Students of oral epic should know Natalie Kononenko’s 1998 Ukrainian Minstrels: And the Blind Shall Sing (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe), an insightful study of the life and work of Ukrainian performers of dumy (epic; singular: duma) and other genres of song. The book under review addresses itself to non-academic readers, but the resulting accessibility makes it useful as well for folklorists and comparatists unfamiliar with Ukrainian oral poetry. A history from below, of Ukraine via its poetry and extensive translated selections thereof, Kononenko’s study touches on numerous issues relevant to investigators of other traditional oral poetries, especially epic.
The poems evince themes with transhistorical appeal, but the bulk of the book helpfully contextualizes Ukrainian dumy and historical songs, offering deep dives into, for instance, slavery in the Ottoman empire, the early history of raiding expeditions against and by Ukrainians, the peculiarities of the boat called the chaika, and the epochal uprising against Polish rule led by Bohdan Zynovii Khmelnytskyi. These lively discussions explain practices and customs described in the poetry that were already obsolete and obscure from the point of view of nineteenth- and twentieth-century performers and audiences, never mind the twenty-first-century audience for this book. Kononenko also introduces us to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century singers themselves, attending to their requisite blindness and their membership in guilds (the Orthodox church played a pivotal role here, and one notes the role of an institution in the perpetuation of an oral tradition). She details how they learned their songs—the possible use of written texts in this process intrigues—and the diversity of their repertoire, from begging songs to psalms to dumy to historical songs. As ever, variability and continuity are the watchwords: the three cycles of dumy differ and overlap; the ostensibly same duma can vary from performance to performance; one can trace the interactions between the different genres in the minstrel’s repertoire as well as juxtapose dumy with ballads and laments. In the same vein, Kononenko observes that the meeting of audience and performer shaped the performer’s oral text: striking in this case was the performer’s need to satisfy female listeners.
Kononenko’s study likewise illuminates the intersections between poetry and politics. The songs themselves were often politically engaged, whether they were about the horrific life of a galley slave on a Turkish ship or the military feats of Khmelnytskyi. Moreover, in Ukraine as elsewhere a nationalist agenda guided the textualization of oral traditional works. Kononenko’s project is itself a manifestly political one. She avers that she explores dumy “not as a Ukrainian nationalist” (292) and positions Ukrainian oral poetry as universally resonant, but she simultaneously explains the impetus for the project as follows: Ukrainian poetry showcases the distinctive features of Ukrainian culture, and this book aims to help members of the Ukrainian diaspora understand the poems that they take as emblematic of Ukrainian identity; such work is critical in the face of Russia’s current aggression against Ukraine, including the annexing of Crimea in 2014.
Kononenko proposes a thematically oriented definition of epic that enables her to link dumy to much longer instances of the genre from other (primarily ancient) cultures. Still, the book’s goals seem to preclude attention to the sorts of small-scale compositional mechanisms, such as formulas and type scenes, that tend to reveal points of contact between traditions. For instance, one finds some of the same language and motifs in the Ukrainian poems as appear in South Slavic oral epics from Muslim and Christian singers, such as negative comparisons (“it was not a black cloud that flew by, / It was not a fierce wind that blew, / It was the soul of a Kozak” (119)) and the likening of warriors to falcons; the bedraggled figure of Kozak Holota resembles the character Tale of Orašac.
I leave it to specialists in Ukrainian studies to evaluate the book’s assertions about Ukrainian culture and history. Readers should attend carefully to page 30 and to page 68 wherein the author distinguishes at a formal level between the genres referred to in the title: epic and historical song. Blink and you’ll miss it. Kononenko’s volume is otherwise exceedingly reader friendly, as befits a book aimed at a wide audience. Instead of presenting a collection of discrete texts with appended notes or commentary, Kononenko weaves translations of entire poems directly into her historicizing analyses. This manner of presentation makes for an integrated and coherent reading experience that all who pick up this volume will appreciate.
--------
[Review length: 740 words • Review posted on February 11, 2021]