Welcome to Ukrainian poetry - October 2004

January 18, 2006 The country in which we appeared on this earth has plenty of reasons to be considered poetry-centric. Its history has been such that poetry was one of only a few means for national or, at the very least, linguistic survival, especially during the nineteenth century, which was disastrous for Ukraine. It became the century of poets, and specifically of one poet (the Father of our Nation), after whom came an entire army of successors and followers. I use the word ‘army’ not by chance. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, poets and poetry gained a special meaning in Ukrainian public tradition. Poetry was connected with the fight for freedom, words were weapons, and individualism and intimacy were pushed far to the background, as is required by any disciplined army. The poet was no longer seen as just a spokesperson, but as a national messiah, and poetry was a citizen’s strongest message. I note in brackets, that in this sense we are not alone, especially in the part of the world that later came to be known as Central-Eastern Europe.

According to external logic, this notion should have existed until at least August 1991, when Ukraine gained its independence. In reality it disappeared significantly earlier. Perhaps this disappearance started in 1933, when hundreds of Ukrainian poets, who were residents of the capital city of Kharkiv, failed to notice village people swollen from hunger and dying on the streets or in the unattended parks. Or perhaps it began in 1985, when Vasyl Stus, who was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature, died in a Soviet labor camp in the Urals.

Yet what if it still exists today? With seven days left until the decisive Ukrainian Presidentian elections (on October 31), my email inbox is practically screaming with messages about students being pursued by the police, about the leadership’s lies, about the arrival in Kyiv of countless military units who were trained by Russian specialists in “suppression of massive unrest”. Slowly, you start to think about your own participation and your joint responsibility. You want to remain so uninvolved that you can’t stay out of politics any longer.

By an important measure, this is the final autumn. Perhaps it has to be categorically so. Maybe the epoch of Ukrainian uncertainty will end along with it, and Ukrainian poetry will have a path by which to survive. Translated by Christina Redko


The Ukrainian domain is supported by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Ukraine, and the International Renaissance Foundation