Life is always more interesting than anything written about it. We are thrilled to “read” the world using some imperceptible signs in order to come closer to understanding it. We are attracted by life experiences of noted personalities capable of understanding it. Vadym Skurativsky is one such personality. One does not have to think of an excuse — a new book, film, etc. — to meet and talk to him. The very presence of such a figure in a certain time and place forms a sequence of collisions and reflections worth being put on record.
“THE SOVIET LIE GAVE RISE TO A WHOLE SERIES OF OTHER FALSEHOODS”
Mr. Skurativsky, you are quite active in various branches of the humanities — history, art and film criticism, literature, and so forth. Where do you think you have accomplished most?
V. S.: Nowhere, unfortunately. I haven’t accomplished what I should have in any of those fields. Because I couldn’t. I tried to study Shevchenko in the 1970s. I wrote an article (only one, as it happened), so they kicked me out not only from the magazine Vsesvit , but from Ukrainian literary life. I tried historiography and was shown the door. Before that I’d tried to become a Germanist and failed.
How did your childhood, that epoch and its atmosphere, affect your world outlook?
V. S.: I was born in October 1941, and the Germans had seized Chernihiv the previous month. My father was in the Red Army and my mother was with the partisans, probably acting on some kind of instinct, so my brother and I were with her. We were in the forest and I can vividly remember that naive sense of absolute quiet among the trees. That idyll seemed eternal and absolute. Years later I realized that, had the occupier’s dragon hit that small partisan camp with just its tail, nothing would have been left of it. Also, I was scared by the war and this fear has stayed with me. That’s why I’m so frightened by that stupid US-Iraqi war. In general, I’m scared by all cataclysms: revolutions, wars, and the peace that begets another war.
Do you remember when you made your choice and what decided you?
V. S.: The thing is that I was always instinctively aware of all that falsehood inherent in all the Soviet models of the past. Not because I was so bright, but because the Soviets always said their system was the best in the world. Meanwhile life in the countryside was very hard, so I finally suspected that not everything the official propaganda told us about the past was true.
After the university, I graduated in Romano-Germanic philology — making a choice wasn’t easy, because we all sensed the falsehood in what they told us in class — not only party history, but even the more “respectable” subjects. After graduate school finding a job was a problem; first, I had no residence permit, so I had to live from odd jobs in the 1970s. It was no way to live as a normal individual, of course. Three times they let me work at the Institute of Philosophy, but every time I had to quit because I was not a Party member or because my job suddenly turned out to be redundant. Quite frankly, recognition is a very long process. It’s still underway because there’s too much falsehood about our past and establishing the truth is very difficult. You see, there are lies that produce other lies supposedly antagonistic to them. And then try to find the truth.
I remember leafing through a literary collection commemorating Motrzhynska. Now she was one tough KGB lady. Then she became a professor specializing in combating anticommunism. I was also shown a collection of foreign Ukrainists polemized with one of the authors of that collection on Comrade Motrzhynska. A friend of mine glanced through the former and latter collections and told me, “It’s all the insane fighting the insane.” Let me tell you: Soviet lies triggered off a whole lot of other falsehood. I have to say that the Soviet lie provoked a whole series of other falsehoods. Now in Russia and partially here we see a supposedly alternative to the Communist model of the past. Good Heavens! It’s as false as the 1939 History of the VKP(b): Short Course.
“AN AGE HAS COME WHERE FOOLS ARE MANY BUT A MAN CAN BE FREE”
Getting back to your roots and search for an alternative, you seem to have found it. What role did Kyiv play with its old and rich culture?
V. S.: Kyiv is a European city, but starting with the 1918 pogrom by Muraviov, it has been disowning European culture, first spasmodically and then systematically. It’s this city’s tragedy. At least there were closed library reserves in Moscow and partially in Leningrad, containing European literature inaccessible to the general public. There were no such archives in Kyiv. Under Volodymyr Shcherbytsky it became grotesque, even paranoid. I watched the quasicultural life at the time. We are all ignoramuses, starting with that epoch of ignorance. The situation in Russia was a bit different. Moscow was fully informed in a diameter of 100 kilometers. That Eurasian city was closer to Europe than Kyiv, in all respects. To travel to Warsaw from Kyiv, one had to travel to Moscow first, meaning that Kyiv was a slighted city and it was saved only by people remembering the concentration camp alternative.
How did you know it was time to surface, what was the signal as the times had begun to change?
V. S.: In 1986, I watched the Shcherbytsky regime in its death throes: the Chornobyl disaster and the petty continuity of the regime. Shcherbytsky had one chance. He should’ve told the Kremlin in May there would be no festive demonstrations in Kyiv. He would’ve become a national hero. But for him saying no to the empire was unthinkable, so he paid for it.
I then worked at the Institute of Culture (currently Poplavsky’s institute), the epitome of totalitarian stupidity and meanness. There was a soiree commemorating Academician Hrushevsky, I took the floor and spoke sharply. Shcherbytsky hated what I said, yet I wasn’t arrested. Several days later I received a call from the KGB. I was told that I would be visited by a British woman journalist: “in view of this we suggest that you say such- and-such...” I said I knew what to discuss with journalists and hung up. No one bothered me afterward. Several weeks later, Vsesvit editor Oleh Mykytenko called and proposed I write a foreword for Orwell’s 1984, this model work of anticommunist literature. This sent me flying off the couch and to the desk. Four hours later I was at the editorial office with four typewritten pages. The novel appeared in print (although the word “party” was replaced by “organization” throughout the text, a last minute correction, I would learn).
We are talking about the hermetic space of intellectual life. What about society?
V. S.: I realized that things were actually changing in August 1991, in front of the White House in Moscow. The Soviet Union, a giant structure, looking grand the way an Egyptian pyramid or ziggurat does, was collapsing after decaying from the late 1960s through the late 1980s. The authorities decided that any kind of modernization was not for them. It was grotesque. Xerox machines appeared, a powerful tool of Western civilization. Before only one such machine was available at the Vernadsky Library [in Kyiv] and one had to submit an application, be entered on a waiting list, and only 24 pages could be copied. And this country with such a Xerox philosophy expected to survive! Not to mention videotape recorders and players. They were banned in the Soviet Union.
True, there was enough stupidity across the Atlantic as well. Reagan with his Hollywood actor’s mentality (that says it, doesn’t it?) was responsible for world security and one of his civilian generals said there were things in the world more important than peace.
Also, I feel ashamed hearing all those nasty things about Gorbachev. Let’s face it: where would we all now if not for his futile attempt at democracy? Long since rotting in a radiation field. All his reforms were weak, but he did the most important thing, forbidding the secret police to arrest those who wanted more. The result was incredible. My daughter was in the department of history and I asked her once who she thought was the best university teacher. She said the party history one, a young docent who’d come and offered to tell them the truth and done so the whole semester!
CHRISTIAN CULTURE TEACHES VIRTUOUS GESTURES FROM WITHIN
You say that people have more things to choose between now, but maybe this is what makes one feel so confused?
V. S.: Maybe, but why feel confused? You see, in this confusion most people try to find a certain level of comfort. You sit in your armchair and watch, excuse me, some televised lie. That’s the easiest choice. All right, then try to choose between the channels and what to see and hear. I watched Yegor Konchalovsky’s Antikiller the other day. I believe it’s a real horror film. The young director, representing an aristocratic dynasty in the creative realm that has smoothly passed through all the political systems, now tries to keep afloat producing perfect kitsch. That’s not art, that’s dead art. After watching this kitsch for two hours, one is bound to waste some of one’s biographical time to make that choice. Efforts have to be made. One may complain all one wants, saying one is attacked by all kinds of strategies, world views, polarized views, but remaining inactive. That’s one’s tragedy and it could end in a very bad way. An average American, for example, falls prey to all those mass complications, all that stupidity that has been fed him for half a century, eventually forming in his mind (not to mention the subconscious) rather chimerical configurations. So we have to wage war on Iraq? Then we will. And they allow their leaders to do just that and they start a war that, I daresay, won’t end in this century. I am told that spectators vote with their feet. Indeed, those same spectators voted for Hitler in the twentieth century. In the fall of 1917, five-sixths of the Russian population were against the Provisional Government. A person must make his choice! The Soviet people couldn’t, unlike the Americans. Well, the situation across the ocean was different, they had good humanities professors... Although, quite honestly, they had good professors but lazy students.
Yet it was generally believed that our people were better educated. Another myth?
V. S.: It’s a bit more complicated than meets the eye. In a sense our humanities had more information about the classics. Intuitively, we always felt that the classics were the alternative to the darkness in which we lived. People in the West poorly know the classics, theirs and others, but have always had a superstructure, democracy. After all, people instinctively knew that, if not protected by knowledge of the world, they would be protected by democracy. This, in principle, corresponded to the reality at the time. We, in contrast, knew that we couldn’t refer, say, to the minister of culture. We knew that Comrade Furtseva or Comrade Bezklubenko were out fighting that very culture.
1991 saw the appearance on the historical arena of a generation showing little interest in classical cultural forms, regarding them as past realities. As for modern realities, they are interested at best in Dumas imitators. Young people read such books without making any choice. They are kitsch-oriented, and kitsch doesn’t explain anything. The current generation, however, has an opportunity to make their choices. A young individual can now receive an amount of information, within minutes, which I spent decades collecting with great difficulty. What I have in mind is the classical way to obtain information: by reading books and visiting libraries. The Internet? Stanislaw Lem once said that 90% of the Web is turning into a system where mankind dumps all its stupidity, all its myths and ignorance.
Still, do you consider this problem social more than personal? How can this situation be improved?
V. S.: A lot depends on those who wield power. Yet why should any government feel concerned about every citizen’s world outlook? The regime cannot keep abreast of the freedom of choice. This choice must be made by every citizen, from within. Christian culture teaches virtuous gestures precisely that way, from within. As for the Ukrainian situation — not so long ago our country officially marked Volodymyr Shcherbytsky’s 85th anniversary. It was actually a scandal in terms of world view, demonstrating the [cultural and moral] level of our political elite. So what is one to expect from the masses? They sit and watch their 20 channels, choosing the same televised stupidity. We have to understand one thing: commercial art explains nothing. It’s merely a specific quasiaesthetic pseudonym for big money. Kitsch operates an elementary aesthetic keyboard and does not help young people get their bearings in this complex world. This is the tragedy of the twentieth century in the West, and now it’s becoming our problem as well.
WE MUST NOT SAY THAT GOD IS DEAD
Could the crisis in the arts causes a crisis in human relationships and those between civilizations, as evidenced by the situation with Iraq?
V. S.: Mankind doesn’t realize what happened in the twentieth century. First, a total war that could only result in a revolution begetting eccentric regimes that people would later try to get rid of. Saddam Hussein is a child of the world revolution and, consequently, world war. Once the Arabs were totally dependent on Turkey. They were liberated by the world war and Iraq appeared. At first it was entirely British-minded, but permanent nationalist revolution made it a sovereign, independent country, so Hussein had to appear onstage. In fact, he was sired by Europe, America, and of course the Soviet Union. Now the West is going to topple the dictator, without realizing that another leader will appear and be just as eccentric that Hussein, saying he wouldn’t mind a dialog with the US, will seem like a cub scout in comparison.
In the late nineteenth century some intellectuals claimed that God was dead; now we should likewise declare that the arts are dying. What will happen next?
V. S.: Actually, that’s how it all begins. We must never say that God is dead. French revolutionary leader Saint-Juste once said, quite unexpectedly to him, that peoples live and die so that God can remain alive. There must be some eternal, all-embracing truth. Those saying that God was dead made a very bad mistake in terms of Weltanschauung. We must proceed from the fact that our God exists and that His very presence in the Cosmos can send man a message. What message is still a great mystery to me, but of course not the war on Iraq or that dull quasi-avant-garde Western concept. There must be the beacon of the world and God is that Beacon in terms of our world view. Now and then intellectuals like Nietzsche appear and try to extinguish the beacon. So what happens? Nietzsche became insane and part of the human race in Europe also lost its mind.
