The greenness of birds, the emergence of a countercanon and a poem by Lina Kostenko

Abstract

In 1962–1965, the publication in the Ukrainian émigré journal Sučasnist' and in several anthologies of works by a group of poets termed “Shistdesiatnyky” (“People of the Sixties”), including Lina Kostenko, established among Ukrainians in the Western diaspora a literary countercanon conceptualised as oppositional to the values prevailing in the officially endorsed literature of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Sixtiers, according to émigré critics, manifested aesthetic excellence, an affinity with modernist movements of the West and of Ukrainian letters of the 1920s and early 1930s, and demurral from the ideological tendentiousness and formal traditionalism of Soviet writing. A reading of Lina Kostenko’s poem “Paporot”, (“Ferns”) demonstrates the capacity of a particular poem from the new countercanon to respond to Western expectations shaped by principles and methods derived from New Criticism.