Bu-Ba-Bu

Bu-Ba-Bu (an abbreviation of 'Burlesque — Balahan — Buffoonade') is a literary grouping of three poets, founded in 1985 in Lviv, which became the most vivid phenomenon of Ukrainian literary Postmodernism at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Its members were Yurii Andrukhovych (the Patriarch), Viktor Neborak (the Procurator), and Oleksandr Irvanets (the Treasurer). The aesthetics of Bu-Ba-Bu rested on carnival, irony, play, parody, the lowering of pathos, the joining of the 'high' and the 'low', and the theatricalization of poetic performances (the legendary 'poeso-opera' Chrysler Imperial). The grouping freely and wittily ridiculed Soviet ideological clichés and returned to literature the freedom, play, and joy of the word. Bu-Ba-Bu exerted a significant influence on the further development of Ukrainian poetry, becoming a symbol of the liberation and renewal of national letters in the era of gaining independence.