Oksana Zabuzhko on sex and national history

"Field Studies of Ukrainian Sex," an internationally successful novel by Ukrainian author Oksana Zabuzhko, has become a kind of Bible of the women's movement in her homeland. Zabuzhko explains her book's success in an interview with Werner Bloch: "The fate of the nation, national identity, the past – all these lofty themes were translated into the language of the female body. It was a kind of love story of our national history. ... For a writer, sex is a fabulous laboratory. The heroes are naked – physically, spiritually and psychologically. And yet most authors fail ... Kundera, however, only has to put someone in bed, and we can peel away all the person's layers like an onion. I love it. But Kundera does get on my nerves because he is so macho. I wanted to create a kind of female counterpart to him."

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