Wild Music. Maria Sonevytsky

have suggested wild [дикі] … if she had called them “Fiery Dances,” she would have hit the mark [попала в точку] and become a national hero. But someone must have suggested—this—“wild” and she went with it—and wild has many meanings, a few different aspects. The word dyki literally means primitive … implies that someone is primitive. People understood in its most direct meaning, and so, there were some incidents … people did not accept it, but then it passed, all of that. (personal communication, January 20, 2009)

      A local historian based in the village of Kryvorivnia expressed another view on Ruslana’s impact. He commented on the fact that “wildness” is a pervasive and potentially insidious stereotype of his culture, but that it can be read multiply, as evidenced through varied reactions of Hutsuls to Ruslana’s depiction. (His village, Kryvorivnia, had spearheaded the attempt to boycott the album in Ukraine, expressing outrage at the term “wild” in the album title, though he was not directly involved.) As we talked about trendy representations of Hutsuls in popular music and historical representations in ethnographic studies, he shared a nuanced position: on the one hand, it’s good to raise awareness of our existence; on the other hand, we don’t deserve slander (personal communication, October 19, 2009). Many others voiced such ambivalent reactions, acknowledging that while Ruslana may have raised the profile of Hutsuls internationally and helped stimulate tourism to the region, it came at the price of disgrace and through the reinforcement of negative stereotypes.

      While shrugging ambivalence and unfavorable reviews of Ruslana’s chart-topping Wild Dances were common among Hutsuls in many regions of Hutsulshchyna, some evaluated her work more positively. One young Hutsul violinist told me, “Ruslana brought glory to Ukraine” (interview, January 29, 2009). During my fieldwork, many Hutsuls would simply laugh about the dispute, repeating a canonical joke such as, “What is a Hutsul? He is a Ukrainian, but wild!”¹⁰

      Debate about Wild Dances in Hutsulshchyna arose in many social situations, including the quotidian practice of locals gossiping about each other. On January 7, 2009 (Christmas Day by the Julian Calendar), I trudged through the snow to the Sergei Parajanov Museum in Verkhovyna with my host Oksana, her friend Svitlana, two visiting tourists from Kyiv and Sweden, and my Russian American friend, who had come to visit me. In the two-room Parajanov Museum, located in the humble Hutsul house where the Georgian-born, ethnically Armenian filmmaker lived while directing the internationally acclaimed Soviet-era film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, tour guide Pani Halyna recited her guide’s monologue and then opened the small floor to questions. As the formality of the tour-guide-to-audience relationship relaxed, she shared a story concerning Ruslana and her reception since “Wild Dances” had won Eurovision. Following a devastating flood in the Verkhovyna region, which destroyed many homes in isolated villages in July 2009, Ruslana sent provisions via Hummer and helicopter, and also wanted to stage a concert to “lift the people’s spirits.” The people, however, were not all receptive. Pani Halyna and Oksana discussed:

      HALYNA: My godmother [kuma] was involved in the Dyki Tantsi project. Maybe you remember, in the first video [“Znaiu Ya”], there were three ladies, and they’re all standing, and they show their fingers—do you remember? It was a short fragment. And so she came to me and said, “Did you see Pani Marijka on the television?” And I hadn’t seen it yet … She was so offended! Even now when there were the floods, she [Ruslana] loaded up a whole truck with provisions and sent it up to [the village of] Zamagora—

      OKSANA: Yes, that’s true—

      HALYNA: Okay, I heard all of this from my godmother; I don’t ask these questions myself! [Laughs] And so this lady said, “She made a joke of me to all of Ukraine, this humiliation, and now I’m supposed to take her macaroni too?” I laughed so hard!

      OKSANA: [Speaking to me] See, our people are stubborn as rams!

      MARIA: Did she know they were making a film?

      HALYNA: Yes, but, you see, they said for what? Why turn the cameras to show our fingers? Like we don’t wash! … They were so mad, even that one fellow Futivsky, he said it was really not good, said they made us into clowns, with horns …

      OKSANA: No, well, the thing is that there is progress! She couldn’t have just given us the same old thing—then it wouldn’t be her song! Let the troisti muzyky (traditional trio ensemble) set up and play; that’s one style and hers is a different one—

      HALYNA: That’s what I’m saying—this is modernity [сучасність]!

      OKSANA: But I think we made an important project! And the fact that people get so upset about these Dyki Tantsi, I tell them, “Good people, we should be proud that we’re dyki, that our nature here is wild, so let us be wild in that sense, as in primordial [первозданними]! But our people, they say, “We’re not wild, we’re like this, we’re like that.” But why should we be ashamed? … See, and even now, she’s so proud, she’ll die of hunger before she takes macaroni.

      Oksana articulated another viable interpretation of Ruslana’s Wildness, in which it stands as a trope of resistance to the commercial, urban industrialized world (even as “Wild Dances” is made significant due to its commercial success). For Oksana, Wildness emphasizes the obvious fact that Hutsuls live in rural conditions, or as Ruslana would have it, in “wild nature, high in the mountains” (press materials, 2005). Later in the same conversation, Oksana pointed out that the women featured in the video should not be ashamed of having the dirty fingernails and weathered hands of a farmer or shepherd, since the traditional values and lifestyles that Hutsuls take so much pride in maintaining are based on agrarian, subsistence living.

      The local mol’far (shaman) Mykhailo Nechai articulated a position similarly sympathetic to Ruslana’s depiction of Hutsul Wildness. As a public figure in his own right (known for being the “Last Living Carpathian Mol’far”), he acted as a spiritual consultant to Ruslana when she was developing her original Hutsulian Project, and remained a trusted advisor until his tragic death in 2011: “She took the strength of Hutsulshchyna and showed the whole world! Beautiful women, outside and inside, Hutsuls’ wild and active dances. She was in seventy countries of the world, and she showed the artistry of our Hutsuls, that the whole world watched and marveled, not only those seventy countries of the world, but even more. So she’s a woman deserving because, you understand, she showed the history of our Hutsulshchyna” (personal communication, February 2, 2009).¹¹

      Outside of Hutsulshchyna, some accounts of Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” rehearsed romanticized notions of Hutsul “wildness” in celebratory, sometimes naïve terms. One Western Ukrainian reviewer rhapsodized that “Wild Dances” was “an attempt to touch the soul of the people, which has always been in harmony with the universe. Consciously or not, Ruslana has brought to life a deep, strange layer of genetic memory […] that is able, ultimately, to explode with revelation: yes, I am a Ukrainian, these are my lands, my mountains, my people” (Koval’, quoted in Pavlyshyn 2006, 482).

      Perhaps it is no surprise that the kitschy nationalistic pageant of Eurovision would cultivate such prideful feelings in Ukrainians who saw Ruslana’s depiction as embodying a deeply entrenched truth about their culture. Yet such attempts to draw the line from a conceptual and essentialized Ukrainian Wildness through the Indigenous Hutsuls to Ruslana’s polysemic Wild Dances resulted in a variety of reactions from Hutsuls whose intrinsic Wildness was purportedly being represented on the global stage. Why? In part, because at the heart of this debate over Wildness lies the perennial question about affiliation in Ukraine, a nation forever occupying a liminal position as the historical crossroads and battleground of empires, and now the borderland between the exclusive European Union and Russia. By activating the stereotype of Hutsul Wildness for the benefit of the Eurovision-consuming public, Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” provoked anxious discourse among Hutsuls about whether Ukraine could be taken seriously as a “European” state if it portrayed itself as a cradle of ancient, primitive expressive culture. To many of my Hutsul interlocuters, “Wild Dances” represented an obstacle on the path to Ukraine’s integration into the European Union.

      Many