“We’ll die, not in Paris –”: New Ukrainian Poetry

18 januari 2006 Is it worth the trouble, dying in Paris? This question was asked at one of the first – and one of the most explosive – pro-perestroika meetings at the House of Poets in Kiev. It was raised after {id="5523" title="Natalka Bilotserkivets"} had recited her poem, with the following epigraph by Cesar Vallejo: “I will die in Paris on Thursday night”. So, the poet read:

    We’ll die, not in Paris –
    This I know for sure –
    But in a tear-and-sweat-soaked provincial bed.
    And no one will hand you your cognac,
    I know
    We won’t be comforted by anyone’s kiss
    The circles of darkness won’t disappear under Pont Mirabeau.
    We cried too bitterly and abused nature  
    We loved excessively
    Thus shaming our lovers      
    We wrote too many poems
    While disregarding the poets.
    Never.
    They won’t let us die in Paris
    They’ll encircle the water flowing under Pont Mirabeau with heavy barricades.

It sounds preposterous, but the poet was forced to address this question quite literally, explaining that her reference to Paris had little to do with the actual city, where (as the Soviet media would have liked us to believe for so many years) the rich sip cognac and the unemployed and homeless die under the bridges. She was speaking of the Paris of the mind – the Paris of the Arts, of culture, the Mecca that artists visit in imaginary pilgrimages, if not in reality. In the context, it would be incorrect to contrast Paris literally with Kiev or any other place in the world. For Paris as a symbol contrasts sharply with any place where provincialism exists – even in Paris itself.

Why is provincialism, this psychological complex we so often raise in referring to our culture, such a characteristic feature of Ukrainian literature? There are a number of reasons. Perhaps foremost among them is the fact that there is probably no other large nation in the world about which so little is known. In addition, it would be difficult to find another country with such a small proportion of intelligentsia, an educated and creative elite that speaks the language of the people – Ukrainian, not Russian. This was perhaps the reason why Taras Shevchenko (1814-61), one of Ukraine’s most renowned poets, at one point complained: “Why do I write? For whom do I write?” In a fit of temper he even wrote: “Why in the name of hell do I waste my days with this ink and paper?” Lesia Ukrainka (1871-1913) echoed these words, asking: “How can I teach the indifferent to care? How can I awaken the mind that is asleep?”

Though it is important to note that these poets experienced very different frames of mind, nevertheless from the time of Shevchenko to the present day, Ukrainian poetry has been replete with themes reflecting the poet’s haunting doubts. They feared that their work would be read by only a few contemporaries, that it would be forgotten.

“We will die in slavery”, said one Ukrainian poet to those of her colleagues infected with the “Paris sickness”. Indeed, the provincialization of Ukraine, its land and its people, once so cultured, came as a result of three hundred years of Russian colonial policies. It began with a strict ban on the Ukrainian language and brought about the widespread assimilation of urban dwellers into Russian culture, with a concomitant growth of indifference among the rural population towards their national culture. The Ukrainian intelligentsia attempted a revival after the two Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, only to be all but completely eliminated themselves during the years of Stalinist rule. The artificial famine engineered in 1932 and 1933, which claimed the lives of millions of peasants, threatened the nation with extinction. Even today it is still poised precariously between life and death. The recent law granting Ukrainian the status of state language allied to a number of other measures designed to raise its prestige, have thus far failed to overcome the effects of such colonialism on the consciousness of the people.

Although the media have stopped speaking about Ukrainian language and culture as “having no prospects for the future” or being “doomed”, “hopelessly provincial”, and “second rate”, such views are still quite prevalent in society. To understand this, one need only look at billboards in Crimean resorts, where films produced by the Kiev Dovzhenko Studio are passed off as productions by Mosfilm (Moscow) in order to attract audiences; or visit a local bookstore and inquire whether there are any good books available. You may well get a reply along the lines of: “Nope. Everything we have is in Ukrainian.”

This kind of situation cannot but have an effect on Ukrainian writers – even the most zealous ‘aesthetes’ among them, who live and work only for their art, must somehow come to terms with this. Some compose verses of ‘repentance’, for having sacrificed and adapted their style to suit the audience. {id="5528" title="Yuri Andrukhovych"} challenges this practice, asking: “Did it make you feel better that you rhymed your lines in order to be understood and accepted?” Another poet, {id="5521" title="Ivan Malkovych"}, takes an openly didactic stance, in ‘A Village Teacher’s Advice’:


Perhaps it’s not the most crucial thing, but you, child,
with your tiny little palms must protect that tiny candle – the letter ї
and standing on tip-toes,
hold up the crescent-like sickle of the letter є,
cut out of the firmament along with its thread,
Because, child, they say that our
language is just like the nightingale’s
Though you should realise that there may come a time
when even the smallest nightingale
will not remember it.
That’s why you ought not to rely
only on nightingales, child.


(see note)

The very fact that poets are resorting now to such declarations seems to me symptomatic. After all, poets are not inclined to rhymed invectives, and are upbraided often enough by critics for their excessive use of metaphor, for their complexity, for ducking the issues and writing only for a narrow coterie. The cultural situation in Ukraine today is one that rules out the possibility of approaching art from a purely aesthetic point of view. Under present conditions, pure art is a luxury which writers simply cannot afford. The reasoning of those who wish to prevent young aesthetes from “dying in Paris” is clear, but I think that it’s unnecessary to put up any barricades to their creativity. The writers themselves exercise their own internal restraints, compelled by the feeling of responsibility they have for their nation’s language and culture. “We’ll die, not in Paris –” is a single bitter, but fairly sober assessment of the situation our literature finds itself in today, and it opens the door to an awareness of our destiny.

Ultimately, though, how, should the responsibility that people feel for their culture be expressed? By a continuation of traditions, hoping against hope to get the message across to the public at large? Or by the creation of a refined, exquisite, elitist culture, capable of surprising the world, and in doing so, attracting attention to a nation which does not exist on the map? Perhaps this feeling of responsibility should be expressed in an attempt to reconcile these two alternatives, to find a dialectic unity of these opposites? Contemporary Ukrainian poetry answers these questions in various ways.

On the one hand, there is a group of poets who place special emphasis on ‘what’ a poem is about, and less on how it is written. The credo of this school was captured most succinctly by Stanislav Chernilevs’ki, when he said: “What really matters is not how beautiful, but how truthful, the language is.” Several years ago, this statement provoked quite a debate in literary circles and paralleled in intensity the debates of the past over statements advocating “pure art”. On the other hand, there is another group of poets who seem indifferent to “social problems” and are thus often criticised by the proponents of “socially conscious art”.

The differences, however, rarely end in confrontation. This is partly because the ‘aesthetes’ show little inclination to engage in polemics, looking upon others with an attitude of arrogant condescension, and partly because their opponents sense that they lack sincerity, that there is something of a pose in the position they hold. What is more, since the experience of the 1920s and 1930s, Ukrainian writers understand that such confrontations can be outright dangerous, as they can be exploited by outside forces.

Today, for the first time since the 1920s, we seem to have this diversity in Ukraine once again, not only within the official Writers’ Union, which has evolved into quite a progressive organisation, making the issue of its dissolution for having been a Stalinist organisation in the past, obsolete. Diversity is also a feature of the ‘informal’ literary groups, such as Propala Hramata in Kiev, Lugosad in L’viv and the Bu-Ba-Bu group of L’viv, Rivne, and Ivano-Frankivsk. These groups, unable to find their way to the reading public in official publications, compensate with skillful live performances. In addition, we might mention the informally published magazines. Literaturnyi iarmarok in Kiev, and Zhytnyi Rynok in Zhytomyr.

Unlike the ‘executed’ renaissance Ukrainian culture experienced in the 1920s, that of the 1960s was merely a ‘suffocated’ one. Most Ukrainian poets survived the repression of those years both physically and spiritually. Even during the profound stagnation in the post-60s period, these poets continued to play a role in the cultural life of the country. Their work continued to circulate unofficially, influencing younger generations of poets in their formative years. So the continuity between generations was not disrupted as it had been in the past.

Today when reading the poems of Holoborodko, Kordun, Vorobiov, and Sachenko, it’s difficult to detect the allegedly seditious content the government of the time read into these innocent metaphorical lines. It is difficult to comprehend just exactly what state principles these hermetic exercises had violated. It is impossible to justify the searches, the confiscations, the expulsions from the universities, that mere possession of this material brought about. This kind of absurdity lies at the very heart of the totalitarian system. During Brezhnev’s and Shcherbyts’kyi’s rule, any form of independence and non-conformity was viewed as evidence of ‘anti-social’ revolt, and the unwillingness of literary people to conform to the spirit of Stalinism was viewed as an attempt to undermine the achievements of ‘developed’ socialism and interpreted as an act of ‘sabotage’. This Ukrainian hermetic poetry of the late 1960s and the early 1980s played the same role in Ukrainian society during those years as Italian hermetic poetry played in Italy during the rule of Mussolini.

Yet however difficult the years of stagnation were for Ukraine, the country emerged from this period with its poetic tradition uninterrupted. Young poets of the 80s were able to draw, not only on the experience of the poets of the 1960s, but also on that of the poets of the post-60s era. They had access to the classics of our culture, as well as to the works of the Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1920s, which had been partially restored to Ukrainian culture during Khruschev’s ‘thaw’. They could draw not only on trends in Russian poetry, but also on those in world poetry, which was extensively and well represented in Vsesvit magazine, under the editorship of Dmytro Pavlychko in the 1970s.

There is another factor of great importance that has a bearing on the development of Ukrainian literature, namely that we have a first generation of creative people who were born into urban families and/or to families of intellectuals. These children were taught to appreciate the classics, to speak foreign languages, translate great works, and to view culture as a natural medium of expression. Respect for education was cultivated in this generation. Furthermore, this generation was capable of self-criticism, of irony – a quality Ukrainians seem to have lacked in the past. Young Ukrainians today have developed a burlesque-type of humour, which is the flip side of the coin to our pathos, our sentimentality, which seems to me to be a traditional aspect of our psyche.

The work of today’s young poets betrays a familiarity with both world and Ukrainian culture. Yet no matter how new and diverse the poetry may be, it nonetheless spring from a certain national mentality which has been moulded by a specific set of historical, social and cultural circumstances. One detects a common ideological framework in this body of work. In English, it could be defined by the notion of ‘identity’. In Ukrainian, it should probably be seen as a search for both a national and an individual identity, a quest that takes place on many levels. This search includes complex ways of probing into the national psyche, through folklore, mythology, national metaphors and idioms, through specific national landscapes. There is perhaps no other poetry in the world that is quite so oriented towards the past. There’s a good reason for this. No other poetry is seeking justifications for its people’s right to exist in quite the same way.

The degree to which a nation’s fate is decided by the quality of its poetry is a delicate point. But if we accept T.S. Eliot’s idea that poetry indirectly and imperceptibly influences the life of the nation by colouring the very nature of people’s perceptions about the world, we can perhaps also accept another idea of his: that the loss of any language is the beginning of a decay, and leads to a people’s inability to express the emotions they feel as civilised human beings. Eliot considered this a tragic loss for world culture.

Ukraine is making a valiant and inspired effort to prevent the impoverishment of the world culture by the loss of yet another language – its own. If the vitality of the creative search taking place is any indication, it looks as if we may well be successful.


Note:
The letters ї and є distinguished the Ukrainian alphabet from the Russian one.


Translated from Ukrainian by Vera Kaczmarsky.

A fuller version of this article appeared in the Autumn-Winter 1989 issue of Soviet Ukrainian Affairs, under the same title.