UKRAINIAN ALLUSIONS IN HISPANIC AMERICAN LITERATURE: FROM MAZEPA TO PUTIN

Abstract

The article offers a brief overview of some works written in Latin American countries from the late 19th to the early 21st century, which contain references to Ukrainian realities, but have not hitherto become the object of literary criticism from this angle. This oversight is regrettably common to literary studies both on the Latin American and the Ukrainian side. Thus, three writers from Mexico, one from the Argentine and one from Nicaragua have never been examined from this point of view, wheras the literary presence of Ukraine in that area of the world lies outside the scope interest of Latin American scholarly research. The figure of the Ukrainian leader Stepán Mazepa, which appears in two poems – Trilogy and Lamentation of the Voluptuous – by the outstanding Mexican author Amado Nervo, parallels the way it is conceived of by several 19th-century European writers (including Victor Hugo), being treated in rather metaphysical terms, with as good as no regard  for the Ukrainian national and historical context. The Jewish Gauchos, a novel by the Argentine writer Alberto Gerchunoff, includes some fond memories of the author’s childhood spent in Ukraine, as well as a condemnation of the oppression of the Jews by the Russian tsarism. Taking his hint from A. Gerchunoff, the prominent Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío makes in his Canto a la Argentina a general mention of the Jews of the Russian Empire who were able to resettle in that country. A sophisticated investigation of some enigmas of the Second World War by the Mexican Ignacio Padilla led the author, in his detective novel Amphitryon, to an original appraisal of the Civil War in Russia, with sympathies expressed towards the Ukrainians’ aspirations for independence. The Mexican Jorge Zepeda Patterson, whose novel Milena or The most beautiful femur in the world bears a clear reference to the initial stage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, seeks to unmask the deep secrets of the international sex racket mafia as one of the dirty faces of big politics, especially on the side of Russia.