Biographical factors of pseudonyms of the Ukrainian writers in DP camps

Abstract

The article focuses on the pseudonyms of those Ukrainian writers who, after Stalinist repression and concentration camps, were imprisoned in DP camps in the postwar period. The label of an ‘enemy of the people’ forced them to make every effort to avoid repatriation. The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the biographical factors that influenced the pseudonymy of expatriate authors.

The study focuses on the biographical information, personal traits, family circumstances, and often the place of imprisonment, which determined the range of authorial reflections in the postwar period and found explicit or implicit expression in the fictitious names. In order to achieve this goal, the author uses historical, comparative and biographical research methods, which allow, on the one hand, to reconstruct the biographical conflicts of each individual author, and, on the other, to consider non-returnees as a rather diverse community united by similar desires and goals.

The study found that the writers created pseudonyms from the names of Ukrainian ethnic regions, cities, villages, rivers, islands, plants or animals, and their own or their fathers’ names. The authors hid behind their mothers’ maiden names, as well as the names of famous literary characters. To avoid repatriation, they used pseudo-andronyms (Kateryna Perelisna — Klym Pyshchyk, Olha Petyk — Volodymyr Olhovych) and pseudo-hybrids (Volodymyr Kulish — Seraphyma Husochka). However, they rarely used anagrams to create pseudonyms.

The novelty of the study includes the identification of the functional load of the removed names, which served not only for the conspiracy of expatriates, but also for their self-presentation in the foreign-speaking world, and often turned out to be a sign of the emergence of a new author’s role.