nomination to represent Ukraine at Eurovision, thus giving Ruslana access to new international audiences, for whom the ethnic intimacy of Wildness would resonate differently. Just as intimacy “may be protected, manipulated, or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory, or estranged by critique,” so does Ruslana’s Wildness accrue new meanings once it is made salable to diverse international audiences on the Eurovision Stage (Boym 2000, 228).

THE EROTIC AUTO-EXOTIC

Two years after the “Znaiu Ya” premiere, Ruslana released the album Wild Dances (a direct translation from an earlier Ukrainian-language release, Dyki Tantsi). On the heels of her 2004 Eurovision victory, the album topped the charts in Belgium, Greece, and Cyprus, and made it to the top ten in many other European countries. In the course of these two years, the pop star also reinvented herself as a pop icon whose unrestrained sexuality and ferocity drew upon ancient Slavic and Soviet archetypes of femininity.

The Eurovision-winning titular song “Wild Dances” is sung half in English, half in Ukrainian. The lyrics feature a recurring “Hey!” (in the studio version, the booming “Hey!” comes from a field recording of Hutsul highlanders), and also the prominent use of Hutsul vocables such as shydy-rydy-dana:

Just maybe I’m crazy,

The world spins round and round and round.

Shydy-rydy-dai, shydy-rydy dana. (2x)

I want you to want me

As I dance round and round.

Shydy-rydy-dai, shydy-rydy dana. (2x)

Forever and ever—

Go, go, go wild dancers!

(Refrain)

Dai-na, dai-na, wanna be loved,

Dai-na, dai-na, gonna take my wild changes,

Dai-na, dai-na, freedom above,

Dai-na, dai-na, I’m wild ‘n’ dancing!

Гей! (Hey!)

Напевно даремно, (Surely for nothing,)

Була я надто чемна (I was too polite)

Shydy-rydy dai, shydy-rydy dana. (2x)

Для тебе, для себе, (For you, for myself,)

Застелю ціле небо. (I will make a bed of the whole sky.)

Гей! (Hey!)

Shydy dai, shydy-rydy dana. (2x)

Без жалю запалю, (Without sorrow, I’ll start the fire,)

Go, go, go, wild dancers!

(Refrain)

Dance forever, come and be mine!

Dance together till the end of time!

Dance together!

Go, go, go wild dancers!

(Lyrics reprinted from Pavlyshyn 2006, 473; translations

from Ukrainian are my own.)

In reference to this song, literature scholar Marko Pavlyshyn has suggested that “the lyrical ‘I’ … identifies her as ‘wild’: her condition is one of pre-civilizational naturalness, perhaps of noble savagery.” Pavlyshyn argues that this association with wildness acts as “Ruslana’s … refutation of the Orientalist stereotype. By association with the wild beast, she has strength, and it is strength that inflects her attitude toward love” (2006, 474). Pavlyshyn elaborates on the European Enlightenment ideals espoused through Ruslana’s confident assertion of herself as “wild,” arguing that her “wildness” operates as a form of “European-ness.” But I think another interpretation is possible: instead of a confident reversal of the Orientalizing gaze, the text of the song may also be heard as an expression of postcolonial desire, as a yearning for inclusion. Ruslana sings, “I want you to want me,” and one can hear it as aspirational allegory or as a formulaic attempt at seduction through popular music, instead of as an empowered solidarity with European values. By rehearsing some of the clichés of Orientalism—including the eroticizing of the mysterious “other” (here, the Hutsul)—Ruslana’s auto-exoticism in “Wild Dances” attempts to slake the European public’s thirst for the exotic at its eastern borders.

Ruslana thus refashions the ethnic intimacy cultivated for the Ukrainian public through Dyki Tantsi into a strategic and erotic auto-exoticism for the benefit of an imagined European public. Was Ruslana’s auto-exotic strategy unique in the context of Eurovision? Arguably not, since, as Janelle Reinelt writes, “Eurovision … annually constructs the collective memory of European cooperation while dramatizing the impossibility of escaping the borders and boundaries of nation and culture, gender and sexuality, self and other. Participating countries are united less by geography than by media space. Otherwise, the contest serves as a consolidating cross-cultural discourse, situated squarely in the popular domain, wherein the struggle over European identity plays out” (2001, 386). With regard to Turkey’s winning entry in 2003, when pop star Sertab invoked stereotypical musical and visual gestures evocative of “Turkey” (including the arabesk, the harem, and the Turkish baths), Thomas Solomon points out that “trading on, and taking advantage of, familiar orientalist tropes and Europe’s fascination with exotic Turkey was … shrewd marketing, however politically incorrect it may seem from progressive and Europeanist Turkish points of view” (2005a, 8). In “Wild Dances,” Ruslana’s ambition was to combine the language of Eurovision kitsch with a claim for Ukraine’s legitimacy as a European state through a marketing language of Wildness that at once romanticized the object of her research while firmly asserting its location in Europe.

Ruslana’s auto-exotic representation of Hutsul culture as representative of the whole of Ukraine doubles as a bid for European identity, albeit one filtered through the unique, kitschy sensibilities of the Eurovision Song Contest.⁵ Between the Dyki Tantsi and Wild Dances albums, as her primarily Ukrainophone domestic audience expanded to an international (primarily European) public, Ruslana’s persona also underwent a radical shift, as the guileless post-Soviet estrada singer metamorphosed into an “Amazonka.”

From its first iteration in 2002, Ruslana’s Hutsulian Project was marketed with flamboyant language, positioning Ruslana as a uniquely skilled curator tasked with the mission of “popularizing” the ancient traditions of the Hutsuls for the modern consumer. Due to the international ambitions of Ruslana’s Hutsulian Project, even early press releases were made available in multiple languages, including English: “The colors of Hutsul music, fiery rhythms, dance that pulls you into its circle—that’s the energy that lights a fire in the soul! The music of Ruslana stores this fire. She brought the rhythm of the mountains to the stage and made it modern, cultish [sic]” (press materials, 2002).

In the lead-up to the Eurovision performance, Ruslana’s marketing language became even more ostentatious: “Without giving [the] audience an opportunity to take a breath from the impression, here we see wild and sexy, hot and dangerous, mystic and knowledgeable about all the secrets of Carpathian mol’fars (shamans) mountain Amazonkas. Fur and leather, ethnic weapons, danger ous games and unique meditations all of this charms and entertains you, gives shimmering in the heart [sic]” (press materials, 2004). This heightened pitch of her marketing language corresponded to the increased sexuality in Ruslana’s self-presentation and self-identification: whereas the Ruslana of “Znaiu Ya” was modestly dressed in a tailored full-body leather suit, a shoulder-length bob, and an unassuming grin, the Ruslana of Wild Dances emerged as an “Amazonka,” predatory and stern, with an expansive mane of gnarled hair and an innovative wardrobe of bikinis, microskirts, and studded leather accessories.

Ruslana’s identification as an Amazonka was first and foremost a nationalist allusion, referencing the ancient Scythian warrior women who inhabited parts of modern-day Ukraine (the Crimean peninsula and the “wild field” (dyke pole) to its north, but not modern-day Hutsulshchyna) in antiquity. Famously described in Herodotus’s Histories as archetypal barbarians, these Amazon warrior women battled on horseback, and were reputedly willing to amputate their right breasts to facilitate shooting arrows (2003, 276–79). Ruslana knowingly drew on this history аs she reconstructed her persona as a fierce and wild woman, even releasing a 2004 music video to the song “Oi, zahrai my muzychen’ku” (originally included on the album Dyki Tantsi) filmed in Crimea, where she is depicted as a horseback-riding free spirit who viciously beats up her cheating boyfriend on the shore of the Black Sea.

Ruslana’s erotic auto-exoticization—predicated initially as it was on the image of Hutsuls—became a contentious source of debate for scholars, critics, and Hutsuls themselves, especially as the image of Ruslana-as-Hutsul-woman became conflated with Ruslana-as-Amazonka. Ruslana justified the change as an outgrowth of her prolonged ethnographic study of Hutsul culture, legitimized by her cooperation with ethnomusicologists from her alma mater, the Lysenko Academy of Music in L’viv. Ruslana’s turn toward this reputed institution historically devoted to the systematic study of rural folklore was significant as a legitimizing step in the reinvention of the material (despite the fact that some of her consultants later distanced themselves from the work), and as a brace against accusations of exploitative exoticism. Emphasizing the “exotic” and “ancient” aspects of Hutsul culture as truisms ostensibly observed during Ruslana’s own field expeditions, she validated her license as an artist to exploit these facts. Pavlyshyn explains that “just as the music of Wild Dances was publicized as the fruit of Ruslana’s own ethnomusicological research in the Carpathians, so the costumes were explained as the outcomes of the meticulous collection and study of ethnographic data” (2006, 481–82). This explanation, however, did not pass the muster of Hutsuls themselves: in the course of my fieldwork, it was repeatedly pointed out to me that traditional Hutsul dress for both females and males is quite modest (if extremely colorful), and always covers the body. The traditional wardrobe is composed of painstakingly embroidered shirts; ornate woolen vests embellished with vibrant embroidery, mirrors, and leather piping (kozhukhy); overcoats (serdaky); men’s pants and thick leather belts (cheres); skirts (zapaska, for women); and elaborate headwear: colorful hats for men (krysania), and meticulously wrapped head scarves (khustky) or headbands (namitka) for women.

Ruslana’s bodily palette of leather, metal, and bare skin suggested, to many onlookers, a kinkiness that directly opposed the traditional conservativeness of Hutsul female self-representation. This was partially demonstrated in Ruslana’s integration of Scythian imagery in her Hutsulian Project, which she repackaged as modern sexuality: “In these clothes, we felt ourselves to be true Amazons—at once sexual and warlike” (quoted in Pavlyshyn 2006, 481). Pavlyshyn read the “sado-masochistic attributes with which the costumes were replete” as a comment on the strong female voice represented in the song, one defined by power and the defiance of quotidian norms (481). This interpretation is valid, but does not account for the diversity of interpretations and the robust debate about meaning that followed Ruslana’s 2004 Eurovision victory, in which her erotic auto-exoticism meant many different things to different publics. As a representation of Ukrainian femaleness within Ukraine, Ruslana’s body became inscribed with the weight of internal national discourses of Ukrainian sexuality and femininity; as the representative of Ukrainian femaleness outside of Ukraine (on the Eurovision stage), her message communicated an ethno-national wildness vis-à-vis unbridled female (understood as some combination of Hutsul or Amazon) sexuality.

As the anthropologist Sherri Ortner (1974) famously argued, the female voice and body are recurrent tropes of the nationalist myth cross-culturally, where femininity is conflated with the sphere of “nature” that is counterposed to the rational, masculine sphere of “culture.” In the Slavic world, the nation has, “since time immemorial,” been depicted as female (Goscilo 1996, 32). In Ukraine, where a gargantuan Soviet-era statue of Rodina Mat’ (Motherland, called the iron baba with ironic affection by locals) towers over the city of Kyiv, the cradle of Slavic civilization, the symbolic position of the female protector and mother in the Slavic imaginary is manifest physically, in massive quantities of steel. The ancient archetype of the female Berehynia (protector of the hearth of the nation) has recently been rehabilitated as a prevalent trope in Ukrainian notions of femininity, referenced by prominent politicians such as Yulia Tymoshenko, radical feminist groups such as FEMEN, and in revival festivals celebrating pre-Christian fertility (Bilaniuk 2003, 54; Helbig 2011; Zychowicz 2011).⁶ In its reinvention, the Berehynia has been repurposed to express a range of stereotypical feminine qualities, from nurturing to mysterious to hysterical. Ruslana’s self-sexualized presentation also evokes Western postfeminist discourses that, among other things, mark a “shift from objectification [of the female body] to sexual subjectification” (Gill 2009, 101). Thus, Ruslana fused an emergent brand of post-Soviet Ukrainian femininity onto the canvas of her celebrity body, one that culls from nationalist and Soviet discourses of female aggression and freedom, Western postfeminist discourse, and the ancient archetype of the Amazonka.

Ruslana’s manipulation of such Indigenous tropes—of both femininity and rurality—and her savvy branding of them as a uniquely Ukrainian kind of “world music” on the Eurovision stage, suggest that her strategy of auto-exoticism was enacted in part to subvert the power structures inherent in acts of exoticizing.⁷ Yet, her method stands in contrast to other notable examples of such subversions on the ESC stage, such as the controversial Russian pop duo t.A.T.u.’s performance in 2003. Dana Heller has suggested that the duo’s faux-lesbian shtick and poo-pooing of Eurovision norms presented a “challenge to the hegemony of the West” and “indifference to the ‘assumed rules of the globalization process’” (2007, 204). Heller interprets this as revealing of the deeply entrenched hostility felt by Russians toward Europe.

In contrast, Ruslana’s 2004 performance appears to be a dedicated endeavor to appease Europe by perfecting the Eurovision aesthetic that blends catchy global pop with essentialized national self-presentation. Ruslana’s celebrity body, adorned in the primitivist drag of Amazonian/Hutsul fantasy, is surrendered to the crude exigencies of the Eurovision machine in order to make a claim about Ukrainian political desire. Thus, the pop star’s body is put on display in what might be called a pop “ritual of sovereignty,” in which Ukraine’s European-facing desires for political sovereignty in line with the values of liberal democracy are expressed through deference and submission (cf. Bernstein 2013b).⁸

In its tactics, the appropriation of Hutsul elements into this Ukrainian popular music rehearses themes prominent in the scholarly literature on globalization and the world music industry: the reproduction of hegemonic relations between cities and villages (Taylor 1997), the masking of compensation mechanisms (Meintjes 1990; Feld 2000), the denial of modern subjectivity to peoples on the margins of power, and, less cynically, the “intimate entanglement of sounds and bodies in music and dance underpinned at the ideological level by an ‘all out relationism’ and ‘empathetic sociality’” (Stokes 2004, quoting Erlmann 1999, 177). But the interpretation of “Wild Dances” as an attempt to subvert marginalization through strategic auto-exoticism is further complicated by the complaints that were voiced by many of the very people that Ruslana constructed as the Ukrainian subaltern: the villagers of Kosmach and other villages in Hutsulshchyna. For some Hutsuls, the shame of being called “wild” outweighed the fact that Ukraine had won, as many put it, “the attention of Europe.” Segments of the community stereotyped as the “exotic other” attempted to resist the tropes of othering that were thrust upon them through the rhetoric of Ruslana’s press releases and the branding of her product. This attitude exposes a tension predicated on the power of postcolonial representation, here rendered as the wish for affiliation with legitimizing discourses of civilization that are mostly, but not always, opposed to discourses of Wildness. For some Hutsuls, the rejection of Wildness was demarcated strenuously, as an explicit alignment with the sovereign imaginary that desired inclusion in the European Union and that would finally shed the burdens of exoticism that mark Hutsul modernity.

PRIDE, SHAME, AND SHAROVARSHCHYNA

In 2009, I asked Mykhailo Tafiychuk, the patriarch of the Tafiychuk family of musicians, for his opinion on Ruslana’s Eurovision-winning “Wild Dances” as we sat in his kitchen in the isolated Hutsul village of Bukovets’. His initial reply was a shrug. After a pause, he added that he didn’t “understand her jumping around. She behaved badly.” Further, he said, “she really offended us by calling our culture wild.” I asked him what he took this “wildness” (дикість) to mean. He answered that it implies that “we are not smart” and then added, “animals are wild, not people.” At this, his wife Hannusia, who had been quietly sitting by and listening, weighed in, “Ruslana put on some underwear and a Hutsul kozhukh [traditional decorated vest] and danced on television … it was not very nice [гарно].” To the Tafiychuk family, Ruslana’s labeling and selling of her aesthetic as “Hutsul” was taken personally, as an insult and a denigration of their own integrity and sophistication.⁹

In the months following Ruslana’s ESC victory, some Hutsuls lobbied their local district parliament to censor sales of the Wild Dances disc for their strong objections to the representation of their culture as “wild” in an international arena. Ivan Mykhailovych Zelenchuk, a historian and ethnologist based in the town of Verkhovyna, told me about the misunderstanding and bitterness that local people felt when they saw Ruslana’s representation of the deeply entrenched stereotype of Hutsuls as “wild people”:

FIGURE 1.2 Mykhailo Tafiychuk in his instrument workshop. The unfinished body of a lira, a hurdy-gurdy, is visible in the foreground. Photo by Alison Cartwright Ketz, 2011.

FIGURE 1.3 Father and son demonstrate the sound of newly completed horns in front of their home as other members of the Tafiychuk family look on. The trembita is the elongated horn played by Mykhailo Tafiychuk. Photo by Alison Cartwright Ketz, 2011.

Ruslana harmed us in this regard, because instead of calling them “fiery dances” [запальні танці], she was looking for a word, and someone must have suggested wild [дикі] … if she had called them “Fiery Dances,” she would have hit the mark [попала в точку] and become a national hero. But someone must have suggested—this—“wild” and she went with it—and wild has many meanings, a few different aspects. The word dyki literally means primitive … implies that someone is primitive. People understood in its most direct meaning, and so, there were some incidents … people did not accept it, but then it passed, all of that. (personal communication, January 20, 2009)

A local historian based in the village of Kryvorivnia expressed another view on Ruslana’s impact. He commented on the fact that “wildness” is a pervasive and potentially insidious stereotype of his culture, but that it can be read multiply, as evidenced through varied reactions of Hutsuls to Ruslana’s depiction. (His village, Kryvorivnia, had spearheaded the attempt to boycott the album in Ukraine, expressing outrage at the term “wild” in the album title, though he was not directly involved.) As we talked about trendy representations of Hutsuls in popular music and historical representations in ethnographic studies, he shared a nuanced position: on the one hand, it’s good to raise awareness of our existence; on the other hand, we don’t deserve slander (personal communication, October 19, 2009). Many others voiced such ambivalent reactions, acknowledging that while Ruslana may have raised the profile of Hutsuls internationally and helped stimulate tourism to the region, it came at the price of disgrace and through the reinforcement of negative stereotypes.

While shrugging ambivalence and unfavorable reviews of Ruslana’s chart-topping Wild Dances were common among Hutsuls in many regions of Hutsulshchyna, some evaluated her work more positively. One young Hutsul violinist told me, “Ruslana brought glory to Ukraine” (interview, January 29, 2009). During my fieldwork, many Hutsuls would simply laugh about the dispute, repeating a canonical joke such as, “What is a Hutsul? He is a Ukrainian, but wild!”¹⁰

Debate about Wild Dances in Hutsulshchyna arose in many social situations, including the quotidian practice of locals gossiping about each other. On January 7, 2009 (Christmas Day by the Julian Calendar), I trudged through the snow to the Sergei Parajanov Museum in Verkhovyna with my host Oksana, her friend Svitlana, two visiting tourists from Kyiv and Sweden, and my Russian American friend, who had come to visit me. In the two-room Parajanov Museum, located in the humble Hutsul house where the Georgian-born, ethnically Armenian filmmaker lived while directing the internationally acclaimed Soviet-era film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, tour guide Pani Halyna recited her guide’s monologue and then opened the small floor to questions. As the formality of the tour-guide-to-audience relationship relaxed, she shared a story concerning Ruslana and her reception since “Wild Dances” had won Eurovision. Following a devastating flood in the Verkhovyna region, which destroyed many homes in isolated villages in July 2009, Ruslana sent provisions via Hummer and helicopter, and also wanted to stage a concert to “lift the people’s spirits.” The people, however, were not all receptive. Pani Halyna and Oksana discussed:

HALYNA: My godmother [kuma] was involved in the Dyki Tantsi project. Maybe you remember, in the first video [“Znaiu Ya”], there were three ladies, and they’re all standing, and they show their fingers—do you remember? It was a short fragment. And so she came to me and said, “Did you see Pani Marijka on the television?” And I hadn’t seen it yet … She was so offended! Even now when there were the floods, she [Ruslana] loaded up a whole truck with provisions and sent it up to [the village of] Zamagora—

OKSANA: Yes, that’s true—

HALYNA: Okay, I heard all of this from my godmother; I don’t ask these questions myself! [Laughs] And so this lady said, “She made a joke of me to all of Ukraine, this humiliation, and now I’m supposed to take her macaroni too?” I laughed so hard!

OKSANA: [Speaking to me] See, our people are stubborn as rams!

MARIA: 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 to our discussion of Wildness came from Yurko Izdryk, a well-known poet and essayist based in the Western Ukrainian town of Kalush. He wrote about sharovarshchyna as a particularly Ukrainian iteration of a broad cross-cultural “identifying code”: “Though so-called ‘sharovarshchyna’ belongs to culture, it is not itself a full-worth cultural phenomenon. It 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