You enter the park of an Italian Renaissance villa, and your heart suddenly stops beating: you see Chornobyl’s Way of the Cross along the alley — two rows of fourteen crosses with black and white mourning ribbons tied to them. The crosses bear the names of Chornobyl’s extinct villages: Poliske, Chystohalivka, Kruta Hora, Zymovyshche, Opachychi, and Krasne. Candles are lit here at night. Bowing to Ukraine’s Stations of the Cross are Renaissance-style stone angels, their wings cropped by time.
There is an old magnolia tree, also tied with a white ribbon. It is a wounded tree, with photos of adults and children blown off the earth by the winds of Chornobyl scattered over the grass.
The Ukrainian tragedy is concentrated in the space of Absolute Esthetics, concrete topoi of the disaster and timeless tranquility of Renaissance frescoes. Every detail explodes, wounds, and cries out. At the same time, the tragedy’s immersion into this centuries-old solidified space of beauty discloses the eschatological dimension of Chornobyl.
On March 10-12 Vicenza (Italy) hosted perhaps the world’s first international forum dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the disaster. The forum was organized to reflect three mutually complementary aspects. The first is an exhibit called “1986-2006: Remembering Chornobyl;” the second is the Italian-Ukrainian scholarly conference “Wounded Humanity: 20 Years after Chornobyl;” and the third is “An Overture to Apocalypse,” a series of evenings devoted to the poetry of Lina Kostenko. Chornobyl was thus discussed in the language of art, scholarship, and poetry.
The forum was organized by the Vicenza-based Institute of Social and Religious History Research — the coordinator of an international Holodomor congress held in Italy a few years ago — the Il Ponte-Mist Association, which works with Chornobyl children, the Kyiv Museum of Chornobyl, and the municipalities of Caldogno and Marostica. It was held under the patronage of the Ukrainian Embassy in Italy, the Foreign Ministry of Italy, the Region of Veneto, and the Province of Vicenza.
The Vicenza institute has been studying Central-Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, for the past several years. This field of interest was launched by Gabriele De Rosa, the institute’s president and senator for life of the Italian Republic, who is regarded as the patriarch of Italy’s history studies. Today it is spearheaded by the institute’s secretary-general Giorgio Cracco, a medieval specialist.
But the organizational and scholarly engine of this institute is the scholarly secretary Francesca Lomastro, a historian and the “mother” of Chornobyl children. This slender woman seems to burn with love for Ukraine. Do we really need to ask why? Two years ago, in the fall of 2004, Francesca organized “Toward a Space of Light,” an exhibit of works by such late 19th and early 20th-century Ukrainian painters as Murashko, Bohomazov and Exter, at the same villa. Today, it is Chornobyl, a space of darkness.
Ukraine was represented at this conference by the historian Yuriy Shapoval, Chornobyl zone researcher Natalia Baranovska, and the writer and former Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Yuriy Shcherbak. Shapoval spoke about the criminal informational policy of the Soviet leadership and the KGB during the disaster. Shcherbak delivered a paper entitled “The Legacy of the Chornobyl Disaster for the 21st Century.” Baranovska analyzed the government and society of Ukraine after the disaster, raising ideological and cultural issues: Chornobyl as the ashes of an anti-utopia.
The Italian side featured papers presented by anthropologist Elisa Geremia (Venice Ca’ Foscari University), Silvia Bertazzo, a specialist on the legal aspects of technological disasters (University of Trento), energy expert Andrea Gasparella (Vicenza Energy Center), and other speakers. Also taking part in the conference was Mario Petrucci, a British physicist, poet, and film director of Italian origin, who showed a clip from the film Heavy Water, a laconic but dramatically and visually lavish screen version of Svetlana Aleksiyevych’s book on Chornobyl.
The “nerve” of the scholarly forum was an exhibit created by Anatoliy Haidamaka. I am certain nothing of the kind could have been organized in any other cultural space. Serving as the stage was the villa of Renaissance genius Andrea Palladio whose work had the greatest impact on the development of modern architecture.
Palladio is the quintessence of High Renaissance, a symbol of its unattainable harmony. The steps to Villa Palladio are covered with black-embroidered towels that bear the meanders of ashen patterns that used to be colored. A medieval wall is bedecked with photographs of deserted Ukrainian houses from whose windows you can see a doll looking out, a plush rabbit with a bent ear, or a teddy bear leaning against the weather-stripped window frame. At the foot of the stairs is a homemade little boat festooned with children’s drawings. It stands motionless on the stone steps, for there is no place to sail to.
There is a crossed-out Chornobyl road sign at the entrance to the villa. In the middle is an Orthodox iconostasis. An almost phosphorescent statue of a member of a Chornobyl clean-up brigade stands beside the altar. Here and there the spaces between the frescoes are filled with embroidered Ukrainian shirts. This is not an attribute of folklore: the nation’s body was blown out of these shirts. Spreading wide their empty sleeves, the shirts are flying through time.
A girl’s silvery voice is heard singing an enchanted note. The note breaks up from time to time, and the reedy voice keeps trying to catch up with it, fluttering in time broken asunder, in split space.
The frescoes show the warm marble of columns kissed by the setting sun. Smiling people are relaxing, and ladies are talking to gentlemen. A woman’s figure is frozen in dance. Children run about, dressed in satin clothing. Wine-filled glasses and grapes stand on the table, the sunny peace of art that does not fade.
But you see all this through gigantic transparent photos of the Chornobyl disaster. The sarcophagus has caved in over the realm of tranquility and beauty. A gas mask is lying amid Renaissance-era silver vessels. A clean-up worker’s outfit shines through a knight’s armor. The inscription “Contaminated” covers the ancient world. The Christ Pantocrator is plunging headlong into a nuclear conflagration. Roman columns surround the Chornobyl cemetery.
The mad ravings of communism about conquering nature turned the clock back to primeval times. High above the painted capitals soars a spiritualistic black bird whose transparent body shows entangled pictures of Lenin, Stalin, and the people they turned into phantoms.
There are two dates: 1933 and 1986, the first and the second genocides of Ukraine.
In the last hall the wall on the right shows frescoes depicting slaves being beaten by Roman soldiers, and the one on the left shows the same soldiers brutalizing women. The one in the center features a square full of people and the flags of the Orange Revolution raised high in the Maidan’s night sky.
In the adjacent hall, 16th-century girls are donning flower wreaths in a blooming meadow: they seem to be talking with mannequins of Ukrainian girls, who are wearing embroidered blouses and flower garlands, like their Italian sisters in the frescoes: different blouses, different traditions of Ukraine, dance movements, the voices of springtime.
An old woman smiled at you at the exit. She must have come from the other world, the world of antiquity. A little girl also smiles, adjusting on her head a big ruffled wreath of grass, flowers, and everything that grows and blooms.
Then you leave Villa Palladio to enter a World War II bunker filled with photographs by Ihor Kostin, sparsely scattered throughout its compartments, where there is water on the floor and the rusted doors do not open even into Nowhere; humanity’s last refuge after a nuclear war.
The lopsided, washed-down walls show scenes of death. A skeleton-like youth, until very recently an athlete, is lying on his death bed. The only thing that remains of him is his eyes. Homeless women are crying, abandoned on a rain-slurred road, with bundles in hand and loneliness in their heart. A dosimetrist is monitoring the radiation level of dead fish on a river bank.
There is a picture of an eight-legged horse. Kostin sent photos of these mutants to Mikhail Gorbachev but received no answer. A man wearing a gas mask is pushing a baby carriage, but there are no gas masks for babies. There is a picture of the August 1989 protest march. National flags are flying. A placard reads, “We demand a Chornobyl Nuremberg trial!”
A few months later both the communist system and the Sarcophagus of Death collapsed. But radiation will continue to seep through — yesterday, today — for centuries and millennia to come.
You are pursued by the buzzing of a Geiger counter that echoes in the bunker’s corridors. As you leave the bunker, you see the words of Lina Kostenko on a rugged concrete wall: “Oh, buried Chornobyl woods! Do not forget our voices.”
Is this Ukraine’s lesson to the world? To whom is the testament of humankind addressed?
You are back at the Renaissance villa’s ancient garden. Tiny violets have sprouted beneath an enormous plane-tree.
If ever there was in-depth contact between two cultures, it happened in this place. Here you can read Italy through Ukraine and Ukraine through Italy. You read the future through the past.
The Chornobyl exhibit is a metaphor of modern times. Renaissance man has brought the laws of harmony down to earth from outer space. Modern man is producing chaos and is transporting it from earth to outer space.
It is also a warning: those who did not succeed in staging a Nuremberg trial for 1933 are doomed to that of 1986.
It is a catharsis: a fresco shows a mother’s hand on her child’s head, shining through the past and future ruins of the world.
