An opportunity to present new editions and establish business contacts, the Book World Fair also featured numerous roundtables that were convened to identify cultural problems and discuss ways of solving them. The problems ranged from purely professional ones to general questions.
Does Ukraine have a cultural policy? Can contemporary Ukraine be considered a cultured nation? What should be done to remedy the situation? The answer to the last question encompasses all three points of discussion. Thus, the roundtable addressed the general state of Ukrainian culture. According to roundtable moderator Yury Makarov, representatives of the main cultural domains shared their reflections on this issue.
Oksana ZABUZHKO, writer:
“Today culture exists according to Soviet principles, which reduce its significance to songs and dances that depend on government support. This is an essentially totalitarian understanding of culture, which we inherited from the Stalinist era. In the contemporary world this notion and perception of culture is absolutely irrelevant. Culture is not a separate sphere of life. It is a social value. Today all UN documents gauge the living standards in every country not in terms of per capita income but the so-called humanitarian development index, whose absolute priority is to ensure the cultural rights of citizens and the freedom to use them.
“Meanwhile, the contemporary Ukrainian political environment is devoid of understanding of the relationships between the state and culture, which are inherent in any civilized society. What does culture ask of the state? Funding and subsidies are an important factor, but not a determining one for culture in general. Culture is independent and valuable in and of itself. It needs two basic things: adequate laws and, paradoxical as it may sound, a prosperous society — wealthy people and affluent consumers of culture. Then society will independently fund culture, say, by buying theater tickets worth 100-200 hryvnias or a book.
“There is also the problem of information. The coverage of culture in the mass media is nothing short of tragic. In reality, the cultural topic is redundant and optional in the media. Culture is in a state of informational chaos, in which journalists cannot be called to account for what they write.
“We must understand that culture is a living organism, which will develop in an appropriate social, and primarily legislative, climate. Culture must not be a crowd of “camp idiots” (from the novel The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), to whom the administration throws a few scraps from their table. Culture wants to be supported by a society that would be able to provide adequate funding for this sphere.”
Yury MAKAROV, journalist (One Plus One Television):
“Here’s a joke about a piano. An oblast state administration promises to buy a piano for its regional philharmonic. A representative from the philharmonic goes to the administration only to learn that there won’t be any piano, because the money has been spent on tickets for end-of-season concerts of oblast philharmonics at the Ukrayina Culture Palace. The moral is: if we decide in principle that we need philharmonics in Ukraine, especially in all the oblasts, we must take into account the fact that each one must have at least one piano.”
Mykhailo ILYENKO, film director:
“I would like to tell you what hurts me as a filmmaker. Today we have so much politics that I get the impression that we’re going to overdose. But I think that we aren’t running the risk of becoming addicted. Our mission is to balance everything in normal proportions to prevent overdoses.”
Yevhen KARAS, art gallery expert:
“The governmental action plan ‘to ensure comprehensive access to the cultural heritage, create cultural demand among the population, improve conditions for creative work, and enhance Ukraine’s positive cultural and artistic image abroad’ is creating a legal environment for culture. But it seems to me that the factors of responsibility, professionalism, and desire to make Ukraine a cultured state are extremely important here. This program obviously does not provide for such factors.”
Serhiy PROSKURNIA, theater expert:
“We are now facing chaos. Unfortunately, the achievements of several generations of cultural and art workers before 1991 — which were supposed to lay the groundwork for laws and strategic documents, and provide the underpinnings for the development of independent and contemporary Ukrainian culture and arts — are in disarray and have been frittered away by certain individuals. What we are facing now is forcing us to roll up our sleeves again and harmonize our work.
“First of all, we must systematize all subjects of creative activity in Ukraine. This represents a colossal amount of work that needs to be done. After we create a database, we will be able to establish an information policy in the sphere of culture and arts.”
Leonid FINKELSTEIN, publisher:
“Last year we went to Odesa. We stopped by a local bookshop only to find our books in the Foreign Literature section. How’s that for state cultural policy? When we were in Poltava, we stopped by some state- owned bookstores and offered to put our books up for sale, to which we heard in Russian: ‘Nobody reads them here!’ How’s that for state cultural policy?
“We should not say that Russian books are ousting Ukrainian books. After all, we are dealing not with an expansion of Russian literature but an expansion of cheap Russian popular culture. Only the mass media can help open our society’s eyes to this.”
Oleksandr AFONIN, president of the Association of Ukrainian Publishers:
“I have completed a thorough study of all cultural policy documents passed by different Ukrainian governments and prime ministers in the past nine years. I didn’t find the word ‘book’ in a single document. Books are missing from our cultural and social policy. They are not to be found in documents that constitute the science strategy. Thus, the impression is that books don’t exist. But everyone knows that they do exist, like a sort of bastard, but no one wants to recognize this.”
