Yesterday the family and friends of Roman Andriyashyk, one of Ukraine’s greatest prose writers, met to mark the ninth day after his passing. Born in Ternopil oblast in 1933, Roman was the first Soviet writer to write honestly about OUN-UPA and they hounded him for it, especially during the dark days of the General Pogrom of 1972. He once even recalled how they poisoned his dog. How he managed to escape arrest will always remain a mystery to me. When the year before last he was belatedly awarded the Shevchenko State Prize, this nation’s highest award for intellectual achievement, it was already too late, for he had passed his creative prime, using his meager pension to buy cheap unfiltered cigarettes, otherwise unavailable in the village where he spent most of his time, and which would return to him as food, moonshine, and enough money for the next excursion back to Kyiv.
I remember Romko as a good friend, always jovial and usually tipsy. He had always befriended my wife, who also had her own bleak days under the Soviets, and one of his last phone calls was to a mutual friend to whom he said, “I just read Natalka’s book. You can’t image what she’s done. Protect and preserve her. I’m already too old and sick.” A final word, a final helping hand just this side of the grave. I will personally never forget how the three of us once sat in the park behind Ukrayinsky dim (Ukraine House), sharing a bottle and swapping anecdotes about life and literature until dawn. I always want to remember him like that and not his funeral last week, to which such fellow literary lions like Ivan Dziuba, Yuri Mushketyk, and Ivan Drach came to pay their last respects. A true lion has been lost by a nation having far too few of them. I will miss a friend, but his literary legacy will be with us always. A writer lives on in his books, and Roman Andriyashyk achieved immortality long before he died.
