James Joyce, the French Writer: Ukrainian Reception of James Joyce in the 1920–1930s

The article analyzes the reception of the works by Irish modernist author James Joyce in Soviet Ukrainian and Western Ukrainian literary journals and press of the 1920-1930s. The exceptional focus is put on the mistake made by Antin Pavluk in his article “New Novel In French Literature” in 1927, when he called J. Joyce a French writer and transliterated his name accordingly. Further examination put light on other mistakes made by the Soviet critics, including various misspellings of Joyce’s name and Abram Leytes’ claim that J. Joyce’s novel “Ulysses” was set in London instead of Dublin. The trend of exaggerating the length of “Ulysses” was also noted and compared to the similar trend of Soviet critics adding additional volumes to Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time.” The article proposes that even though those trends started as incidental misinterpretations, they ultimately became clichés designed to stress the supposed exes of Western bourgeois literature. Despite this, Soviet stance on J. Joyce was not yet cemented in this period, as the critical evaluation of Joyce’s literary work varied from pro-Marxist to reactionary, depending on the goals of the examined article. In the 1930s, as the Stalinist repressions escalated, the discussion on J. Joyce rapidly declined. At the same time, in Western Ukraine, where the conversation were not so active during the 1920s, the 1930s marked two important developments in regard to Ukrainian Joycean studies: the publication of the Ukrainian translation of the short story “Eveline” in Lviv magazine “Dzvony” in 1933 and the release of Daria Vikonska’s monograph “James Joyce: The Mystery of His Artistic Face” in Lviv in 1934. Although D. Vikonska’s study was disregarded by critics, noting the lack of the full translation of “Ulysses”, the article acknowledges its importance as the first large-scale examination of J. Joyce’s work in Ukrainian. The article concludes that J. Joyce was not widely known in Soviet circles during the 1920s, but the reception was noticeably fuller in Western Ukraine in the 1930s.