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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

August and a Thirst for Summing Up

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

Several days ago during talks in the corridors one very respected critic and observer of the times participating in the session turned his interlocutor's attention to the following: “Look at the young fellow over there who felled the government in the fall of 1991, yet –"

He cut himself short, and we were called back to our deliberations, and in the following break, itself a sign of our national vagueness, we had already moved on to other topics. In one of my works I wrote, “It happened somehow in a big hole...” Recalling this, I tried to construe the rest of that reputed analyst's statement, and I think I succeeded. Perhaps because I had been reminded of my most beloved fall of 1991, the best time of my life, especially because I was then able to see a different visage of Ukraine, suddenly and wonderfully catastrophically shorn of its time of nerves as the prophetic circle was broken and connected and is became possible for it to become a young, beautiful, and dynamic country. Looking to the immediate future was interesting and joyful, and our current 1998 was then envisioned as a time of spectacular progress: Live on, dear Ukraine, and find happiness in the European Union. We could now sing – or maybe whistle – something like that.

But we do not. The dithyrambs are not those but a rhythm of totality, a rhythm of everyday life, as always something else and nothing in any way similar to Europe. More precisely, it was not even rhythm but its absence or, as one of our national heroes put it, arrhythmia.

And the consequences are already written on the wall. During his recent visit to Kharkiv, Polish President Aleksandr Kwasniewski seems to have said that he would find it regrettable should Ukrainian citizens have to apply for visas to travel to Poland. One suspects or feels that this was but yet another example of diplomatic rhetoric, for the matter had obviously already been settled and the ink dry. Anyway, we have to be content with our multivector policy pursued by our grand masters of foreign policy, whose unflagging efforts seem to be directed at some new chimera like the USSR minus the Baltic States confronting the rest of the world with another iron curtain on its western frontier separating our motherland from the rest of the world. True, this curtain because of contemporary technology might nor be an iron one, but all the same it will be a curtain, a border, a wall. “Farewell, Europe, it was pointless for you to tempt us with your holy glitter,” might well sigh the last surviving Occidentalist as he wipes Sarmatian tears from his face.

I am far from the secrets of politics grand or otherwise, and in order to counsel the country in which I live I must abide only by my own aesthetic criteria and verify everything happening around me through my own aesthetic quality. I am repeatedly compelled to proclaim the next wave of the return of those that were and everything that was: a way of thinking, speaking, and of governing the country. The phenomena of the Speaker, Prosecutor General, or someone else appointed from among those with the “honest faces of the past” has long ceased to be anything out of the ordinary. Ukraine itself and the Ukrainians themselves, those sly hard-headed peasants, in their own way stubborn, in their own way full of guile, cast unchanged on the altar of the “brilliant Soviet past”, and proud of how they led in “those glorious years” (how they forget the baseness of those years!) once again are taking their seats at the summit of power. Thus passes yet another turn in our spiral of development. And only seven years ago it seemed like it was curtains for them. But we were much younger then and could indulge in such illusions.

Without doubt with these “honest faces from the past” we have nothing to do in Europe. With them – recall Oksana Zabuzhko's observation – we have only the dandruff on their jackets and wrinkled trousers. Freedom of movement, material well-being, fairy-tale landscapes, and a life of ease remains for them, not us.

Only sometimes I feel great sorrow for the young and beautiful country we saw in the early 1990s.

 

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