Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ A Conceptual Challenge for the Current Theories of World Literature Natalya Bekhta 1 Introduction The idea of world literature - variously understood as a global variety of literary studies, as the texts of the world, or as the world of literature itself (Habjan 2019) - came into the focus of literary theory again in the late 1990s, influentially endorsed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and David Damrosch, among others. Since then, work on the problem of world literature and on the suitable methods for its study has opened up many new research directions, leading, in many cases, to a revision of the boundaries of university disciplines, canons, and publishing practices. Such new areas of research include an ongoing debate on the validity of computational methods for literary studies (Lesjak 2016; Bode 2017), the unresolvable and therefore very fruitful opposition between adepts of reading in translation (WReC 2015) and advocates of untranslatability (Apter 2013), new expansionist (Damrosch 2018 [2003]), and sociologically-informed (Niblett 2012; WReC 2015) theories of comparative study, to name but a few. The idea of world literature today, in the words of Aamir Mufti, exerts “a strange gravitational force on all students of literature” (2016: x). Regardless of whether or not we may want to adopt it, “it hardly seems viable to say in response, ‘Back to national literatures! ’” (2016: x). And yet, the idea and its theories are as appealing as they are contested. An area of ongoing contestation, on which this chapter focuses, is the way various national literatures, or, indeed, world-literary regions, are mapped out in the new, seemingly globalised and decolonised geographies of the international literary field. In comparative terms, these geographies are often organised around the division of the field into the Global North and South, ‘Western’ and postcolonial literatures, or the currently hegemonic Anglophone core and its peripheries. The case of what was known, in times of the Cold War, as 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 the Soviet ‘Second World’ is interesting in this respect: For example, does contemporary literature from Ukraine, Poland, or Estonia belong to the Global North or to the South? These are European literatures, but do they belong to the so-called Western canon? In other words, there exists a post-Cold-War typological challenge in classifying literatures of the former ‘Second World’ in transnational comparative terms. The period between 1945-1989 was dominated by “a particular imagination of the globe, the image of three worlds” (Denning 2004: n.p.), which included the capitalist First, the Communist Second, and the decolonising Third World. The break-up of the Soviet Union has invalidated this fraught but popular typology, leading to a substantial revision of the geopolitical as well as the literary-theoretical views of the world and of world literature. As Debjani Ganguly observes, comparativists of this post-Cold War age have identified many new heuristic chal‐ lenges in undertaking critical studies of ‘world literature’ - global translation, multi-media publications / adaptations, linguistic imperialisms, new humanisms / cosmopolitanisms, and postmodern / ethnic / religious (trans) nationalisms. (2012: 16) Strikingly, however, literatures of the former ‘Second World’ usually do not feature in the discussions of such world-literary concerns. This may be due to the fact that there has been no shortage of replacement concepts for ‘Third World Literature’ - “postcolonial literature, minor literature, minority literature, […] ethnic literature” (Esty and Lye 2012: 270) - but the same cannot be said for that of the ‘Second World’, which contributes to its absence in present world-literary debates. This typological challenge translates into a conceptual difficulty of being unable to spot and theorise formal and aesthetic developments in such ‘invisible’ regions of the international literary field. A reconstruction of the aesthetic and historical distinctiveness of literatures of the former ‘Second World’ within world-literary theory is a complex problem. In this chapter I will focus on one of its aspects - the problem of genre - and the possibilities of tackling it through a combination of approaches from narratology and world literature. My overarching hypothesis is that contemporary literature of the European periphery has a distinctive system of genres in which the novel coexists with forms that resist novelisation (with varying degrees of success) - most notably, satire. But in order to recognise this “struggle of genres” (Bakhtin 2017 [1981]: 5) in contemporary fiction, we first need to admit to such a possibility - that the novel is not the sole genre of narrative fiction that has a world-literary significance today. This is a key challenge for the project of reconstruction of the former ‘Second World’ as a 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 332 Natalya Bekhta 1 I use the English titles in cases where a published translation exists; in other cases, a transliteration is given, followed by my translation of the title in parentheses. world-literary region because the majority, if not all, attempts at theorising contemporary fiction on a global, transnational scale are organised around the novel (e.g. WReC 2015; Ganguly 2016; McGurl 2021; Bartoszyńska 2021). This is justified in so far as the novel is the dominant genre of contemporary fiction, following its historical expansion together with the colonial enterprise of Western Europe (Siskind 2010: 338; Scholes et al. 2006 [1966]: 3; Moretti 1994). This is a well-established fact, and I do not dispute it. However, literary theory also actively makes the novel into a genre that more or less contains all long narrative fiction, regardless how formally diverse. And this is the situation that I would like to challenge in what follows, opening up a potential direction for further inquiry in literary and cultural studies. 2 The Novel and Theories of World Literature To put the above claims into context, let me cite a recent argument put forward by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska in Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and the Theories of World Literature (2021). By comparing notable works from Polish and Irish literatures, she proposes “a more inclusive vision of the novel on both geographical and formal terms” (12), so that these texts, previously excluded from the history and theory of the novel, can be considered under this heading. Amongst others, she analyses texts by Jonathan Swift, Ignacy Krasicki, Samuel Beckett as well as Ferdydurke (1938) by Witold Gombrowicz. 1 Bartoszyńska notes: The texts I discuss are anomalous enough that the question regularly arises whether they are even novels. What else would they be? The account of the novel as a genre is an impoverished one if it cannot accommodate books like these, which clearly participate in the work of theorizing the form and exploring its capabilities. (127; emphasis added) I agree with Bartoszyńska that texts like Ferdydurke and others explore the form and capabilities of literature and of narrative, more generally, but the problem is that they may explore it precisely in order to move beyond the generic conventions and readerly expectations tied to the novel (Beckett; Gombrowicz), or that they explore the form of narrative fiction with a utopian and satirical agenda (Swift; Krasicki). A more general problem here - and in other recent studies (e.g. McGurl 2021; Ganguly 2016) - is that the novel seems to tacitly structure not only the aesthetic imagination but contemporary theory as well, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 333 to the point that it is impossible to recognise other genres and aesthetic forms operating on the international literary field. To the point that an idea that some texts might not be novels cannot be developed because we cannot see what else these texts would be. The world-literary dominance of the novel is, thus, a conceptual challenge. Consider how Gombrowicz commented on his Ferdydurke, published in 1938: We live in an era of violent changes, of accelerated development, in which settled forms are breaking under life’s pressure […]. The need to find a form for what is yet immature, uncrystallized and underdeveloped, as well as the groan at the impossibility of such a postulate - this is the chief excitement of my book. (Borchardt 2000: n.p.) This comment echoes an argument put forward by Pieter Vermeulen in his Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel (2013). Vermeulen analyses a selection of contemporary novels and the way they dramatise the idea of the end of the novel in order to renew this genre. So, one might see Gombrowicz’s quest precisely as one such attempt to move past those variants of the novel that he sees as settled and immobile in the era of violent changes. In other words, it may well be so that Ferdydurke is a renewal of the novel. One can also recall Mikhail Bakhtin (2017 [1981]: 3-7): The novel is the only genre currently in flux, the only contemporary genre, as it were. In so far as it stays in tune with the social reality it represents, it will continue to morph. At the same time, the novel’s boundless plasticity and ability to absorb any experiment on its earlier forms threatens to become a universal explanation for the kind of aesthetic and social projects mentioned by Gombrowicz. Literary history does involve a great deal of competition between literary tendencies and schools that feed into a formal renewal within the boundaries of one genre, but, as Bakhtin (2017 [1981]: 5) observes, they are “peripheral phenomena and historically insignificant. […] Behind them one must be sensitive to the deeper and more truly historical struggle of genres, the establishment and growth of a generic skeleton of literature”. The question of whether there are forms in contemporary world literature that resist novelisation is thus connected to more general issues of literary history. Furthermore, any significant transformation in the system of genres can potentially signal the underlying world-historical changes in contemporary societies themselves - lasting cultural and sociopolitical shifts that demand new symbolic forms of expression - and thus, constitute an issue of particular interest to literary and cultural studies today. However, given the novel’s world-literary dominance, scholarly and critical discourse seems to have a hard time assessing literary works with help of other generic categories - even such established ones as satire or utopia (see, e.g. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 334 Natalya Bekhta 2 «Стиль роману «Фаршрутка» та його мова нагадують вміст величезного баку зі сміттям, куди довго кидали усе підряд» (Shynkarenko 2016: n.p.). Bartoszyńska’s 2021: 13 discussion of Gulliver’s Travels). For example, in his critical review of Ivan Semesiuk’s satirical novella Farshrutka (2016), writer and literary critic Oleh Shynkarenko is visibly struggling to identify Farshrutka’s genre. He goes through various comparisons - for example, with the picaresque or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Ivan Kotliarevsky’s nineteenth-century trav‐ esty Eneїda - and ends up noting that “the style of the novel [sic! ] Farshrutka and its language are like a huge trash can, into which many things have been chucked in for a very long time” (Shynkarenko 2016: n.p.; my translation). 2 Semesiuk’s text indeed does not work well as a novel because it straddles the line between social critique and fiction, narrative and non-narrative, parody and utopia. In Farshrutka a small bus full of diverse social types - rather than fleshed-out characters - and a talking baboon find themselves in the middle of an epic battle with propaganda clichés and magical debris flying from across the eastern border from self-imploding Russia. This text uses a form of satirical exploration of public discourse, cultural stereotypes, and literary clichés to capture the ultimate absurdity of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Of course, it had the 2014 invasion as its frame of reference.) Judged by the generic standards of the novel, texts like Farshrutka are often described as deficient - stylistically, in terms of coherence of plot, character system, and so on (see, e.g. Brynykh 2015). This has a concrete consequence when it comes to world-literary theory: On which terms do such texts fit into the world-literary discussion, dominated by the prestige of the novel? Their discussion would be necessary for the project of a reconstruction of ‘second-world’ literatures within the contemporary world-literary geographies as well as for a development of a more refined view of the international literary field. To reiterate, the novel continues to be a very productive genre, both for writers and theorists. And the dominant one at the moment, including in post-Soviet literatures in Europe. At the same time, world-literary theory should be able to address the diverse generic distribution, which characterises world-literary regions, as well as the function of non-dominant genres. In order to bring forth the ongoing struggle of genres, I propose to fuse the large-scale perspective of a world-literary approach with the narratological attention to the inherent generic properties of a literary text. The text I shall examine in detail is Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (2019) since, unlike Farshrutka, it is also available in the English translation. However, just like Farshrutka, Ferdydurke, or Yuriy Andrukhovych’s Rekreatsii (1992), 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 335 Oles’ Ulianenko’s Stalinka (1994), Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), Andriy Lyubka’s MUR (2020), and many others, Rafeyenko’s work provides a fruitful ground for examining the problem of the novel as a preferred genre of theories of world literature. 3 Mondegreen (2019) and the Case for Menippean Satire Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (2022; Ukrai‐ nian original published in 2019) is a text true to its subtitle: The book is 190 pages long - a lengthy, but not long, and oftentimes lyrical musing on language, identity, war, displacement, society, and life. It cannot be convincingly called ‘a novel’ or even narrative for that matter. (Even though the front cover of its English edition sports the label ‘a novel’, possibly for reasons dictated by the book market.) Narrative progression and the building of a storyworld in this text are consistently disrupted because of the multidirectionality of time and multiple digressions from the story and its characters, dictated by a pure exploration of the joys and pitfalls of language. Rafeyenko lived and worked in Donetsk until 2014, when he had to flee the Russian invasion to a suburban town near Kyiv. In 2022 Rafeyenko and his family were lucky to escape - yet again - the Russian attack on the Kyiv region. Having graduated from the Donetsk University with a degree in Russian philology and culture studies, he wrote and published in Russian until 2014. Mondegreen is Rafeyenko’s first literary work in Ukrainian after he himself switched to Ukrainian in everyday life. ‘Mondegreen’ means a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics of a song. Besides being an indication of genre, the full title also foreshadows the logic of the text that follows. There is a clear setting: The text is held together by one protagonist, Haba Habinsky, who flees Donetsk in 2014 and moves to Kyiv, where he works in a grocery shop (called ‘Beautiful and Useful’), located in a huge, maze-like shopping mall (‘Karmatown’), since his journalistic writing and tutoring is not enough to sustain him in the very expensive capital of Ukraine. This clarity is immediately shaken up because Haba-the-character also sometimes coincides with the authorial, heterodiegetic narrator, and the narrator is often not distinguishable from Rafeyenko himself. Haba’s story is continuously interrupted by digressions hinging on individual words or phrases that allude to other texts, iconic quotes, songs, or advertisement slogans in a whirlwind of linguistic exploration: Let’s say, John the Evangelist. I mean, come on, man, if you indeed saw those four horsemen in your dreams, those that flew in to bomb Syria, then why didn’t you write just that? As in, dear people, what I can tell you about Armageddon. You read my 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 336 Natalya Bekhta 3 «Скажімо, Йоан Богослов. Ну дійсно, старенький, якщо ти вже бачив уві сні цих коней вогненних, які прилетіли бомбити Сирію, то чому прямо так не написав? Мовляв, люди добрі, що я можу вас сказати стосовно Армагедону. Ви читали моє «Одкровеннє» чи як там, «Об’явлення» (поїзд далі не піде, зупинка Героїв Дніпра, молоко, молозиво, м’ясо, сало, яйко, синє небо над головою кожної святої неділі, ей матко, моя матко, виховуй мє гладко, від неділі до неділі, як червоне ябко)» (Rafeyenko 2019: 14). 4 Lauren Goodlad has succinctly described distant reading as “a project of studying genre at a supratextual scale” (2020: 494). Since world literature usually implies studying fiction on a scale of transnational, transhistorical comparison with a vast corpus of literary texts, it requires supratextual methods. 5 «Через спогади про неіснуюче минуле, через казки та сновидіння людина-переселенець, а саме його рідкісний підвид — переселенець-поліглот — зустрічається нарешті з буттям. Із тим самим, яка за Парменідом є тільки тепер, ніколи в майбутньому, співвітчизники, ніколи в минулому. […] І вже Apocalypse, or should I say ἀποκάλυψις (the train isn’t going any farther, the stop is Heroїv Dnipra, cream, icy-cream, lima bean, protein, sea bream, sunshine on my shoulder makes me happy, mama ooh-ooh-ooh). 3 (Rafeyenko 2022: 9, original emphasis) A ‘distant’, supratextual reading 4 of Mondegreen reveals striking formal affinities with Menippean satire, a proto-genre from the pre-history of the novel. Monde‐ green offers a rudimentary fantastical plot that is a pretext for an exploration of Haba’s / Rafeyenko’s / Ukraine’s present, past, and future. It is a setting for Haba’s hallucinatory travels through the layers of Kyiv’s topography and history. These travels, in turn, are a way to meet strange people, animals, and characters straight from folk tales which offer an opportunity to draw in parody, travesty, multiplicity of styles, and languages. Mondegreen is written in Ukrainian, with occasional parenthetical notes in Russian or English and a broad play of various Ukrainian dialects. Individual words might give rise to a parodic fun with the literary classics to which these words allude, and random phrases may spark a play of linguistic associations. All this may be described, in a nutshell, as “excessiveness of language”, following an example from Mondegreen: Through the memories of a non-existent past, through folk tales and dreams, the refugee, and even more so this rarified version of him - the refugee-polyglot - finally comes face to face with being. […] And only later, this excessiveness of language, of course, finds very concrete, although not always comfortable or understood, representations. For example, already in those very first months after he began studying the language, this neo-Kyivite began to receive rather regular visits from the mare’s head (or the MR*). *The author knows that formally it should be MH. But let’s just keep it as MR. (Rafeyenko 2022: 17) 5 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 337 потім надмірність мови, ясна річ, віднаходить дуже конкретні, хоч і не завжди комфортні та зрозумілі образи. От, наприклад, із перших же місяців навчання української мови до киянина-початківця доволі регулярно почата приходити кобиляча голова (або КБ*). *Автор знає, що з формального погляду має бути КГ. Але хай уже буде КБ» (Rafeyenko 2019: 23). The Mare’s Head is a figure from a bizarre Ukrainian fairy tale, where the head visits a girl who is in exile in the forest. Yet another hint at the refugee fate of Haba / Rafeyenko, although it seems that the Mare’s Head is here because of the sheer joy of working with this incredible image and the linguistic fun it implies as some of the versions of this folk tale include song-like refrains and alliterations. The Mare’s Head is, furthermore, Haba’s tutor in Ukrainian, a materialisation of language, as it were, that pops up in the least comfortable moments to lecture him on the rules of word usage. How does a text like Mondegreen fit into genre theory? According to Bakhtin’s formulation, “in Menippean satire the unfettered and fantastic plots and situa‐ tions all serve one goal - to put to test and expose ideas and ideologues. These are experimental and provocative plots” (2017 [1981]: 26). In Mondegreen, linguistic fun and fantastic, magical, and mythical plot events arguably function to soften the provocation, which boils down to the implicit question to the reader: Given all the grief in the modern history of Ukrainian relations with the Russian empire, how is it that the contemporary Ukrainian society preferred (at the time of Rafeyenko’s writing) to live according to the “catechism of blessed ignorance” of its past (Rafeyenko 2022: 81)? Bakhtin, further: “Menippean satire is dialogic, full of parodies and travesties, multi-styled, and does not fear elements of bilingualism” (2017 [1981]: 26). Mondegreen follows this description one-to-one but, of course, no lists of features can really describe a genre. Additionally, since Menippean satire contributed greatly to the development of the novel, it may be difficult to single it out into a separate genre now. This difficulty is further compounded by the incredible plasticity of the novel. In his Theory of the Novel (2017), Guido Mazzoni observes: What is the novel today? If we were looking for a concise formulation that belonged to neither Schlegel nor Hegel nor Bakhtin but that neatly encapsulated an idea central to their theories, we might say this: Starting from a certain date, the novel became the genre in which one can tell absolutely any story in any way whatsoever. The boundless multiplicity of forms of life, whether real or possible, can be narrated from inside or outside consciousness, and at the same time any style can be adopted, allowing the variety of the subjective imagination to be revealed. (17) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 338 Natalya Bekhta In other words, the novel knows no restrictions in style or content but - and crucially - it does tell a story; the novel is narrative in form. Furthermore, despite all the variety of the novelistic subgenres and the many experiments with its form, the contemporary novel, for the most part, has a well-developed character system, sturdy plot, emotional and psychological depth - these are some of the elements that contemporary readers have come to expect from the novel (see, e.g. McHale 2022). Menippean satire, on the other hand, does not care for any of these, and it is freer than the novel in a formal sense, less regulated by conventions and readerly expectations. In Mondegreen even the narrative progression is secondary, subjugated to the focus on language and the exploration of (historical) memory, as well as the difficult questions of whether Haba / Rafeyenko / Ukraine could have gleaned from its past and present what was to come in 2014. In any case, my purpose here is not to challenge or refine definitions of the novel but to find a way of conveying generic distinctiveness of a certain category of texts that circulate in literatures of Central-Eastern Europe. When judged by the novelistic standards, these texts are often described as lacking - such as Farshrutka briefly discussed above. In his 2015 lecture on the cultural phenomenon of “The Iconic Ukrainian Novel”, Ukrainian literary critic and editor Mykhailo Brynykh describes key texts of the 1990s in a similar manner: Even though books like Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996) or Oles’ Ulianenko’s Stalinka (1994) were published as novels, “there is nothing novelistic about them” (Brynykh 2015: n.p.). Brynykh does not dwell on what comprises a novelistic quality, but he implies that, among other things, these texts are too short (about 100-150 pages) and have no discernible plot. Given the secondary role of story in such works, they are also sometimes described as incomprehensible. Lack of clarity as to what the text is about can nevertheless be viewed as a positive feature: As of the 1st of October 2023, half of the fifty reader reviews of Mondegreen on the book-cataloguing website Goodreads give it a maximum rating and generous comments, although each review summarises the book very differently. In the words of the Goodreads’ user ‘Serhiy’: “Very interesting, absolutely incomprehensible” (August 21, 2021). Curiously, Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love has no additional generic qualifier in the original publication (see Fig. 1). The publication information only adds ‘[Text]’ and the title page features the subtitle in brackets, by way of clarification what the text will be about. This should be a hint for the readers that any genre-related expectations may be put aside, even though the majority 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 339 6 I am grateful to Magdalena Pfalzgraf for this observation. 7 «Неясно наразі, як вивести КБ в ролі центральної постаті цієї повісті, бо ми багато вже говорили про неї, але вона все ще десь там, попереду цього несерйозного та невмілого наративу. І незрозуміло, як нам бути далі. А краще нічого й не розуміти (ми, зрештою, ніякі не Декарти), а просто завітати до Габи в один з вихідних днів, які вже відбулися на момент нашої оповіді або, навпаки, ще тільки of the readers probably nevertheless expect to get something novel-like and story-led in a print book positioned as ‘fiction’. 6 Figure 1. A spread of the Ukrainian edition of Mondegreen. Let us look at one more example relating to Mondegreen’s form: At this point, it is unclear how to make the MR the central character in this story, because we’ve talked about it a lot, but it’s still somewhere over there, up ahead of this flippant and inept narrative. And we don’t know how we should proceed. But it’s better not to know anything (we are, in fact, no Descartes), but instead simply visit Haba on a day when he is off from work, which may have already taken place at this moment in our story, or, conversely, is still to come. With this Kyiv time, you never know which day it is that people live in. (Rafeyenko 2022: 39, original emphasis) 7 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 340 Natalya Bekhta мають надійти. З цим київським часом ніколи не знаєш, який саме день живуть люди» (Rafeyenko 2019: 48). A narrative analysis of this kind of storytelling would be able to note that there is a self-reflexive authorial narrator, who is communicating very explicitly with the reader, that there are many metafictional and metanarrative comments, that the conventional chronology is uprooted - in short, we would be able to quite precisely describe what is going on in this passage on a technical level. We also would be able to single out clear motifs, dominant in Mondegreen, such as unreliability and the ‘reality as a dream’ trope, which manifests itself as Haba’s constant questioning of what is real and imagined, staged, fake, or true. In addition to allegory and personification, the motif of metamorphosis plays here a significant structuring role: Haba’s lover from his previous life as a lecturer in a Donetsk university literally transforms into a huge insect, in an unmistakable re-writing of Kafka. But the description of this literal metamorphosis is interspersed with references to metaphorical ones: “the meta‐ morphosis of the city” with the beginning of the war (109), the transformation of things that used to be laughable into something serious, the changes in people and so on. ‘Metamorphosis’ may even be seen as expanding from the story level into an overarching structuring principle and substituting the principle of ‘development’ of the narrative trajectory (see Bakhtin 2017: 113), where elements build on each other, with an unfolding that is spasmodic, sometimes haphazard, and mythologically motivated. However, as I have already mentioned, going through the features of a text would not necessarily help us define a genre, especially as the motifs and techniques of Mondegreen are nothing new in the history of the novel. What is distinctive about Mondegreen, and contemporary Menippean satire in general, is how these motifs and techniques combine. Their structural function is what distinguishes this text from the novel. As Bakhtin notes, individual motifs are not in themselves new: “they had already been developed in other genres […] - still, when combined in this new chronotope, they become subject to its ineluctable logic and thus acquire an utterly new meaning and special function” (2017 [1981]: 102; emphasis added). Franco Moretti phrased this view of genre transformation as follows: “Literary evolution does not normally proceed by inventing new themes or new methods out of the blue, but precisely by discovering a new function for those that already exist” (Moretti 1996: 20; emphasis added). The distinction between the form of Mondegreen 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 341 8 Susan Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan (2022: 430) have recently noted that this concept has been surprisingly underutilised by narratologists despite its continuing relevance. and that of the contemporary novel can be made on the basis of its distinctive chronotope. 8 Chronotope, or time-space, is the way time relates to space in narrative representations. It is “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 2017 [1981]: 84). According to Bakhtin, it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, since it allows to describe how old elements connect in a new way and thus produce a new generic form. The emphasis on the structural relationships between features is particularly important for such fluid genres as the novel and Menippean satire, which are impossible to describe if we focus on the features themselves. In Mondegreen - and here I am approaching the core of my hypothesis regarding the genre of Menippean satire - familiar motifs combine in an exploration of social reality which is tangibly material, like the war and its toll in death and destruction, but which at the same time is absolutely surreal. Put differently, Rafeyenko offers us a record of reality that, should you come across it in a novel, would be judged as impossible, absurd, over the top, unrealistic. This paradoxical combination is formally resolved through the chronotope of contingency. Contingency is what structures Mondegreen and what articulates, in this particular text, the formal freedom that characterises Menippean satire. We can see the force of contingency most clearly in the flexible flow of time in this text, which can go backwards and forwards without particular difficulty for the narrator or the storyworld. Linear temporal progression is an essential element of the narrative logic; this is what defines narrative. But in Mondegreen time is subjugated to the logic of language. What seems natural, immutable, given, can also be otherwise: “simply visit Haba on a day when he is off from work, which may have already taken place at this moment in our story, or, conversely, is still to come” (39). Contingency expresses the fact that the narration here is indifferent to whether or not events it narrates are real (in the storyworld), whether they happened or in which order - and thus, whether they are ultimately necessary for its progression. But in the ultimate twist, Mondegreen shows that even language, which dominates other chronotopic elements of this text, is contingent. Recall the example of Mare’s Head abbreviated as MR - for no apparent reason except for why not. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 342 Natalya Bekhta 9 Personal communication with Alexander Scherr. 4 Conclusion A narratological attention to the structural features of Mondegreen and how they combine into a particular chronotope - the temporal-spatial structure of a literary work - makes it possible to single out the particularity of this text, namely, its formal and stylistic freedom. I have suggested that Mondegreen is thus closer to the protogenre of Menippean satire than it is to the novel. At the same time, Menippean satire, it may be objected, is a proto-novelistic genre which contributed to the formation of the contemporary novel. Therefore, Mondegreen may just be the latest experiment with the novelistic form, especially given the novel’s constant fluctuation as a genre that never settles. A case can be made that this text is a satirical experiment with the conventions of the novel or what Alexander Scherr has called an “essay-novel” (2021: 263). Drawing out features of essayism - such as contingency, orientation towards possibility, openness, exploratory rather than narrative progression, lack of commitment to the plot arc - Scherr illuminates a significant subgenre of the novel that has been operating throughout the history of world literature. Examples of essay-novels 9 include canonical classics, such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) or Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930), as well as contemporary novels successful on the international literary field, such Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014) or Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015). In the Ukrainian context, one could cite Maik Yohansen’s Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with his Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta (2025 [1932]) as a typical example of the essay-novel. With its contingent chronotope, Mondegreen and my other examples are indeed seemingly very close to essayistic novels, with an added satirical twist. Finally, Mondegreen’s surreal elements suggest a strong affinity also with magical-realist novels. This comparison, however, implicitly suggests that narrative features and generic forms remain identical across time and space. In order to avoid such a universalist claim, my narratological observations about inherent genre properties must be qualified in world-literary terms. Since formal choices are inextricable from the particular world-historical position of a literary text, I propose to add a world-literary orientation to the narratological analysis in order to make a typological decision. Approaching Mondegreen as Menippean satire foregrounds those formal and generic features that are representative of literary processes in the Central-Eastern European fiction after the 1990s. Approaching Mondegreen as a variation on the form of the novel foregrounds its similarity to the canon of works that currently forms the core of world 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 343 literature, such as the well-known examples of magical realism or essay-novels. Both typological decisions have valid theoretical underpinnings, but the latter one would also imply that literary experimentation from the world-literary periphery is simply an engagement with the genre norms and traditions already consecrated by the world-literary core. The aesthetic processes of the world-literary region in which Mondegreen originates would be viewed in provincial terms as ‘coming afterwards’, as an imitation. On the one hand, the habitual currents of literary influence and exchange on the international literary field make it impossible to talk of any national literature or world-literary region as an isolated phenomenon. On the other hand, the absence of literatures from the former ‘Second World’ in contemporary literary theories needs to be first addressed on its own terms, before world-literary comparisons can be drawn so that such comparisons resist assimilatory implications. Ultimately, then, my suggestion to consider the possibility of contemporary re-emergence of Menippean satire is motivated by the formal peculiarities of certain literary texts viewed in a world-literary context. Texts like Mondegreen abound in contemporary Ukrainian fiction (see Bry‐ nykh 2015), which speaks to specific historical circumstances of Ukrainian literature. Since the 1990s each decade in Ukraine’s history has seen tectonic shifts in social reality. The collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by a spree of restructuring and privatisation; the 2004 ‘Orange revolution’ was followed by another change of ruling business elites, followed by the 2013 Maidan and the Russian invasion in 2014, followed by a full-scale war now in 2022. Literature in these conditions cannot settle, much like in Gombrowicz’s assessment quoted at the beginning of this article. Literature constantly faces pressing and relatively abstract, transindividual social concerns. The artist in these conditions also occupies a politically involved role and directly participates in the social and national struggle (see Casanova 2011 on ‘combative literatures’). The novelistic, predominantly narrative form cannot very easily capture the immediacy of social change or, worse, the chaos of war as it is still unfolding. When it comes to narrative in particular, war destroys one of the key elements of narrative tem‐ porality: the future. And so narrative loses its usual forward-moving trajectory oriented towards a resolution. Contemporary Ukrainian fiction offers a number of ingenious formal solutions to this representational dilemma and (Menippean) satire is one of them. Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen (2019) fits well into this category together with his earlier book, The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad (2023 [2017]), which is structured as a fairy tale with insertions of brutally realist novellas about life and death during war. Contemporary Menippean satires include also Ivan 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 344 Natalya Bekhta Semesiuk’s novellas about the adventures of Thomas the baboon (“Evolve or die! ” 2015 and “Farshrutka” 2016), Oleh Shynkarenko’s Pershi ukrainski roboty (First Ukrainian Robots, 2016) or such iconic works as Yurii Andrykhovych’s Recreations (1998 [1992]) and The Moscoviad (2009 [1993]). Research into other literatures of Central and Eastern Europe confirms contemporary significance of Menippean satire across this world-literary region (e.g. Katkus 2013): from Polish Witold Gombrowitcz and Tadeusz Konwicki to the works of Czech Bohu‐ mil Hrabal and Milan Kundera, Romanian Mircea Cărtărescu, Hungarian Péter Esterházy, Estonians Tõnu Õnnepalu and Paavo Matsin, Belarusian Alhierd Bacharevič, and others. Texts like Mondegreen draw attention to the variety of literary formats that structure contemporary aesthetic imagination as well as social imaginary - a variety that exists alongside the novel, rightly seen as the dominant genre of the contemporary literary field. These other forms and formats productively counter the generic limitations of the novel even if it may be tricky to see them at work. The novel, after all, is extremely flexible. It is a cannibalising genre, according to Terry Eagleton (2005: 1), or, as Bakhtin phrased it, “the novel gets on poorly with other genres”, and when it becomes the dominant genre, “almost all the remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent ‘novelized’” (2017 [1981]: 5). Given this special status of the novel, it is intriguing to observe that, at this point in world-literary history, there may be a genre resisting novelisation, such as satirical texts in literatures of the former ‘Second World’. At the same time, further work is needed to determine if this is indeed the case. In this chapter my goal was to put forward a hypothesis that, if proven valid, would add nuance to our understanding of contemporary world literature, of the international literary field, of its forms and genres as well as of the social realities they reflect. 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