BOOK REVIEWS: Myrna Kostash's new book provides historical narratives via a personal journey (06/27/99)

BOOK REVIEWS

Myrna Kostash's new book provides historical narratives via a personal journey

The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir by Myrna Kostash. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1998. 182 pp.

by Luba Krekhovetsky

Trudging through the snow-covered campus of the University of Alberta in the 1960s, a young Myrna Kostash dreamed of civil rights demonstrations and freedom marches. Her passion for political activism motivated a decades-long quest for a political ideal embodied in the form of the "rebel hero." Self-reflective, disarmingly honest and inherently political, Ms. Kostash's latest offering, "The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir," takes the reader on a personal journey through Greece, Ukraine, Slovenia, Poland, Serbia and back to Canada in search of the perfect love.

It is not unusual for a writer to use a journey as a metaphor for the inner life of the protagonist; in fact, Ms. Kostash's previous book "Bloodlines: A Journey into Eastern Europe" (Douglas & McIntyre, 1993) chronicles her journey to the former Soviet Union on the eve of its demise. What distinguishes "The Doomed Bridegroom" from other tales of travel and self-discovery, however, is the intimate nature of her journey: it recounts the author's relationships with men.

The landscapes of "The Doomed Bridegroom" are similar to those of "Bloodlines": the troubled histories and revolutionary movements of Central and Eastern Europe, or what Ms. Kostash terms the "other Europe." Some of the characters are also familiar: socialists, revolutionaries and dissident writers committed to resistance, mostly against Soviet imperialism. But this time these scenes are revisited by Ms. Kostash as a lover rather than as a writer and activist.

The "Doomed Bridegroom" describes Ms. Kostash's relationships - real and imagined - with various "bridegrooms," while deftly eschewing the man-in-every-port formula one might expect from such a plotline. Beginning with Lenny, the Jewish student activist, it traces Ms. Kostash's "personal history of arousal" by revolutionary figures who captivate her with "the ardor of their ideas." There is Kostas, the Greek Communist revolutionary; Vasyl Stus, the Ukrainian dissident poet; "K," the unnamed and ambiguous Polish writer; the feckless Canadian Mennonite known only as "Dear Heart"; and finally, the unidentified young Serbian poet.

Yet, for all its talk of lovers, "The Doomed Bridegroom" isn't simply about lovers. It's also about Ms. Kostash's relationship to politics as revealed through her persistent attraction to the type of the doomed bridegroom: the revolutionary figure, passionate, idealistic, committed, yet "unavailable to the claims of intimacy," and carrying his demise with him "like [the] spore of predestination." Ultimately, it's about the desire for an elusive rebel figure who shares her political commitments.

Rather than divorcing the personal from the political, Ms. Kostash sees the two as intimately linked. She writes: "I am intrigued by the inextricability of political and sexual arousal, and the ways in which I am drawn, over and over again, in sympathies of desire, to heroic figures in the extremity of resistance and sacrifice." Ms. Kostash the socialist-writer-feminist is indivisible from Ms. Kostash the lover.

Although the story is told from Ms. Kostash's point of view, the "bridegrooms" act as vehicles for a deeper engagement with politics and history. Predictably, the chapters that deal with Ukraine are more heavily weighted than others. For instance, the imagined relationship with Stus provides a historical overview of the Soviet suppression of Ukrainian language and culture. Similarly, the relationship with the nameless Mennonite serves as a point of departure for examining the history of Ukrainian-Mennonite relations.

The "bridegrooms" thus serve as entry points for exploring the historical narratives of Eastern Europe. To varying degrees, every one of the relationships demands that the lovers come to terms with their shared, and sometimes antagonistic, histories. Through these characters, Ms. Kostash is able to reconstruct the complicated histories between ethnic groups - Ukrainian serfs and their Polish masters; Ukrainian peasants and their Mennonite landowners - from both perspectives. This, undoubtedly, is one of Ms. Kostash's strengths: her ability to juxtapose two divergent perspectives on a single history while lending credence and understanding to both.

In this sense, "The Doomed Bridegroom" is representative of the Ukrainian Canadian author's writing style, which draws together exhaustive historical research and countless literary sources, and combines them with her personal reflections.

The forthrightness with which Ms. Kostash reveals the details of her personal life is both disarming and seductive; she is unafraid to pose herself the tough questions, even though she knows she may end up disappointed with the answers. Above all, it is this honesty that makes "The Doomed Bridegroom" a signature Myrna Kostash work.

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