Wild Music. Maria Sonevytsky

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,