‘A Salieri but not a Mozart’

18 januari 2006 Do you think one can stop being a poet? What happens to a poet, when he stops writing poetry? Do you still consider yourself a poet?

I don’t think poets are any special species. Intellectuals are. I mean intellectuals in a broad sense – people prone to all sorts of intellectual reflection. People who think intensively on what they think, what they see, what they hear, what they read, and try to articulate their thoughts, their feelings. There are different techniques of reflection, and this is where the difference between, say, poetry and philosophy or political analysis comes from. But basically this is the same sort of intellectual activity, which profoundly differs from a non-reflective, ‘spontaneous’ way of life.

In these terms, I believe, nobody can stop being a poet if he/she has ever practised this sort of intellectual activity. He/she can stop writing poems, of course, as many, actually the majority of young people do eventually. But they certainly cannot give up intellectual reflection – maybe with a minor exception of yoga converts who employ special elaborated techniques to this end.

So, basically, I still consider myself a poet, even though I haven’t written a line since 1988, and have no intention of ever resuming this business. I feel I’m a poet because I still have a command of certain techniques of intellectual reflection, and I cannot give them up or pretend I don’t know them.

Yet, at the same time, I know some other techniques, including those from the hard sciences and the maths I studied at the Polytechnic Institute (my first diploma was in electrical engineering). And I apply all of them, perhaps subconsciously when writing my essays, my political analysis, or literary criticism.

Your dedication in my copy of your only book of poetry says: ‘To Katya, instead of memoirs’. Do you consider your poetry to be memoirs? Did you conceive it as memoirs or did this understanding come to you later? Do you plan to write ‘real’ memoirs?

Any poetry is a sort of memoir or, perhaps, diary. It’s a report on something that can’t be stated, something that can be felt only or, rather, induced, evoked in the reader. I don’t think poetry is conceived as a memoir or a diary but it can certainly be read, interpreted this way – as an intimate, metaphysical rather than physical history of the person.

All these histories are essentially very similar: love and death, light and darkness, enlightenment and despair, fighting with devils or, maybe, angels (very often they are indistinguishable). Any good poem, or essay, or short story has rather a simple structure: thesis – antithesis – catharsis, i.e. an attempt to reconcile ‘pro’ and ‘contra’ or, rather, to transcend them.

I’d like to produce good memoirs, something like Hemingway’s Moveable Feast. Actually, I embark on this sometimes in my essays, at least in the best of them – like ‘Saturday Night’ or ‘Eight Jews in a Search of the Grand-Pa’. They have essentially a poetical structure. Any catharsis actually comes from the same interplay of opposite feelings – protivochuvstvovanie – as a prominent Russian psychologist Leonid Vygotskiy called it.

Why don’t you write poetry any more?

I don’t know. The simplest and perhaps the most self-indulgent answer would be to refer to the maturity, sobriety or, maybe, cynicism that comes with age. Yurko Andrukhovych, as you remember, joked long ago that there was something shameful about being a poet after the age of 30. I would put it differently: at some moment you suddenly feel that everything has already been written, and much better than you would ever be able to do it. You come to understand that you are a good professional but not a genius, a Salieri but not a Mozart. There is no shame in being a good professional in journalism, in political analysis, in literary criticism. But in poetry?

Of course, this is a prettified version. Some people are just too lazy. Not me, I am a workaholic. But there were too many changes in my life in 1984–1988. Each of them could be a reason to give up poetry (and prose, since I used to write short stories as well). First, I got married, and gave up my carefree, Bohemian style of life. Second, I moved from my native Lviv to Kyiv, i.e. dramatically changed my urban, cultural and linguistic environment. Third, I joined the Writers’ Union and became an editor of a literary journal. One may put it that I became an ‘official’ writer and compromised my vocation, my status of independent, unrecognized, underground genius, I betrayed my guild of stokers and watchmen. And fourth, perestroika had changed radically the whole social, political, cultural setting. I found some new opportunities to express what I wanted to (mostly in journalism), and lost some other modes of feeling and expression. In sum, I have no language, no style, no artistic approach to deal poetically with my/our new life. But I still try to do this in some other, less ambitious genres.

In your essays about contemporary Ukrainian poetry you use poetry just as a tool for understanding extra-literary - socio-cultural and geopolitical - matters. Why poetry?

The essays you mention are examples of journalism rather than literary criticism, albeit the border between the two is vague. I was just asked to introduce Ukrainian literature to foreigners who had little if any idea about Ukraine. So I definitely had to refer to some social, historical and – as you say – geopolitical matters. But basically I can do this without any reference to poetry. And usually I do so.

What was the role of poets – or more generally, writers – in the Orange revolution? Is it comparable with the role of poets in major revolutions?

I don’t think they played any specific role. Yes, many of them went on the streets with the people, some of them signed petitions, published articles, gave their comments to domestic and international media. And, to their credit, not a single more or less good writer supported the incumbent regime. But the major role in this revolution was played by the rock-stars. And this is one of main differences between modern and postmodern revolutions. I’m happy that Ukraine joined the postmodern world, at least partly.

In the essay ‘We’ll die, not in Paris –’ written in 1989, under the milder Soviet regime, you state: “Under present conditions, pure art is a luxury which writers simply cannot afford”. Conditions have changed dramatically. Can writers afford such a luxury now?

Not yet actually. It was the ‘bourgeois’ revolution that removed the remnants of Soviet feudalism. But Ukraine is still a postcolonial country where the Ukrainian language and culture have been harshly oppressed and have not yet recovered. The situation is not as dramatic as in Belarus where the national language has been brought to edge of extinction by the neo-Soviet regime. But it still needs a sort of protectionism from the government. And special awareness from the people, writers in particular.