On being human

Vasyl Symonenko was one of the most prominent Ukrainian poets of the Sixtiers. His life, as well as that of many other conscious and conscientious people of that generation, ended abruptly and tragically.

In 1962, together with Alla Horska and Les Taniuk, he found burial places of NKVD-shot people in the Lukianivsky and Vasylkivsky cemeteries. By sending a memorandum to the Kyiv City Council with a demand to make these places known to the public and give them the status of memorials, he essentially signed his own death warrant. Soon thereafter, the same year, he was arrested by the police at the Cherkasy train station on trumped up charges and was beaten up in the Smila Police Department. The back injuries he sustained proved fatal.

The regime had the same in store for Alla Horska. When they chose to protect a person victimized by totalitarian society, they had to face the same destiny. This makes one think about the very deep lines Symonenko once wrote: “Do you know you are a human? Do you know this or not?”

In complete accordance with existentialism, which greatly influenced the postwar generation in Western Europe and found quite a response in the USSR, man appears to be, implicitly or explicitly, in the center of nearly every poem written by Symonenko. He describes man not as an abstract entity, such as a representative of the human race or a small screw in a mechanism, but as an extremely special and unique, alive and agitable being concerned with constant troubles and full of feelings and pains. In fact, the reasons for such uniqueness of every individual, which Losev once referred to as a real and genuine ego, are usually in the center of any poet’s attention, whether he is aware of it or not.

Every person, as in fact any other being or thing, manifests themselves to the environment through a great number of more and less important characteristics, features, and actions (“Your smile is one of a kind; your suffering is one of a kind; your eyes are one of a kind…”). However, a person’s inner nature always remains mysterious and can be comprehended only intuitively. “Is my beauty what I am?” asks a character of Symonenko’s novel Vyno z troiand (The Wine from Roses). She feels and even knows that her beauty is a part of her, but only a part. She asks that question and answers it right away by giving a name to that one feeling through which a person is able to see (or more exactly perceive the entirety of) another person’s boundless essence: “I want someone to love me rather than my beauty, my dark eyebrows, and pink cheeks. What is beauty worth? Winds will bark my skin, rains will wipe away the pink color, and there will be nothing left of the beauty I once had.”

The problem of time and hence the problem of continuous and eternal values mentioned in this fragment is another central issue in Symonenko’s work. While love appears to be the kind of feeling that enables a person to see the real essence and value of other things, only facing the implacable time (in essence, facing the unavoidable death) can a person realize the need to search for one’s real self, one’s own, intrinsic and timeless nature.

From the point of view of the poet, it is not death that changes life into absurdity. On the contrary, it is a realization of its inevitability that forces a person to awaken from a delusive and useless life as a semidream into which a person inescapably falls as soon as they forget about the temporary character of their life. “You will be gone some day. So you better hurry up to live, hurry up to love. Make sure you don’t miss your chance,” Symonenko the poet reminds, or rather warns, making a reference to a life that is definitely not thoughtless, carefree, and animal-like life.

Symonenko encourages immersing oneself into the frenzy of life so that it does not just pass by. He means a permanent conscious attitude to life rather than one dictated by current and changing circumstances. When he reminds the reader about the fleeting nature of life, he makes one look at the fierce life race as if from the outside and try to understand where to and why it is running incessantly. One can hurry somewhere only if he sees some clear goals on the horizon. The key point in one’s attitude to life turns out to be, again, love (“hurry up to love”). This is the one feeling that can truly overcome egoism and inspire a person to not only receive but also to give.

The poet turns to the world and asks it: “Don’t spare good for me, a human, and don’t grudge happiness for my lifetime. I will give those treasures back to you drop by drop with great love.” This inevitably reminds one about Vladimir Soloviov’s Smysl Liubvi (The Meaning of Love). The Russian thinker wrote: “Egoism as a real basis for individual life permeates it and guides it, defining everything specifically. Therefore, it cannot be outweighed and canceled solely by theoretical realization of the truth. Until the vital living force of man’s egoism meets with some other living force opposed to it, the realization of the truth remains to be only the outward illumination, reflection of someone else’s light. The truth as a living force that dominates over man’s internal essence and truly leads him out of false self-assertion is called love.”

It is absolutely clear that this approach to life rules out not only egoism but also an ethical or any other kind of relativism (expressed in the saying “After us the deluge”). A defense of this position could be found, if one so desires, in the following words: “You will be gone some day. So you better hurry up to live.” The thing is that this way or another ethical relativism is always a consequence of ontological relativism. Hence, once translated into the social plane, it is very likely to turn into various types of Machiavellianism, one of which we know so well from Soviet realities: “The road to happiness lies through a river – this river is one of blood and some tears, but take heart, you will not drown! Go ahead!” (Kazka pro Duryla, Fairytale about Bonehead). Symonenko’s intentions, no doubt, directly opposed and, moreover, were specially directed against the totalitarian ideology and practices, which manifested themselves, among other things, in the destruction of national diversity.

Symonenko’s poems dedicated to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, language, and history exhibit his complete mental or even archetypical Ukrainianness. Having Ukraine in his soul and feeling in his veins the incessant pulsation of Cossack blood, he succeeded in painting an unrivaled picture of this ecstatic pursuit of freedom and the development of a full-fledged people, which, despite the vain attempts of strangers and invaders, was confidently “growing, multiplying, and acting” under the eternal sun (“Where are you, the butchers of my people?”).

However, Symonenko does not confine himself only to freedom and feelings. Rather, he reaches the stage of self-cognition and self-consciousness of the national spirit. In his poem “To Ukraine” Symonenko almost devoutly praises the country’s name and ascribes to it the meaning of the Absolute, which embraces and permeates the entire life: “Then I die with your name and live in your name!”