The Eastern Revanche on the Horizon

January 18, 2006 A month has already gone by since another historical happening took place, marking the death of postmodernism as it was already stated by fast and precisely defining and wisely generalizing analyzers, and since the beginning of the war between civilizations. “The world is not the same after September 11th!” This phrase is a leitmotif of all that has been stated lately on blue television screens and flickering computer monitors. I will dare to rephrase this expression. “After September 11th the world is not the SAME, it just IS!” As it WAS not once and not twice during the history. The world is encountering the evidence of its existence, as it did after Auschwitz and Hatyn’, after Bykivnia and Pearl Harbor. It does so and continues to write poetry. I have an Adorno-style wonder whether poetry is possible after September 11th. And probably I will never find an answer to this question. As I will never find an answer to the question: what is going on in Eastern, let me say, Europe?

This introduction does not preface a talk on urgent topics of the present. My speech will be quite egoistic and optimistic, probably, because of my egoistically optimistic obsessive wish – being stock-still in the slumberous vacuum of the present – at least for a moment to imagine myself and the world around not tragically hopeless, but to find in this tragic hopelessness of post-colonial, post-soviet, post-postmodern, post-carnival non-existence of Eastern, let me say, Europe, and, in particular, of my dear Ukraine the light at the end of the tunnel.

All of you know perfectly well where Ukraine is. Or maybe I should say: all of you can perfectly well find Ukraine on a map of Europe, because you know that it should be there. Someone Unimaginable decided that this would be so and presented to these Eastern, let me say, Europeans from the Slavic tribe this territory which, as one Ukrainian poet has put it, is reminiscent of a chewed-out heart. Apparently, from this form forward taking everything to heart and living not as the head dictates, but as the heart feels – this became a primordial mental feature that runs in the nation. Here is the heart of cordocentrism/cardiocentrism of Ukrainians, a very comfortable myth of social consciousness, which can compete only with such famous stereotypes as “the Russian soul” or the exaggerated individualism of Western Europe. Thus the very geographic boundaries of Ukraine came to define the mode of Ukrainian existence. Although all such myths should be viewed with a critical eye, I suspect bits of truth in this idea of cordocentrism/cardiocentrism.

Another symbolic mark of Ukrainian being is that an absolutely non-Ukrainian by origin, literary father of a certain sexual and existence model of behavior, described later by Austrian psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing, for some reason chose Ukraine as his birthplace. By this, I mean Herr Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, born in Lviv. I would not misrepresent the truth, if I were to say that masochism in all its manifestations and emanations is inherent in Ukrainians. This nation is not only accustomed to successful suffering at the hand of numerous external forces. It has also learned to suffer from its own with even greater success and more powerful effect. This feature has also transferred to the mental sphere. On the planet Earth you can hardly find more heartily resigned self-torturers than Ukrainians. These are characteristic traits of a nation, which does not recognize the right of its own existence.

This persistent refusal of ourselves throughout the entirety of our history is reason enough to query the Intention of the Divine, because it is absolutely unknown why God created Ukrainians. I would dare to suppose that it was done for other people to watch us and see, how life should not be. It may be just the opposite as well. Maybe Ukrainians are the Chosen Nation, maybe God truly loves only us. (And maybe also the Saami, Gypsies, Kurds and Basks a little bit.) God likes our way of life – our constant waiting for the God-send. The very concept of waiting as a process without any stated goal or outcome has become a very fruitful source of inspiration for Ukrainian literature. But forget about literature! A look at the phraseological level of Ukrainian language will give you a sense of how deeply we are infected with the virus of passive waiting. The verb ‘to wait’ has 19 synonyms in Ukrainian language.

The passive observation of life, enthusiastic non-intrusion into it appears in quite unexpected places. For example, in the national anthem, which is, so to say, a manifestation of the national character, one can find beautiful illustrations of Ukrainian mentality. What would you say about the line “Our enemies will disappear as dew under the sun”? They will disappear on their own, without any intrusion from our side. They will die, and we will live forever. It means that none of our enemies – either real historical ones, or Chornobyl, or the hunger of the 1930’s, or totalitarian regimes, or AIDS, or the infant mortality rate – none can distract us from our waiting. It could not, until those in power decided to stop it.

Of course, anyone’s patience, even divine patience, can come to an end. So it came as Ukrainian independence, which fell on Ukrainians and hit us with its weight. In this situation, Chornobyl of 1986 was a cold strontium shower, awakening and healing. Finally, for the first time our 1000-year history, Ukrainians came close to an understanding of the nature of our existence and started to make due for its imitations in the past. If you listen to the words of the first line of the Ukrainian national anthem you will hear “Ukraine is not dead yet”. Do not believe it. Ukraine has yet to be born – it has yet to exist. It gives us hope that some day it will be born, realized, and will be. And this “some day” will undoubtedly come in the near future. At least, we want to believe in it.

Thus the very concept of “The Eastern Revanche” declared as the name of my lecture should suggest some historical associations. It is quite easy to recall a few revanches in the history of the past century that changed the face of the world. Think about Hitler’s revanche for defeat in World War I. A fundamental trait of any historical revanche is a revenge for insulted conceit, expropriated territories, unjust world order, disgraced national interests, and so on. Ukraine has made a revanche for itself and no one knows how this will be reflected on the rest of the world. Presently becoming increasingly popular in Ukraine are the books of Vasyl Kozhelianko – a writer who in easy belletristic form tries to reconsider Ukrainian history in revanchist mode. He, in fact, rewrites history, creating a fictional situation, where historical executioners and victims change places, lost battles are won, and oppressed Ukrainians with help from allies, mostly Germans, always appear as winners. It is a naïve way of self-rehabilitation in the face of history, taken as a fictional device. Ukraine does not need such rehabilitation of herself as a historical nation, she needs an attempt of the birth of herself as a historic cultural nation.

Ukraine has started to atone for her sin of non-existence, of permanent hanging between West and East, Europe and Asia, Orthodox and Catholics, totalitarianism and freedom, of not being able to orientate, of the inability to choose her own place. Now more than ever we need a feeling of “collective culpability” for ourselves in order to overcome the sin of our historical non-existence.

In Ukraine this revanche, which in each post-communist country occurs differently, is aggravated by the total ruining of all that is essential, with the discrediting of not only traditional, but of any and all humanistic values. We are an ideal nation for postmodernism, a soft clay, which takes any prescribed form. Traditional patriarchal values have been devalued by aggressive deruralization throughout the whole 20th century. The Orthodox Church is discredited and unpopular, playing a simply attributive role. The nation is denationalized with 300 years of Russification. The elite consists of mafia clans. Liberal and democratic values cannot get inoculated, the privatization of land has yet to be legalized . . . Portraits of various apocalypses can be painted even more dramatically, but there is still something in our hopelessness. Namely – a chance for a resistance movement, for a revolutionary situation within the community, when there is nothing to lose, but something still can be gained. I am not talking about an armed revolution, but about a spiritual one, for as Herman Hesse said: “The space is open. There is nothing sacred”.

There is no place for contemporary Ukraine on the world map. She cannot return to tradition, because she never had one in a way that was commonly understood. She cannot copy someone else’s values. Xenophobic inertia – the old disease of not seeing and not accepting the alien – is still very powerful. And the question of the capability to create a new cultural essence is as dead-ended as it is prospective and optimistic. Honestly, I do not see how this renaissance, or, to be more exact, this ‘naissance’ – birth – should take place. It has not yet become a fact of consciousness, a know-how, but, at least for me, it has already become a fact of faith.

The world order reserves a specific place in a certain sector for each country. In my opinion, the strict structure of the present world leaves no place for the so-called “second world” to which, I hope, amongst others, my country belongs. Being able only to take the side of the strongest, we do not decide anything, do we? The unique position of Eastern Europe between other worlds – “the first” and “the third”, which have already entered the contradiction phase – allows us the time and the right to finally take care of ourselves through either political gatherings or by building up our own fields of culture.

To put it briefly, we should stop being a silent voice in the global choir in order to keep from becoming a false voice later. I think that the rescue of our – by this I mean Eastern European – culture will be in the giving up of local closure for the formation of a new Eastern European cultural identity. The nineties stand as a kind of beginning of this Eastern European discourse. In Ukraine this topic has started to gain popularity, laying the groundwork for geopolitical speculations, scientific conferences, and writers’ reflections. There appeared two months ago in Ukraine (in Ukrainian) and a year and a half ago in Poland (in Polish) a book containing works by two wonderful Eastern European writers – Andzej Stasiuk of Poland and Yury Andruchovych of Ukraine – entitled My Europe. Stasiuk’s autobiographical novel The Ship Diary and Andruchovych’s Central-Eastern Revision compose a kind of artistic manifesto of the Eastern European ideology. Eastern Europe in these pieces is not an unclear spot on the map. It takes on closely intimate traits, turning into a spiritual essence. This book is a very important event for Ukraine, because all of a sudden it has become clear that a Ukrainian writer shares more familiar topics with the Polish (or Lithuanian, Hungarian, Croatian, Bulgarian) than with the Russian or English, for example.

All of us are being haunted by the same phobias, we have the same complexes, dream the same dreams. Aches of disappeared and existing empires accumulate in our lungs, hardening and easing our breath at the same time. The citizens of “apple republics”, we have a common past, we laugh at the same jokes, we live through similar crises and are moved by the same touching moments.

Here is a little illustration. A month ago in Berlin I met Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer, who has lived in the Netherlands for a long time, feeling nostalgia for Eastern Europe. We were ideal company for each other. We walked down Berlin streets, discussing different subjects, from literature and nationalism to illegal prostitution and Moroccan emigrants, and ended up in a traditional German Kneipe, which are plentiful in the German capital. I ordered traditional Wurst, and Dubravka chose Kotelett from the variety of sausages. After lunch we walked out to the sunny street. Nothing could have forecast her rapid mood-change to a very sentimental sort of sadness. In 5 minutes Dubravka made a paradoxical statement, which I did not at first understand. She said: This ‘kotletka’ ate me . . . I started questioning her: Maybe the meat was bad and you got sick? No, no, everything is all right with the German quality of meat. It’s just that this kotelette reminded me of Eastern Europe. At home, in Croatia, kotlekta is a traditional dish. I have so many memories connected to this kotelette. It is my past. I feel as if I ate a piece of my Motherland. That is where the sickness came from. Sorry . . . – she said in frustation.

As you may see, it was not a sterile hamburger from the globalized world, which gives one very little, except for the satisfaction of basic physiological needs and the active development of gastritis. What a depth of cultural senses! What a humanitarian filling! Oh, this taste of the pork kotelette is our own, Eastern European, taste of a hundred times quoted Proust cake from the childhood. This is a ritual of nostalgic gastronomy, of understanding on the level of some totally unseen sphere. You can perceive this as merely a writer’s exaggeration, but, you ought to agree, that there is something in it, some touching despair before the past, which has united us forever. And when we lose this common ideology of despair, I am sure, we will definitely lose ourselves. This is exactly the case, when one can surely say: Our strength is in our weakness!

The major challenge is to try hearing and feeling each other, finally to become interesting to each other. And soon is the day, when in Ukraine people will first learn about a new book of the Slovenian poet Alesh Debeliak rather than about a new bestseller of Steven King; the day, when Polish poetess Wislawa Szymborska will be translated in all Eastern European languages not because she had suddenly became a Nobel prize laureate, but because she is ‘ours’ and she is interesting for all of us as a wonderful Polish poetess. In Ukraine Tomas Venclova will be translated not because he was a friend of Brodsky, but because he is a genius Lithuanian poet. In some TV-interview Yugoslavian film director Emir Kusturica will finally call his favorite film director Olexandr Dovzhenko ‘Ukrainian’ and not ‘Russian’. Soon is the day, when finally Bucharest, Prague, Vilnius, Ljubljana, Sofia or Skopje will become closer to us than London, Paris, and New York, closer not just geographically, but, first of all, culturally; when the Lithuanian, Romanian or Hungarian departments of Kyiv State University will have at least 5 people competing for 1 student position; when Polish policemen will not kill a Ukrainian driver just because he was Ukrainian.

I am not a meteorologist, and such forecasts of Eastern European weather will not satisfy anyone in our pragmatic age. Thus I want to turn from somehow amorphous Eastern European lyrics to the topic of our conference. Or rather to its second part, touching new geography. I want to propose to you my own vision of the contemporary European, so to say, geographical situation. In my classification European countries are divided into the following categories:

1. Countries with developed capitalist economies (Belgium), former socialist countries that successfully are building up capitalism (Czech republic), and post-soviet countries that have not even tried to build anything yet (Moldova).

2. Countries where women shave their underarms (Ukraine) and countries where women do not do that at all (France).

3. Countries with legalized homosexual marriages (Denmark) and countries, where a few years ago one could get thrown in jail for homosexuality (Ukraine).

4. NATO-members countries (Spain), recent NATO-member countries (Hungary), longing to become NATO-members countries (Lithuania), countries that hate and that are afraid of NATO, but nonetheless actively take western loans (Russia), and the country that does not give a damn about any organization, including NATO (Switzerland).

5. Countries with legalized light drugs (the Netherlands) and countries, where you can get a kilo of heroin somehow ‘added’ to a gram of marijuana and 7 years of jail to spoil the rest of your life (Ukraine).

6. Countries with legalized prostitution (the Netherlands) and countries that supply them with the “live stock” – each month thousands and thousands of Emmanuelles, Angelics, Justines, Roksolanas and just Barbie-dolls (Ukraine).

7. Countries, where geniuses are born in pain and barely survive (Romania), and then move to another countries (France) in order to realize their talents and die in Paris.

8. Countries about which you get news each day from BBC, CNN or Deutsche Welle (Great Britain) and countries, which you can read about only in the encyclopedia and barely find on the map (San Marino).

9. Countries where a bottle of vodka costs 120 DM (Germany) and countries, where one can drown in this wonderful drink for half a dollar (Belarus).

10. Countries with a monarchy (Liechtenstein), countries with a theocracy, of Papal rule (Vatican), countries with the ruling authority of a Father-President (Belarus), countries where the authority of Mother-Queen is recalled only on her birthday (Great Britain), countries where almost everything is decided by a male-dominated Parliament and thus a woman easily became president (Latvia), countries governed by counselors married 4 times and where living symbols of the nation are publicly disgraced for the petty unsanctioned appropriation of a million DM (Germany), countries where a mere electrician can become president (Poland), countries where a mere writer can become president (Czech republic), countries where a mere American can become president (Lithuania), countries where things will not work out regardless of who is the president (Russia), and countries were mere oligarchs and numerous patriarchs rule (Ukraine).

I can continue this list on to infinity, but I see no sense in it. What is important is to change usual perspective and look at each other with new eyes. As you may have noticed, our diversity is our strength and our weakness! Now just try to put all this together . . .


Presented at the Mute Realities seminar, Vilnius, 19-20 October 2001.