Who is to blame, when a dream of millions becomes unattainable due to the whims of one? What punishment awaits the people who violated and are contemplating the destruction of ideals? What will be the result – other than disappointment – of our unrealized hopes? This is the current rhetoric of Ukrainian reflections on the vanishing Europe and an old parable of English origin.
The lyrical metaphor of the poet Samuel Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, managed to become a literary pearl of Romanticism, a bronze monument, a film, and a reflection on personal and collective responsibility. The ballad’s plot is essentially simple. A sailing ship gets lost in the floes of the Antarctic, but an albatross in the sky shows the seafarers the way to clear waters. When the danger has passed, an old mariner kills the bird with a crossbow for no apparent reason, and the ship is again in the ice-field. The indignant sailors hang the dead albatross on their mate’s neck and tie him to a yard. Now the Almighty decides that the crew is not responsible for the heartless fellow’s actions and takes them all to His abode. Only the cruel sailor with the albatross around his neck remains between life and death. A statue of him was put up in the British town of Watchet, and the poem was interpreted as a parable-cum-prophesy about atonement for sins. The old English ballad has also become a source of superstitions for the Ukrainian ship. For we know on whose neck we will hang a dead albatross for a killed dream. But we are not sure of our own involvement in the “ancient mariner’s” escapade. This person is now doubtlessly Viktor Yanukovych who foils signing the EU cooperation documents. But will fate have mercy on all those who are on board with him?
Many harsh and unkind words have been said about the “collective Yanukovych” and his personal responsibility for what has happened in this country in the past three years. Quite a few political analysts believe that, as he assumed all the rights and powers to manage the country, he must, accordingly, be held responsible the way other usurpers and dictators were in history. And there are ample grounds for this. The realities of present-day life no longer need any statistical or sociological confirmations – they are as obvious as the sky above us. The ever-growing prices of foodstuffs and medicines, while the industrial goods price list remains the same, are an indication of abject poverty among ordinary people who can only buy the means of subsistence. Social networking sites are full of satirical illustrations about taxmen who collect tributes and duties in any possible ways, the frivolous bimbos who hold important governmental offices, the misbehaving gilded youth, and the policemen who commit crimes. An equally deplorable picture is in the real-time space. The roads between district towns have practically vanished, businesses are cutting their staff, the fields and groves next to the cities are heaped with garbage, and the cities themselves are rife with crime. People call it “improvement,” quoting Yanukovych’s election slogan to characterize the years of his presidency. The point is not even in deplorable economic results and the insensitive bureaucracy. For the first time in the years of Ukrainian statehood, we have seen an unbridgeable rift between the authorities and society. The emotions, ideas and advice of intellectuals, experts, and ordinary people cannot pierce the thick walls of residencies and offices that bear the address gov.ua. I am even afraid that the very idea of civil service has been seriously tarnished. For most people, it is an obligation for a pension that you will earn in no other sector. For a narrower circle, it is a set of cushy jobs that provide a nice opportunity to improve one’s financial situation. On the very top of the hierarchal ladder are a hundred people who manage financial rivers with property-lined banks. At first sight, the account for what has happened in this country should be rendered by all: owners, the generals whose orders the frightened “vertical chain of command” fulfills, the enormous army of civil servants who are supposed to defend the interests of the state, as well as we who cast our votes for one political vector or another. But, deep in our heart and in our actions, we are all determinists who think that everything is planned high above and the duty to the country is only to be done over there, high above. We look like the crew of the English sailing ship, which is ready to hang a dead bird on the madman’s neck but not to divert his crossbow from its target. Therefore, the entire social system, the government, the opposition, and ordinary people focus either on searching for culprits or on things that are not worth their professional level, such as struggling for “reducing the price of a borsch-cooking set under the instructions of the president” (http://www.048.ua/news/416139). This moral defect tells on “big and little” people who exchange their principles for a place in the system and no longer see the difference between service and servility. “The human race is unimportant,” says the great postmodernist John Fowles in one of his novels. “It is the self that must not be betrayed.” “I suppose one could say that Hitler didn’t betray his self.” “You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy.”
The Ukrainians of today are facing an alternative typical of an emerging democracy: to raise the bar of their own moral responsibility for what is going on in the country, or to continue making rational deals each on his or her level. Let officials speak about all-time cheap cabbages and entrepreneurs about lack of money for up-to-date equipment, let bosom friends play irreconcilable ideological adversaries and poor people stand is public rallies for a modest reward. Each has a thousand reasons for a compromise with his or her self, as is the case of women who have to adorn a marriage of convenience with words of love.
“He went like one that hath been stunned, and is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man, he rose the morrow morn” is the end of Samuel Coleridge’s poem about a mariner with an albatross around his neck. Maybe, these words harbor the chief message the parable about those who have willy-nilly served as an instrument to kill a hope and a dream. Let us be sadder but wiser.
