Today’s Ukraine has a crying need for honest intellectuals. Although the Soviet system spared no effort to wipe out the scholarly, artistic, and spiritual intelligentsia, such people do exist. One of them is Oxana PACHLOWSKA, a writer, researcher of culture, head of the Ukrainian Studies Department at the Rome-based La Sapienza University, and research associate at the Institute of Literature attached to the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She may be said to belong to a hereditary elite: she inherited the inner need to be morally present among her own people as the highest yardstick of the elite as personified by her parents.
The activities of such people as Ms. Pachlowska are often commensurate with the work of several scholarly institutions. Her name can be placed, without exaggeration, in the same line with the well-known collector of Ukrainian antiquities Ivan Honchar, literary scholar Yuri Shevelov, the American researcher of the Ukrainian Holodomor James Mace, and others.
Oxana Pachlowska recently visited The Day.
CIVILIZATIONAL CHOICE IS A LIFE-OR-DEATH QUESTION FOR UKRAINE”
Ms. Pachlowska, have you perceived any changes in the image of Ukraine and Ukrainian public life since you began working in Italy? What do you think is the current state of Ukrainian literature?
The image of Ukraine is that of before and after the Orange Revolution. Before the Orange Revolution, it was a country that was steadily marching towards oblivion, disappearance, and dilution in the Eurasian wilderness. The Orange Revolution suddenly revealed the nation’s deep-seated energy, and intellectual and moral resources. This event forced Europe to look at Ukraine differently. Europe began to ask itself, albeit on an unofficial level so far, about Ukraine’s eventual integration in the EU.
But the fall of 2004 was a moment, a peak of tension, an extreme. This moment is bound to become a process that will make this turning-point in Ukraine’s history irreversible. This is the problem: it will take much more effort, resoluteness, and awareness for one moment to turn into a process. In other words, this requires long-term moral qualities that consolidate not just at the moment of a very tough test but every day, without heroics, flag-waving, and music.
Actually, the moral dimension is a dimension in which public life and cultural life encounter each other. So in this sense there has been major progress in public and cultural life. But at the same time, this progress has still not been finally cemented in public mentality or governmental strategy. What in fact determines the country’s destiny is a slim margin in an election, and the narrower the margin, the bigger the space for backstage political games. This is very dangerous; hence, the feeling of stagnation because our country has not yet made a decisive step to make a civilizational choice. The choice can only be between Europe and Eurasia. Let us drop euphemisms. Any individual who has elementary knowledge of the Western world is well aware that the European space provides a developmental dynamic that can allow every element of society to find its role in life and build its future. The Eurasian space is a territory of stagnant categories and political rhetoric, a space where there is no movement, and history goes around in circles. This is the mental heritage of Genghis Khan, justly called ‘the Knight of the Apocalypse.’ It is in fact a kind of rarefied apocalypse. The countries that belong to the Eurasian space have no feeling of a clear future. They live a stuffy life, waiting for some eschatological messianic prospect that will result in another collapse or, at best, further swinishness. So the problem of choice is one of centuries-old cultural categories, not current political expediency.
As much as society is uncertain about its final choice, literature is escaping the problems of society: instead of taking the lead over the latter, it is simply addressing false problems. And what kind of literature? The one that is tied to the old Union of Soviet Writers model or the so-called ‘young’ one in the 20-50-year age range? Neither of them is producing new ideas. After all, there are quite a few talented figures, but the current situation only requires “trash,” not quality. It is easy to criticize television, but today it is the most powerful manifestation of mass-media anti-culture. So one can either oppose it by creating alternative and/or regulatory mechanisms or swim down this murky stream. And our literature chose the latter. It projects scandalous figures, strip-tease clips, commercials, and fake psychoanalysis. In a word, it is doing the ‘gymnastics’ of vulgarity no worse than television. Dancing on a cube, so to speak, yet a big and dramatic world lies outside this striptease club. And every day that we live in it can either bring this country closer to the possibility of living in normal conditions or take it hopelessly away from these conditions. Both politics and literature are paradoxically focused on local problems, whereas Ukraine is beginning to play a pivotal role in the Euro-Atlantic balances of our planet. Politicians as well as men of letters keep saying that Ukraine should march towards Europe and that Ukrainian culture is European, but what is frightening is the lack of understanding of these processes and phenomena and the absence of concrete proposals.
We are immersed in the remake of a phenomenon that French linguists once called “la langue sovietique.” This was a rhetorical verbal plasma devoid of content, where every thing could be called in compliance with the current ideological requirement: “internationalism” in fact meant inciting xenophobia, and the regime identified itself with what it called “democracy.” This “language of power turned power of language” caused grave traumas in not only the intellect of society but also its psyche and morality. Today, this “Soviet language” has come back as a “post-Soviet” one. The imaginary “modernization” often looks like cultural vandalism. “Desacralization” is being imposed on a society that has suffered profanation of fundamental existential and cultural values. Here, freedom of speech, one of the pillars of democracy, often turns into permissiveness. Politicians, on their part, are proclaiming Ukraine’s movement toward Euro-Atlantic organizations via a referendum, but they have done precious little to “de-Sovietize” the public mentality and instill in it real knowledge of NATO or the EU. So, in a certain sense, the part of society that came out on the Maidan in 2004 was in fact much more mature than the ruling elite. People sometimes do not know what the abbreviation NATO stands for.
NATO stands for good roads, clean water in the plumbing, safety, and opportunities for people to realize their cultural and spiritual potential.
Exactly. But it is impossible to take concrete steps in this direction if there still are broad strata of society that have not even taken a sneak peek out of their mental prison for many decades. Irrational hatred for NATO is, first of all, the effect of the Russian inferiority complex, the complex of a self-styled superpower with Third World living standards, not to mention the complete absence of even elementary analytical thinking. If NATO ceased to be a deterrent to terrorism, to the proliferation of military regimes in despotic countries, after all, to the Chinese dragon, Russia would perhaps be the first to fall prey to these forces.
But the main trouble is the profound immorality of the societal part represented by the post-Soviet political class. This class has been raking in financial aid from Europe and the US for years under the guise of the “multivector approach,” neutrality,’ and other bogus concepts — just to be able to line their pockets with Western money and at the same time booze it up with the “elder brother.” For example, Luhansk has proclaimed itself “a NATO-free territory,” but there are NATO experts working there. NATO is providing funds to Ukrainian military servicemen placed in retired reserve status and help them adapt to civilian life. So where’s the logic? Or take the recent case when the US supplied us with single-use overalls to combat the bird flu in the Crimea. In Feodosia elderly women threw them into the sea and put on “reliable” Russian padded coats. These categories of people live outside historical time. Those who oppose NATO today sacrificed their own children for the war in Afghanistan yesterday. And they would send them to Chechnya today. And their grandchildren will run away from this country as enemies of Ukraine, but still not as “friends” of Russia, simply as anonymous and amorphous human material for “multivector” use on the world market.
Or take the latest events in parliament: the MPs are putting up anti-NATO posters, but what really makes them do this is the fear of a likely consensus against parliamentary immunity and awareness of the fact that Ukraine’s eventual admission to NATO will inevitably put the entire system of corruption schemes in politics and the economy in jeopardy. So what kind of integration can there be if the country is still not prepared for it in any way? Or take our roads: they are an exact replica of notorious Russian roads. Incidentally, the road is a symbol. A country that has bad roads does not know where it is going.
The Soviet system left behind such deep abysses of ignorance and cynicism that more than one generation can still fall into them. And both the politicians and the intellectual elite must know this. They have no right not to combat this phenomenon.
Again, there should be a synergy of civic and cultural dimensions here. Ukraine is not an isolated territory in an indefinite historical space. Ukraine is in fact more or less integrated in a number of worldwide contexts. And the less society and its elite understand these contexts, the more somebody else will understand them on behalf of Ukraine and try to lead the country into a direction that he, not Ukraine, needs.
ONE MUST GO TO EUROPE WITH DIGNITY AND SELF-CONFIDENCE!
It is often said here that some people are afraid of the European space because they are not aware of our proper place in it. But others have not been afraid to go there in search of a job. These people are already our main Euro-integrators. Besides, a part of the Ukrainian cultural and spiritual heritage is much closer to Europe. But still there is fear in society. How can we overcome it?
The time that has elapsed since the fall of the Berlin Wall was sufficient for most Eastern European countries to really, not declaratively, integrate into Europe, but Ukraine has not even acquired knowledge of what Europe is. Likewise, nobody has clearly explained to Europe what Ukraine is.
I do not quite agree that the people who are forced to seek a job abroad will necessarily be the main “Euro- integrators.” Yes, undoubtedly, they are people with an entirely different mentality. But first of all, these people always feel they are in a state of subjugation — also because their own state does not care at all about them. Therefore, they often have a feeling of fatigue and resignation. Many of them get assimilated. And, second, the political and intellectual class has no right to hide behind their own compatriots whom fate has driven out of their fatherland.
People are sometimes “afraid” of Europe just because they do not have enough instruments to identify themselves culturally. This is why intellectual and cultural integration with Europe should precede the political one. However, no history of Ukrainian literature and culture has yet been written, which could help the contemporary individual understand to which civilizational circle they belong. For centuries on end, Ukrainian culture has suffered from incessant bans, and its course was always cut short at its peak moments. No other European culture has ever lived through this kind of situation. The medieval culture was ruined by the Horde. The 17th-century blossoming was followed by the Treaty of Pereiaslav, the subordination of the Ukrainian Church to Moscow, the destruction of the hetmanate’s cultural and political institutions, which devastated Ukrainian culture and brought it outside the European circle. Then came Romanticism, which was close to nation-forming tendencies in Europe — and again there were bans in the second half of the 19th century. Then the “Executed Renaissance” of the 1920s and 1930s: culture was literally being uprooted; then the almost abortive attempt to crush the Sixtiers’ movement. The empire — tsarist and Soviet alike — destroyed first and foremost not the opposition but culture as such because culture is a laboratory of critical thinking.
The history of authentic Ukrainian culture could be written through a history of bans. For a long time Ukrainian literature was stripped of the things that linked it with European culture: suffice it to recall the Baroque period, modernism of the 1920s, and the Sixtiers’ movement. In other words, a European Ukraine was always banned, under any conditions. And that which was allowed or interpreted in compliance with a priori ideological patterns was aimed at turning Ukraine into an uninteresting Eurasian swamp. These problems should be properly spotlighted not in order to “settle scores” but to understand what has happened.
Take the Russification factor. No history of Russification has ever been written. What matters here is not a certain “ukase” but the unique mechanism of wiping out a subjugated culture, which became a boomerang for the “parent country.” To a large extent, Russia succeeded in alienating a considerable part of Ukrainian society from its own culture. But the result was that Russia, which enlarged the “Russian world” owing to a Russified mass, filled this “world” with the uncultured strata of the population, which in turn caused the Russian language itself to become alienated from culture. The vulgarized and corrupted variety of the Russian language, which is defended by some figures in southeastern Ukraine, jocularly referred to as PISUAR (in Ukrainian: Southeastern Ukrainian Autonomous Republic, a pun on the word “urinal” — Ed.), is in fact a lumpenized argot that butchers Russian first of all. You will not hear a line by Pasternak, Mandelstam, or even Lermontov from a society that has been brought up on Soviet songs and then Russian pop kitsch. In general, a colonial culture reflects the specifics of an empire. India shook off British colonial rule without losing its cultural identity and entered the third millennium as an economically powerful democratic state. Conversely, the legacy of Russian colonialism is sort of a colossal, unidentifiable Myrhorod puddle whose history boils down to bypassing it — first clockwise, then counterclockwise — all the time.
The Ukrainian culture and language have survived only because they long ago had a diversified polymorphous cultural code: they were linked to European civilization, the Latin and Polish languages. The well- known political scientist Ralf Dahrendorf once said something extremely interesting: the boundary of the democratic world coincides with that of the area under Latin cultural influence. Indeed, in the 16th-17th centuries neo-Latin culture was an integral part of Ukrainian literature. In fact, the borderline of this culture coincides today with that of the democratic electorate. It is through Latin that Ukraine was linked to Europe. For this reason, the Department of Ancient Studies at Kyiv University was closed down in Soviet times. Meanwhile, Ivan Vakarchuk, Rector of Lviv University and now Minister of Education, introduced Latin in all the faculties of his university several years ago. Compare this to Luhansk University, where you can get a concussion for using the Ukrainian language. So the civilizational fault line between Europe and Eurasia is, first of all, determined by culture. And Russia is fighting against Europe on the territory of Ukraine, thus becoming a less and less European reality and a more and more Asian one.
In other words, the problem of the European canon of Ukrainian literature has remained unresolved since the beginning of independence. However, instead of focusing on the key problem of the interrupted European tradition in Ukrainian culture, some literary scholars, with a few exceptions, got down to rewriting Soviet textbooks with new patriotic terminology, and others to debunking the Ukrainian classics and creating the cult of nonentities. A canon does not mean “closing” some authors and “opening” other ones. It is impossible to automatically return banned authors to our reality. We should find acceptable forms of critically “relaying” the literary legacy to the present time. The writers who were executed, destroyed, banned and wrongly interpreted writers of the 1920s and 1930s cannot enter our reality through school curricula alone, where Soviet-era rhetoric has been replaced with a national one. As a matter of fact, it is both post-Soviet and postmodern critics who destroyed the now missing European canon of Ukrainian literature. Both parties were egoistically attempting to adjust literature to their opportunistic requirements.
This is why a blank wall of indifference surrounds the publication of historical and philological studies that constitute a new alternative variety of literary research, with which our conversation should have started. Ivan Dziuba recently published a book on Taras Shevchenko. Was there at least one analytical review? And do you know why? Because, to put it plainly, no one is capable of writing one because of lack of competence. Meanwhile, this book raises some crucial questions as far as Ukrainian history and the history of culture are concerned. There was not a single word in the press about Volodymyr Lytvynov’s book Catholic Rus’ (this term, coined by Viacheslav Lypynsky, changes the entire pattern of Ukrainian literature). The print run totaled 500 copies. That’s all. Or Volodymyr Svidzinsky in Eleonora Solovei’s publication — has anyone duly appreciated its philological culture? The point is that Svidzinsky is not called “Vovka” or “pederast” — so there is nothing of interest here. This means that there are silent people in society who develop culture, and there are talkative ones who produce “trash.” And these trash figures are filling the space with the aplomb of masked raiders. It turns out that one can attack a bookstore and establish a boutique there. One can likewise attack a literary phenomenon and turn it into a show of rags .
“Postmodernism” is also one of these trash cults. It is, as befits ‘la langue sovietique,’ a diktat of form, given a very superficial content. It is very doubtful that this term could be applied to our context. Postmodernism is a serious cultural phenomenon that emerged in postindustrial societies, which had the political, socioeconomic and, after all, technological preconditions for this. But in our country, it is nothing but a rhetorical proposal, a cloned model, a “stopgap” for the terminological and content-related void left by socialist realism.
There are some very interesting studies by the Polish-born British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman on the postmodern world as a “rarefied” and “brittle” society of loneliness, in which there are no roots or ties to any stable dimensions of life. This is the result of globalization and a new informational system introduced by the computer, a technology that has created new forms of working and moving around the world. Hence, it has caused identity crises. These processes are also taking place in Ukraine. But transferring these categories automatically onto Ukrainian soil would be tantamount to saying that 1968 in Paris is the same thing as 1968 in Prague. Not in the least, because in Paris young Maoists were smashing classrooms in protest against Government, while in Prague young people were immolating themselves, protecting their fatherland from Soviet tanks. In terms of historical and cultural experience, there is still more than one chasm between Western and Eastern Europe, and it is dangerous to play peek-a-boo over them.
For example, Poland recently went through a period where this most pro-European country in Eastern Europe suddenly turned into an almost anti-European one. Why? Europe is not an unambiguous and single- dimensional Soviet space, where it is known what there will be tomorrow because there will be nothing tomorrow. Europe means development, and it is far from easy to fit in with its picture. One should go there with dignity and self-confidence. At a certain moment Poland, which was no longer afraid to be swallowed up again by Russia, began to fear that Europe was threatening its identity. But as we see now, this was just the fatigue of a country that had done a lot for itself and others to endorse the idea of Europe. Now this crisis has been overcome, and in a few years Poland may become, thanks to its vitality, one of the EU’s most representative countries.
But this is occurring because Poland is aware of itself. Europe is a space that integrates only self-aware countries. You can only overcome the fear of Europe by knowing that your culture is an integral part of the European process.
The first Polish ambassador to Ukraine, Jerzy Bahr, once said this about our problems: you were closer to the epicenter of the explosion. Later, ex-president Alexander Kwasniewski noted in an interview with The Day that the Poles should work more than the Germans, and the Ukrainians more than the Poles. We are now getting ready for the Congress of Ukrainian Intellectuals. What is the current mission (if we can use this word in the modern pragmatic style) of our intellectuals?
The University of Los Angeles recently conducted a study to forecast the time that Eastern European countries need to overcome the consequences of the communist system. It revealed an interesting relationship. The closer a country was to Russia, the more time it needed to achieve Western standards. While Slovenia is already called the “Slavic Switzerland,” it will take Romania 50 years, Hungary 35, and the Czech Republic 25 years to do this. Bulgaria, which had the dubious “privilege” of being “the Russian bear’s best friend,” will need no more and no less than a hundred years!
This is the result of being part of the “Eastern” civilization, which hindered the development of the immense Eastern Slavic area. So the question is: how long will it take Ukraine to achieve Western standards? Two hundred years?
For this reason (unfortunately!), the idea of a “mission” may still be around for a long time. But in my view, this should have a concrete, even pragmatic content, not bombastic. This means that today, in our conditions, duties and responsibility are doomed to be larger than usual. The Eastern European countries had to work hard on their Euro-integration. And they began this process long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. If Ukraine had been moving in this direction at the time, like Poland was, now it would not be periodically suspended over this void. And now every lost day results in a lost year, and every year lost results in a few decades lost. So it is practically impossible to catch up with the leaders in a positive way — we can only try to catch up with them in a traumatic way.
What do you mean?
Ukraine needs to carry out some far from painless reforms to be ready for admission to the EU and NATO. Populism in politics, a parasitic mentality on the one hand, and a slavish mentality, on the other, of a large part of society are sure to slow down the necessary transformations. What can you say to a Donetsk coal miner who, every time he surfaces from hell, goes to vote for those who doomed him to this nonexistence? When is he going to say, “I have the right to live?” Obviously, this is a warped society. After all, let’s not delude ourselves. Totalitarianism lasted for a short span of time in other countries and for 70 years in ours. This means we had a fertile social ground for this.
Sadly, none of today’s adult generations in Ukraine will live better because this society did not want to, could not, and was not prepared to defend its own interests at the beginning of independence. If Ukraine does not defend its own interests, somebody else will be defending his interests — against and at the expense of Ukraine.
So, under any conditions, the only way to survive and then live is Europe. Europe is a very complex and not problem-free reality that has been coming into existence for centuries. But its blessed cultural code — unity in diversity — is based on the idea of the centrality of the individual. On the contrary, the Eurasian world is formed on the basis of the unification of everything because what is central to it is not an individual but the state or, to be more exact, total Government. Yet, it is impossible to launch a cultural transformation towards democracy “from top to bottom.” The idea of the centrality of an individual should be endorsed by all of society. When every individual knows that nobody can insult, humiliate, or brutalize him/her at any level of his/her existence, then citizen of Ukraine will stop fearing Europe because they will understand that their historical roots are here.
I still remember Adam Michnik’s commentary in his newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza on the morning of May 1, 2004, when Poland officially became an EU member. The words of one of the protagonists of Solidarity sounded unusually tired, something like: we did our part, now it’s over to you.
These words can and must be said today to the younger generations. It is they who will choose in what kind of a country they will live.
TO A LARGE EXTENT, SOCIETY’S DISORIENTATION IS DUE TO THE FACT THAT IMPORTS DOMINATE OUR ECONOMY AS WELL AS OUR CULTURE
Some people may say that you have lived for so many years in Rome that you not aware of our realities. What would you say in response?
First of all, I live in two realities. I work both here and there. I grew up in the Ukrainian reality and have always belonged to it, as it has to me. Second, I know the life of Western society at various levels. Moreover, I accepted the offer to work at Rome University first of all because I know our realities and I am convinced that one cannot improve them without a systematic orientation to Europe. I am accomplishing Euro-integration on the individual level, so to speak.
And, simply in psychological terms, I cannot stand stereotypes, such as “It’s easier over there.” I always reply, “You try, please.” After the war Germany lay humiliated and in ruins, the Italians were riding on donkeys, Norway was one of Europe’s poorest countries, and Ireland was scraping by on potatoes. One decade later Germany was one of Europe’s most reliable democracies and its powerhouse, Italy saw an economic boom, Norway became by far the richest country in Europe even without being an EU member, and Ireland is called the “Celtic tiger.” What is behind this is not a Harry Potter-style miracle but a will to live, the ability to work, national dignity, after all. “To work is ethical,” as the British say.
I love this “genius of Europe” very much, this pulse of life that totally rejects “eastern” stupor. I began to work in conditions where it seemed practically impossible to launch the process of Ukrainian studies in Italy. But I believed that it was necessary. As Kant said, I must, therefore I can.
Is it more difficult to launch Ukrainian studies in Ukraine than in Italy?
These are different sets of problems, although the reception and spread of knowledge about Ukraine abroad is very closely linked with Ukrainian studies here. My Slavic Studies colleagues say: you don’t understand that the West does not know this literature and culture at all. Don’t heap on us the terms that you borrowed from us and your terms that are obsolete now. Show us your literature and its most valuable phenomena. In a word, it is a snake that bites its own tail, because this system of values has not been built into our “domestic” literary research.
Professor Giovanna Broggi Berkoff of the University of Milan, who is the president of the Italian Association of Ukrainian Studies, recently published an article entitled “The Poetry of Taras Shevchenko: an Attempt at a Reading.” The very word “attempt” throws us very far from the climate of categoricalness, so customary for post-Soviet debates. This study is based on just one poem, “Why Have You Gone Black, Green Field?” which is analyzed according to Shevchenko’s historical and philosophical concepts and in its Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, and European contexts. This is what I call a normal, “non-theatrical,” interpretation of literature.
It is difficult now to conduct modern Ukrainian studies in our country because of the lack of understanding that what is needed is the European canon. There are some surreal processes going on, with the complete chaos of ethical and esthetic parameters. You see, it is “not up-to-date” to see Shevchenko as a prophet, but it is “very up-to-date” to proclaim as a “cult writer” a downright rogue who hospitably opens up the door of his lavatory to us so that we may feast our eyes on what he is doing there after a booze-up. Yesterday’s “innovators” and “desacralizers” are referred to as “patriarchs” today, and they gratefully acknowledge the applause. And now we are in for a time of “Dan Brown- style” literary research based on apocrypha. Lazha (trash) has given way to lozha (lodge), the “I don’t-give-a-fig attitude” has been replaced by knightly armor. We have “Hrytsky,” “Lesky” and “Olky,” on the one hand, and genealogy, Trypillian culture, and the Templars, on the other: nice euphony, indeed. The public sticks to surzhyk (a pidgin mixture of Ukrainian and Russian — Ed.), and writers have switched to four-letter Russian words. At first, all eyes gaze on “what is underneath” and then philippics ring out about the vulgarity of Ukrainian society, which for some reason prefers trashy Russian pop songs even during Christmas to German Christmas songs that all of Europe listens to. Somebody managed to cobble together a half- page about such an unfathomable author as Ortega y Gasset, and we are told that “literature is a game.” Somebody peeked into Baudrillard’s works — and we have “simulacrums’. Somebody heard about Fukuyama’s “end of history” — and down with history! What can we expect from the reader if there is such chaotic (un)awareness in the very scholarship on literature?
To a large extent, I think this cultural disorientation of society is linked with the fact that imports dominate both in our economy and in culture: imported terms, ideas, theories, and phenomena cannot take into account the depth of the forced degradation of our society, the level of its alienation from its own culture and from culture in general. So I say again that the task of intellectuals is to return culture to society by transferring it from the Soviet to the European dimension. This is such a difficult and important task that it will not be an exaggeration to call it a mission.
WHO WILL DEFEND ABEL?
What thoughts and feelings does Vasyl Stus’s jubilee evoke in you? Is he an exceptional or normal personality?
Exceptional, of course. It would even be unfair to think that a person who opted for the fatal destiny of a martyr might not be an exceptional one. But I am wary of this kind of jubilee, as I am of the Holodomor anniversary. The best way to honor Stus’s memory is to republish his books, translate them into various languages, conduct modern professional studies of his texts, and make these texts available in the largest city and the smallest village. Culture is the sign of a person’s presence in history. Stus left his fiery imprint. Yet in this new time, for whose sake he died, his descendants have not even managed to put up a memorial plaque on the wall of the Ukraina cinema, which hosted the historic soiree at which Stus and other 1960s activists protested against the arrests. Instead, we see countless little restaurants, cafes, bars, and coffee houses. So, literary soirees in his honor may well turn into “remembrance prayers” within a narrow circle of his colleagues and friends, while schoolchildren will go on saying that Ukrainian literature “is not cool.”
Stus helped bring down a whole empire for our freedom. But today this freedom often turns into the mayhem of mindlessness, dishonesty, and banditry directed against culture. Miriam from Lesia Ukrainka’s Possessed would say, ‘But I don’t believe that he is risen, for you are not worth this!’ This is why Stus’s return into society’s memory is like the return of the awareness of the Holodomor: without this memory, society becomes dust in the danse macabre of post-imperialist ghosts.
James Mace said that we are a post-genocidal society. Last year we clearly witnessed changes in mass consciousness. But one thing still worries us: one should not speak the terrible and painful truth only on the Day to Commemorate the Victims of the Holodomor. We must fill the whole system of coordinates with this truth, but how and when?
I fully agree with Mace’s term. I can only add that it is also a post-Christian society because violent and barbaric Soviet atheism had nothing to do with the progressive secularization that the West underwent during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, etc.; hence the immeasurable cynicism and moral illiteracy of this society. The Holodomor led not only to an ethnic but moral degradation of the nation, the degradation of man as such. People were forbidden to bury, mourn, and remember their dead. Moreover, their slaughtered family members were to become enemies to those who survived. In the pre-Christian world of antiquity, the story of Antigone’s unburied brother was one of the most emblematic dramas: to counter the earthly government, which bans burying her brother’s body, Antigone appeals to the moral law of the gods. But in our country the “tally” is in the millions. There are very few examples of such sadistic Jesuitism in history. But in the Soviet era cruelty was a mandatory condition for being “initiated” into the System.
The person who came out of those ideological catacombs was deeply wounded, insensitive to the past, and blind to the present. In comparison with the past nightmares, every bone thrown to him seems to be a generous gift — and the post-Soviet political class has been playing on this for 17 years now. This is why reconstructing history by building up memory is a very acute problem in such a society. And the point is not only in facts. Ordinary individuals may not read historical studies, but they must know that their private lives, the lives of their ancestors and family — in the narrow sense and in the broad sense as a nation — are the highest value. But if it is declared, following Fukuyama, that we should be “free” of history, that dealing with the problems of the death of a peasant civilization is “populism,” and that focusing on genocide is “necrophilia,” then we can conclude that Empire, as a human extermination machine, has achieved its goal.
The Holodomor cannot be something to remember during an anniversary alone. Some elements of rhetoric are inevitable at such moments. An anniversary should only be a signal for the necessity of remembering and knowing one’s past and, above all, for mercy, for the Christian dimension of human feeling. This should be a daily recollection in the same way as every individual needs to visit the graves of his family members from time to time, recall them and everything connected with these people, who will always remain dear to him, and mourn them. A post-genocidal society is not just one that has lost millions of its people. It is a society that has not undergone a catharsis by means of remembrance and penitence.
A campaign called “Hands off Cain” took place recently in the West. It is about opposing capital punishment. I have always been struck by this movement of politicians and intellectuals joining to defend murderers. Every time capital punishment was abolished somewhere in the world, torches were lit in the Coliseum to mark one more saved human life. The life of a criminal! This raises a seemingly elementary question: And who will defend Abel? There are forces that are defending Cain. But this is in Western society whose philosophy is centered on the absolute value of human life. But there were millions of Abels killed in our country. Yet this national disaster has still not been placed among the recognized absolute catastrophes, such as the Holocaust. And this is not only the result of the “allied scheme of history” that Norman Davis mentions in his History of Europe, i.e., the unwillingness of the Allies of World War Two to raise matters that are “ticklish” (for Russia). It is also the result of insufficient effort on our part to defend “our Abel” both inside and outside the country. We have defended him, although posthumously. Our dead only have us to care of them.
Who is supposed to translate this unformed sequence of ideas into the acceptable modern language?
Again, intellectuals. Is this a mission? I think so. But first of all, it is a moral duty. And one should remember that it is a very difficult task. At one time the high-profile Italian geopolitical journal Limes (No. 6, 2004) published the article “Stalin’s Bus: Notes for a Panegyric,” which claimed that Stalin had the right to deport millions of people because those were the laws of his state. Can our cavemen communists really reach these “peaks” of liberal thought? When I asked the editor how on earth they could have printed this, I was told, “We have pluralism.” But if it ever occurred to somebody in Europe to say that Hitler resorted to the Holocaust because such were the laws of his country, he could end up behind bars. Why? Because the nation that fell victim to the Holocaust managed to defend its dead and it deserves the highest honor for this. The Jewish people succeeded in proving that the largest and the smallest victim in their history deserves to be respected and remembered, and whoever does not share this view is not worth being called a human.
And we don’t even know the size of our graveyard. It is not only the Holodomor; it is also Vinnytsia and Bykivnia, where there were plans to build a bus station. We go on living on the unburied remains of our compatriots. The other day I heard on the radio that a western Ukrainian had dug up a cemetery in which were buried the bodies of eastern Ukrainians, who had come to Western Ukraine in search of bread. They were killed by NKVD operatives, as usual, by a bullet to the head. Then they smashed their bones while the people were still alive, just to be on the safe side.
Of course, it is possible to find a justification for this amnesia. A society that languished in a gigantic dungeon for decades became so used to tortures and humiliation that it even lost its pain threshold. But this is a manifestation of slavish mentality, which can in turn become an invitation for new brutalization. There is no such attitude among the Baltic peoples toward themselves. They have all raised their moral and material claims on Russia for the crimes that were committed, such as executions, reprisals, and deportations. Neither the Poles nor the Czechs will allow anybody — neither themselves nor the world — to forget their victims. And the world only respects nations that respect themselves.
This is also a sign of ongoing global geopolitical changes, including those in the history of Slavic civilizations. The Slavs are now experiencing a dramatic division into European and NON-European ones. Europe, America, and the rest of the world reckon with the former. The latter are running the risk of becoming “field fodder” for the horses of a future Genghis Khan. And one of the main division lines between the European and non-European Slavs runs along the border of memory.
In 2000, well before Poland joined the EU, the prominent researcher of Polish Romanticism, Maria Janion, wrote a book called Yes to Europe, but Together with Our Dead. This is the true formula of integration with Europe. What should be an axiom for us is the paraphrased Cartesian dictum, “I think, therefore I am.” “WE REMEMBER, THEREFORE WE ARE.” In a post-genocidal society, memory is the Dantean Virgil who leads a man from the inferno of the past to freedom.
