Dnipropetrovsk hosted a soiree commemorating the 100th jubilee of Valerian Pidmohylny attended by a large number of the local creative intelligentsia. Pidmohylny was an outstanding Ukrainian prose writer and translator, a brilliant representative of the “executed Renaissance” in Ukrainian culture. According to scholars, his generation was first shot at Kruty in January 1918. Those that survived, physically and morally, would be destroyed in the subsequent decades (the first mass official shooting of Ukrainian writers took place in December 1934 — Ed.). Valerian Pidmohylny was shot in a Stalinist death camp in the fall of 1937. For almost fifty years his name and work was de facto forbidden.
The writer was rehabilitated after Stalin’s death, but his stories and novels began to be published in Ukraine only in the late 1980s. A complete collection of his works is still to come.
This and the importance of Pidmohylny’s creative legacy were discussed at the Dnipropetrovsk Student Palace during the memorial soiree attended by Vice Premier Mykola Zhulynsky. Valery Shevchuk, also an outstanding writer who has worked on Pidmohylny, noted that during the terrible totalitarian years, when the role of the individual was reduced to that of a cog in a machine, Valerian Pidmohylny took a European cultural stand and tried to defend the idea of man’s precedence before the state and society in his works. In this way he reached the existentialist philosophic level in his world outlook, a stand that would prevail among the European cultural intelligentsia decades later. One can only mourn his creative heritage doomed to long years of oblivion behind the Iron Curtain.
Viktor Savchenko, chairman of the Dnipropetrovsk branch of the Ukrainian Writers Union, however, believes that the seeds sown by the executed Renaissance (86% of writers publishing in Ukrainian in the Ukrainian SSR were no longer doing so in 1939 and their works banned due to repression — Ed.) sprouted already in the 1960s, in the hearts of Ukrainian creative intellectuals, creative elite, and dissidents. This can perhaps explain in part the peaceful manner in which Ukraine won its independence in 1991, without any bloodshed. “Any national literature would be proud of Pidmohylny’s creative accomplishment,” added Savchenko.
And yet those present at the memorial soiree (some of them would join a round table with Vice Premier Zhulynsky afterward) were surprised to know that Pidmohylny’s heritage remained unknown to most his fellow countrymen now that Ukraine was in the tenth year of independence. The state has not bothered to finance the publication of a complete collection of his works and none are included in the school curriculum. In fact, there is no memorial plaque in Dnipropetrovsk nor Kyiv. And the jubilee could have passed unnoticed but for the Dnipropetrovsk intelligentsia. They had visited countless local and Kyiv official offices.
Yes, we respect the memory of all those writers shot by the NKVD, yet the life of many nowadays leaves much to be desired, mildly speaking. The Vice Premier sounded optimistic, but had to hear the Dnipropetrovsk literati complaining of low pensions, nonexistent book publishing, and that the local Writers’ Union’s branch had been literally shoved into a basement. A poetess told Mr. Zhulynsky quite frankly that she was afraid to meet with her colleagues because the rats scared her to death.
Other literati drew the ranking guest’s attention to the fact that the local authorities were going through the motions of Ukrainization, that all local bureaucrats spoke Russian and that the “official language” was used only when receiving delegations and media representatives from Kyiv. Last but not least, there is still a high-rise granite stele facing the building of the city administration reading, “The Triumph of Communism is Inevitable!” Pressed as they are by the city public, officials are in no hurry to remove it.
Alas, Mr. Zhulynsky could not hear all of the complaints as many creative intellectuals were barred access to the round table (the organizing committee explained there was no room left and ordered the doors closed).
