The Krynytsia Publishers has published a book by the noted Ukrainian scholar and public figure Ivan Dziuba, entitled Spohady i rozdumy na finishnii priamii (Reminiscences and Thoughts on Home Stretch).
In addition to his most resonant Internatsionalizm chy rusyfikatsiia? (Internationalism or Russification?), Dziuba has penned a number of other works: Zastukaly serdeshnu voliu (They Cornered Our Wretched Freedom), Ukraina pered sfinksom maibutnioho (Ukraine before the Sphinx of the Future), Z krynytsi lit (From the Wellspring of Years), Pastka (The Trap), and Taras Shevchenko.
“Whenever Ivan Dziuba can break loose from the tight embrace of all sorts of meetings and sittings, he is overwhelmed by the burning desire to write,” Academician Mykola Zhulynsky wrote in the foreword to the Reminiscences. “This thirst for sitting at his desk and working on a book in solitude permeates his body, and he wants to break free like a stallion that has been kept in the stable for too long. He enjoys this sweet struggle against his laziness. Those who have seen piles of his manuscripts will find Dziuba and laziness incompatible. Who knows, maybe before I am through committing my reflections on this workaholic to paper, some publishing company will venture to publish over thirty literary portraits of Ukrainian writers that Dziuba wrote in the past and now has finally dug up from old issues of journals.”
I don’t know about his collection of literary portraits, but Dziuba’s readers have long been waiting for his memoirs, which he ironically entitled Reminiscences and Thoughts on Home Stretch. By the way, the book is dedicated to his wife Maria “in lieu of verses about love.”
On the one hand, this book is very personal, but on the other, it directly applies to each of us. Dziuba is one of those to whom we are indebted for our national independence. In the 1960s, at the outset of the dissident movement, his Internationalism or Russification? prompted the pro-Ukrainian people to consolidate and for many years afterward served as a reliable spiritual foundation for all who struggled for Ukraine’s independence.
“A protesting generation, one of young rebels, entered our culture in the 1960s. It was there, in their poetry, pictures, journalism, prose writings, historical studies, and films, that a different, new, free, democratic, and European Ukraine was born… Ivan Dziuba was the first to create a systemic vision of European Ukraine after the destruction of intellectuals of the 1920s,” wrote Dr. Oxana Pachliowska, lecturer at the University of Rome La Sapienza (Den‘, No. 205, Nov. 11, 2006).
Ivan Dziuba is correctly referred to as the “conscience of the nation” and “moral authority.” At the roundtable “The Phenomenon of Ivan Dziuba” held at the Ukrainian Home on Nov. 17, 2006 (Den’, No. 202, Nov. 21, 2006), Lina Kostenko offered the following accurate and exhaustive observation that is still topical after almost two and a half years: “We all happened to be live at the turn of the epoch. What concerns Dziuba, he has entered the new epoch without breaking in halves (regrettably, a lot of people have done just that). In ‘that’ society Dziuba was the tuning fork, while in ‘this’ society, unfortunately, he is no longer the tuning fork but a diagnostician because this society is ailing…
“The organism of the state is sick. In order to cure it, we have to work rather than whine or yelp, now that we have Ivan Dziuba as the diagnostician. This man has one foible: he operates in a system of ethic coordinates that few people need these days, including the Ukrainian world that has become silent and the anti-Ukrainian world that has thrown aside all restraint. However, I believe that the next generation will need Ivan Dziuba. Today, while tasting miasma, one is reminded of this biblical question, Where is he that counted the towers? (Isaiah 33:18). What I mean is that Dziuba is one of those who counts the towers and even hopes to find honesty in his enemy, to quote from Dahl.”
Dziuba’s book was published at the expense of Leonid Kuchma’s Ukraine Foundation, which collected the bulk of the circulation (3,000 copies) and intends to distribute them. Another 500 copies were paid for by the diaspora-run Ivan Bahriany Foundation. The book will be launched in the building of the Ukraine Foundation on March 5.
