Saint Augustine wrote in the fourth century that time is contained in human consciousness which is waiting, understanding, and remembering.
At times it seems that we Ukrainians are a people ill suited for living in the present realities. We owe this particularly to the Soviet regime. We were taught to live in misery and endure all hardships for the sake of a brilliant Communist future. At the time, current realities were by and large of little importance. One Soviet generation after the next was promised lavish compensations in the not so distant future for all their current sufferings.
As for the pre-Revolutionary period, even ten years ago almost all our contacts with it were severed. Under the Soviets, history, all past events were “freely” interpreted or brutally falsified to serve propaganda purposes.
The current situation is not very different, except that the times seem to have changed places; for many among us the shining Communist future has been replaced by an equally brilliant Communist past. These people continue to live in the Soviet past, idealizing it in what is best described as a postmortem style. To them, it is Paradise Lost. A logical consequence of their lagging behind history is a total rejection of the current realities; they ignore them the way they did in Soviet days and refuse to adjust to them. Of course, it is much easier to lament over the ruins of that brilliant future in the past.
Eulogies dedicated to things now history are usually accompanied by impassioned accusations of all the modern realities: political system, laws, parties, bureaucrats, society, et al. Naturally, all these Ukrainian institutions are anything but perfect, yet what can one expect from a society where a large number of the communal members mostly sit and weep by the rivers of Babylon? They sit and mourn, opponents as well as exponents of Ukrainian independence. Just listen to what Mr. Yavorivsky, this Ukrainian Jeremiah, has to say.
It so happens that I constantly discuss problems and aspects of modern life in Ukraine with compatriots, among them individuals bluntly refusing to put up with it. An interesting detail is that none, not even a single young intellectual has ever blamed him/herself for any of the problems being encountered. No one has ever tried to explain why he or she has personally failed to get adapted to the new conditions — perhaps lacking flexibility, energy, or training, the latter being an important factor these days (e.g., knowledge of a foreign language), and unwilling to become a student again. Or perhaps it would mean admitting lack of a businessman’s intuition, being afraid to take serious risks and unable to grasp and immediately use information. Such people are comfortably convinced that all their hardships in this transition period are because of the state, the new political system, and because of all those that have managed to get retrained, proved smarter, and got adjusted to the new circumstances (at times very much to the detriment of others, one must admit).
In other words, such analytical self-accusations are not quite in the Ukrainian character and not all Ukrainians are in the habit of making them; we seem unable to freely admit a very simple fact: the new way of life challenges every individual with new requirements. One can either meet the challenge or resort to accusatory verbiage, the way the biblical prophets did, but this can only ruin one’s soul with dark envy, dooming one to living in the past like a ghost, except that there is no chance to appear onstage like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
There is yet another interesting phenomenon is a chronically negative assessment of everything happening in Ukraine these days. Such dark pessimism is found in much of the media and many readers and audiences (otherwise our media would be quite different). Whatever happens, whoever is elected to or assigned an important post, whatever new temple or subway station is ceremoniously opened, we hear angry accusatory voices from all directions. Any positive information (e.g., crops harvested, production growth registered, better textbooks published) meets with the same negative response (sure, we’ve heard that before) and a long string of standard invectives. Meanwhile the dialectic holds that there are no phenomena, individuals, or objects without a single positive aspect. Then why are we so accustomed to seeing only the dark side of everything?
The issue is not only lack of objectivity. The worst thing is that such pessimism makes one’s life so very dull and difficult. Some people I know are not even capable of greeting the coming of spring; they forget that they live by a great river. Is there anything to make them happy? It seems not. No, I do not consider rose-colored glasses very useful, but wearing pitch-dark glasses means only one thing, total blindness.
So much for the present realities. The notion of the future is also highly unlucky in Ukraine; people pay about as much attention to it as did to the past during Soviet times. This is sad, for the absence of a future makes the present time shorter.
