A Big Heart

One of them is a poetess and artist, Halyna Mazurenko, marking her 98th birthday this year. This gray-haired woman with bottomless clear eyes shining with age-old wisdom and kindness, could well be the hero of a novel. At 16 she was a volunteer nurse with Petliura's troops and a year later received the most prestigious wartime decoration from the Supreme Otaman. Later, she emigrated to Prague. Then came the Nazi occupation, and she moved further West before the Soviet troops entered Czechoslovakia. She was separated from her daughter during the war and would find her only more than sixty years later in Kyiv. Now she lives with her ailing son.

Once she was visited by a neighbor, a British woman grief-stricken so much she was ready to commit a suicide. Halyna Mazurenko said, "Why don't you sit down and paint a picture?" The woman had never done any drawing, let alone painting in her life, yet she obliged. Eventually she would have her personal amateur art exhibits. Also eventually Halyna set up a kind of creative therapy studio. She had a young fellow from Mexico and women from Switzerland and France. She did not teach them to paint but to live. I was fortunate enough to attend one such session. I was experiencing a very difficult period, and Halia gave me some paints and a paintbrush, saying, "Son, I want you to try to relax and paint something, just do it as best you can, you'll feel better, you'll see." I wondered who would have thought of calling me son, but I did as told, and it did help.

Now it is difficult for her to walk, let alone paint. Her friends and pupils, also well on in their years, help her. I found her with that same English woman, Kay, her first patient-pupil. Halia introduced her, saying "She is an wonderful person, and she has a big heart."

Later Kay and I agreed that Halia Mazurenko, whose heart was always in the right place, open and good to people, remembering with love her native land, whither she continues donate her works.

My other friend in London is younger, Mykhailo Dobriansky, author of numerous articles, including ones on Ukrainian-Russian, Ukrainian-European, and Ukrainian-Polish relationships, along with several books dealing with Ukrainian history. He studied in Berlin and Vienna before World War II and during it was second-in-command under Kubyjovych in Lviv's Ukrainian Central Committee. Later, he spent seventeen years with Radio Liberty's Ukrainian Bureau. A reputed scholar and principled politician, he has never deviated from his stand for the benefit of that or other political party.

The late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is one of his philosophical idols. He has dedicated a lot of articles to the Frenchman, particularly for Ukrainian newspapers and periodicals. Another is Vyacheslav Lypynsky with his concept of agriculturalist Ukrainian classocracy. Even now Mykhailo Dobriansky has an excellent memory, he is an avid reader, and on that particular occasion he showed me an article in The Times about 300 Ukrainian mercenaries fighting in a civil war somewhere in Sierra Leone, and that they specially paint their faces so no one can tell them from the aborigines.

His commentary was: if these mercenaries were from America or France no one would pay any special attention, for anyone was supposed to be free to fight for anyone in return for hard cash; it was business, as good as any, and it was one's way to exercise one's human rights and freedoms. Now the article mentioned their Ukrainian origin in the first place. A novelty, for here in the West, particularly in Britain, Ukrainians are not often distinguished among other inhabitants of the former USSR. In a sense, identifying these people was a positive sign. They identified us, thus acknowledging our existence.

A veteran master of paradox, Dobriansky stands for translating erotic literature into Ukrainian, something like the classic Fanny Hill. If we fail to publish such books in Ukrainian our young people will read them in Russian anyway, he says. We often belittle ourselves, claiming some special chastity. Time to grow up, we are a full-fledged nation and must have everything the rest of the civilized world has. And then we will choose what we find to our liking.

London