VIKTOR NEBORAK

VIKTOR NEBORAK is a poet, prose writer, literary critic and translator who lives and works in Lviv, Ukraine. He is a founding member of the Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group, which gained enormous popularity in Ukraine during the late 1980s and the 1990s. The syllables of the group’s name stand for burlesk (burlesque), balahan (bluster) and bufonada (buffoonery). At that time, Neborak’s performances, and that of his Bu-Ba-Bu colleagues—Oleksandr Irvanets and Yuri Andrukhovych—were often at the center of mass gatherings that celebrated the cult of the new, which were ushered in by the fall of the Soviet Union. Neborak’s poems, particularly those from his ground-breaking collection Litaiucha holova (Flying Head), introduced a myriad of taboo topics into Ukrainian literature, including rock music and its imagery, which fed the suddenly free Ukrainian youth starved for Western symbols of freedom. His poems often feature an aspect of performance and, in fact, many of them served as texts to songs written and performed by the then-budding and now-legendary rock bands Plach Ieremiï (Jeremiah’s Cry) and Mertvyi Piven (Dead Rooster).

Neborak is the author of ten collections of poetry. He has also authored the novel Bazylevs, a monograph analyzing Ivan Kotliarevskyi’s Eneïda (2001), and a monograph on Ivan Franko entitled Ivan Franko: Vershyny i nyzyny (Ivan Franko: Highs and Lows, 2016). Neborak has published four books collecting his essays and literary criticism. He currently works at the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Literature in Lviv.

Viktor Neborak’s events in the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series, entitled The Flying Head and Other Poems, took place in January 2009.