You can own what is yours, love other things

Continuation of The Day’s series started by the article “What kind of Ukraine do we love?”

It happened so that I spent years and even decades speaking about this lasting, persisting subject. I won’t recall what happened in the 1960s. I will address the more recent times.

In 1989, at the peak of the glasnost campaign, the Republican Association of Ukrainists (RAU) was established in Ukraine. Its membership boasted scholars versed in Ukrainian history and culture. Its purpose was to stimulate and coordinate research into problems that had been previously ignored or simply banned (another reason for developing the Program of Alternative and Compensatory Investigations).

From the outset, one of RAU’s major trend was addressing the sophisticated, politicized, little-known, or little-studied aspects of Ukraine-Russia relationships. On Dec. 20-23, 1990, we held the four-day Ukraine-Russia Scholarly Conference and heard 66 presentations and 50 communications. Among the presenters were Ukrainian scholars who belonged to various generations: Yaroslav Isaievych, Vitalii Rusanivsky, Yaroslav Dashkevych, Petro Tolochko, Ihor Yukhnovsky, Mykhailo Braichevsky, Myroslav Popovych, Vadym Skurativsky, Yurii Pakhomov, Valeria Nichyk, Anatolii Svidzynsky, Oxana Pachlovska, Serhii Bilokin, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Oksana Zabuzhko, to mention but a few.

For the first time the conference was attended by noted Ukrainian Diaspora figures, such as Omeljan Pritsak, Yaroslav Pelensky, Roman Szporluk, Ihor Sevcenko, Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, George Grabowicz (US); Bohdan Hawrylyshyn (Switzerland), Petro Potichny and Olga Andrievska (Canada), Roman Solchanyk (Germany), etc. Western scholarly circles were also widely represented: John Reshetar, Michael Rywkin, Edward Keenan, Henry Huttenbach (US); Riccardo Picchio (Italy); Andrzej Edward Chojnowski, Florian Neuwazny, Stefan Kozak (Poland); Andreas Kappeler and Stefan Kuks (Switzerland); Ivan Vanat (then Czechoslovakia); Hans-Joachim Torke (Germany).

Needless to say, we were interested primarily in having noted Russian researchers and men of letters at our roundtable. Formal invitations had been forwarded to Vadim Kozhin, Eduard Skanunov, Andrei Loshakov, Gennadii Novikov, Yurii Afanasiev, Yurii Labintsev, Gennadii Sanin, Vadim Chernykh, Viktor Kiselyov, Mikhail Dmitriyev, Viktor Kotov, Galina Starovoytova, Nina Nadiarnykh, Alla Latynina, Marina Gromyko, Lev Annensky, Anatolii Streliany, Igor Zolotusky, Petr Palievsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Mikhail Pashkov, Boris Flori, Vadim Chernykh, and Dmitry Obolensky (UK). Most of them showed a keen interest in the conference and willingly took part in it.

My archives (I was then RAU president and ex officio chairman of the organizing committee) contain some of the correspondence. Vadim Kozhin wrote: “Many thanks for inviting me to take part in the Ukraine-Russia Conference. I will be happy to participate in this dialog, considering that the topic has become so important and vital. As you probably know, I am a theoretician at heart, so my presentation will have to do with general issues. I would entitle it something like ‘Contemporary Reflections on the Historical Unity of Ukraine and Russia.’” Mikhail Dmitriyev wrote: “I would like to submit the following topic: ‘Religious and Public Movements in Ukraine and Russia at the Turn of the 17th Century: Degrees of Commonality and Distinction.’”

Yurii Labintsev wrote: “I have been personally absorbed by this vast issue for a long time, so I would like to submit the following topic — which may well take you by surprise: ‘On the Necessity of Establishing an Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Moscow.’”

We were looking forward to have Yurii Lotman among our presenters, the more so that he had previously agreed to attend the conference, but then his wife Zara Mints died. He notified us and sent his apologies for being unable to come to Kyiv.

I must say that we received tangible aid in organizing this conference from the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, as well as from the Association of Ukrainists of the Russian Federation. Why should I recall events dating back 20 years? For one sad reason. It pains my heart to watch the way we’re degrading morally and intellectually in our bilateral relations. Twenty years ago we were spurred on by our joint desire to understand each other; there was a dialog, with all parties respecting each other. At the time, we counted on the ability to prove our arguments. This was the spirit of our conference and subsequent intellectual debates. Now this spirit is practically nonexistent amongst our politicians and all those ignoramuses posing as ones. Their debates are increasingly less often respected by the learned public. Yet there is still the yearning for such debates.

The Day came up with the article “What kind of Russia do we love?”, along with Rossiyskaya gazeta’s “What kind of Ukraine do we love?” Both these publications are proof of the need to break through the barriers of superstitions. This task is a very complicated one; a desire and an urgent need are not enough. What is actually needed is sufficient knowledge. There is also the strong temptation to use cliches or hearsay. Begging my Russian colleagues’ pardon, I will quote some of these allegations, best described as “dating from the times when the Crimea was conquered and Ochakov fell” [to quote from Griboedov’s The Misfortune of Being Clever].

The most demonstrative and infuriating allegation is about Russians who live in Ukraine and are allegedly forced to use some kind of Galician patois, and that this humiliates them while the true Ukrainian language is being destroyed. Here I refer to what Gleb Pavlovsky had to say, but there are others who share his opinion. Several Ukrainian generations have heard these allegations. They formed the bulk of serious political charges [pressed by Russia against Ukraine] — including Mazepa, separatism, Austrian conspiracy, etc. These accusations were getting systematically aggressive at Kyiv’s Russian Nationalists Club (the founders were quite proud of the name). This club was the spearhead of all-Russian nationalism and Black Hundreds at the beginning of the 20th century. And the rhetoric of their leaders where and whenever they were given the floor at the Duma, from its first and last convocation! I can assure you that the transcripts are worth reading.

But then came the revolution and civil war. Red Army forces under the command of former tsarist General Muraviyov seized Kyiv and shot everyone who spoke Ukrainian in the street. Denikin’s White Guard showed a far more civilized approach to the language. In Kyiv and Poltava they would simply tear down posters written in that “Galician patois.” The Ukrainian Russian writer Vladimir Korolenko tried to explain to the Denikin command that it was Ukrainian, not Galician patois, but to no avail.

Now take the late 1920s and the early 1930s. On Stalin’s insistent initiative, Ukraine’s cultural institutions, created in the first years after the Bolshevik revolution, started being destroyed on a planned basis (a process historically known as the rozstriliane vidrodzhennia, or executed renaissance), along with fixed trials over intellectuals, among them the most notorious one involving the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU) that was orchestrated by the Soviet secret police.

This trial was staged at the Kharkiv Opera, in March 1930. People whispered to each other that it was “SVU opera with GPU music.” This and other operetta trials were followed by arrests of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals — writers, scholars, teachers, co-op movement activists, geologists, archivists, actors, physicians, and linguists, who were subsequently exiled or shot as part of [the Kremlin’s] campaign against Ukrainian “social fascism.” In fact, the Soviets were careful to cleanse Ukraine of linguists. They started by closing the Institute of the Scientific Ukrainian Language, which they regarded as the number one hotbed of the Petliurite movement, claiming that all those “language agent provocateurs” were trying to develop an artificial Galician language and use it to replace the genuine Ukrainian one. The question is where this big love for the true Ukrainian language came from, considering the pitched campaign that would be waged for the next couple of decades, aimed at changing the orthography, censoring Ukrainian dictionaries, with the censors being instructed to watch for and delete all vernacular, “archaic,” and “rarely used” words, while making every effort to introduce Russian words.

I remember that in the 1960s and the 1970s our publishing houses were supplied with official lists of taboo words and expressions. What was this all about? Whims of the political leaders or their wise political strategy? Was it simply that they [Kremlin rulers] were scared stiff of Ukrainian separatism? Where else in Europe — or the rest of the world in the 20th century — would you find examples of such care for a national language, using fire and sword, stick and poisoned carrot?

Fortunately for us — and unfortunately for the enemies of that “Galician patois” — the Ukrainian language has survived hundreds of years of persecution, bans on books, newspaper, Ukrainian language schools, humiliations, and even today’s limited usage in a thoroughly Russified Ukraine.

This language is alive and evolving. Of course, it is inferior compared to Russian, which has never been persecuted or restricted and which is still being used in a huge country. Ukrainian has a smaller scope; it is less adjustable to international lexicology, special technological terminology, local urban or underworld argots. Ukrainian, however, matches any other language in expressing every emotional nuance, aspiration, every conceivable idea. In this sense the reserves of Ukrainian and Russian are perfectly compatible. I will not refer to our classics, rather to our contemporary poets, prose writers, sociologists, and philosophers.

Ukrainian has long surpassed the boundaries of Stalin’s formula that designated it as a Kyiv-Poltava vernacular. It has incorporated the rich vocabularies of Podillia, Kherson, Ternopil, Polissia, Prydniprovia, Slobozhanshchyna, Donetsk, Bukovyna, Naddnistrianshchyna, and of course, Galicia (Halychyna) regions. This is precisely why people whose vocabulary boasts a couple hundred Ukrainian words, who prefer not to use Ukrainian in their daily practice, or who simply prefer to be onlookers, refer to that Galician patois that is allegedly crippling their true, beloved Ukrainian language. (You don’t have to look for such characters in Moscow; we have enough and to spare here in Ukraine, among them individuals who have lived all their life here without bothering to master a dozen Ukrainian words and phrases. Why should they? We all know Russian and lapse into this language when communicating with them, for reasons of goodwill or fearing being tagged as nationalistic Russophobes, even fascists — these labels recently came into vogue and are applied to anyone except domestic and visiting skinheads.)

Here is another point in conclusion of the language theme. We keep hearing about Ukrainian being unable to reflect various modern complicated notions — just as we hear about this language being crippled by the Galician patois. What can I say except referring all such people to our Ukrainian research papers, textbooks dealing with cybernetics, mathematics, biology, and other sciences? I could list hundreds — and I stress hundreds — of such book titles, including 500 Ukrainian literary translations of world classics in the cultural, political, philosophical, sociological, legal, economic, financial, and other domains on the Humanitarian Classics lists of the International Renaissance Foundation — and mind you, some of these Ukrainian translations preceded the Russian ones! Here is the latest example. The Dukh i litera (The Spirit and Letter) Ukrainian publishing company put out the first volume of the Ukrainian version of the European Vocabulary of Philosophies: Dictionary of Untranslatable Terms, compiled by French philosophers. This is a lexical and semantic analysis of notions that are untranslatable or hard to translate, and it is Europe’s first translation into a foreign language.

There could have been considerably more Ukrainian translations (and works by Ukrainian authors) if the state supported this effort, instead of magnanimously allowing separate sponsors and philanthropists to act in the field. And the biggest problem is that Ukrainian books have small print runs, being no match for the downpour of Russian publications. (I hasten to add that we have nothing against good Russian books, yet far from all we have on the book market can gladden our hearts — and the same is true of the domestic product.) To sum up, the Ukrainian language’s limited capacity is imaginary. Actually, the problem here is not with the language but with those who don’t know it or don’t want to learn it. This problem is about uncultured people.

The same goes for the “underdeveloped” and “provincial” status of the Ukrainian language and culture. I believe one ought to distinguish between the notions of “provincial culture” and “provincialism in culture.” Take any national culture. You will find lots of provincialism there if you regard it as a whole. Due to the obvious and well-known reasons, this provincialism is especially apparent in Ukrainian culture, compared to Russian culture, for example, and this is a heavy burden to shoulder. However, tagging Ukrainian culture as provincial is unjustifiably humiliating, incorrect, and incompetent. For centuries this culture has been producing values far above the provincial standard. I don’t think I have to list the many titles of literary, music, artistic, drama masterpieces, and names of singular performers. There have been celebrated Ukrainian thinkers, inventors, scholars, poets, prose writers, artists, actors, and singers. Even now we witness important cultural phenomena, although they are often obliterated by predominant mediocre renditions.

The same is happening in other countries. The reader will recall that Benediktov and Kukolnik were in vogue during the lifetimes of Pushkin and Gogol. Today, there are no Pushkins or Gogols on either side, but there are clearly talented poets, prose writers, artists, composers who are blazing their creative ways. They are defending us against the elemental force of provincialism and militant conservative dogmas (even though sober-minded conservatism is another important underpinning principle of any culture).

There have been situations in which these cultures weren’t on equal terms; suffice it recall Ukrainian history, the way it — and its people — were being pushed toward provincialism. This confrontation has been yielding good harvest.

Finally, we have the right to recognize the existence of our national culture — not because of its scope, but because of its unique nature. For example, Czech or Finnish cultures are much smaller in scope than Russian or British culture, yet these cultures have succeeded in creating values that are not found either in Russia or Great Britain, or any other country for that matter. Here no hierarchical principle is applicable.