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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

Bohemian Rhapsody 

13 October, 1998 - 00:00

A friend of mine, Viktor Neborak, published a book recently and I thought
I should tell the reader about it, and I mean just tell, because, as the
author's contemporary, collaborator, and colleague, I have no right to
praise or criticize it. As is noted in the annotation, the book is a "collection
of works varying in genre: interviews, reviews, literary portraits, essays..."
and the title reads Return to Leopolis. Leopolis is the Latin for Lion's
City, meaning Lviv.

Maybe what I am about to say will be regarded by some as an encroachment
on someone's regional patriotism, yet I will say it. Suppose we have in
our society that dubious and suspicious stratum, known as bohemia, then
I would say that Lviv is the most bohemian of all Ukrainian cities. This
did not happen yesterday but a hundred or more years ago. I think that
a number of different external objective factors were involved, a geographical
one included. Lviv is considered to be most "Westernized," in terms of
openness and borrowing ideas and things, adapting them and making them
part of its authentic cultural heritage.

For a long time this specific feature of the city did not attract close
attention. The latest to have noticed it and written a book about it was
Petro Karmansky, leader of the young literati movement. His brilliant Ukrainian
Bohemia was published in 1936. There is also Ihor Kalynets' We Pray to
Distant Stars. What makes this story so dramatic is that the author wrote
about Lviv's coffee and book shops, workshops and narrow streets forming
labyrinths merging into a small secret world of freedom while outside this
freedom, in the barred confines of the Lviv penitentiary in 1972, lies
a year rich in arrests of Soviet intellectuals.

And now Neborak and his book. Latter-day testimony marking the end of
the 1990s and "the first independent decade" in "independent Lviv." It
is a summary (if you will pardon the cliche, as everybody seems to think
that his book is a summary, this is a mark of the times, no doubt). And
to quote further from the annotation, "an attempt to recreate the very
creative atmosphere of Lviv using some fixation method or another."

Who are the characters of Return...? I think that there are only two.
The time and the place. Or should I say Time and the City? Time, of course,
when most fantastic dreams began to come true, when one and all felt charged
with an indescribable enthusiasm and experienced unbearable disillusionment,
accompanied by inflation, degradation and lumpenization; a time of petty
machinations and (begging Mykola Riabchuk's pardon for paraphrasing him)
a "jump from 30 to 40." And the City. It is very special, worthy of the
times, located in a boundlessly ambivalent landscape composed of dumps
and European facades, the City that constantly makes one aware of its presence
and which is a quotation unto itself.

As it is, there are a lot of characters in the book. The author in the
first place, at times identified as Kvadratobyk (i.e., Squared Taurus,
according to the Oriental calendar and signs of the Zodiac), Memory (often
playing him false, especially in little things like the correct spelling
of English "Lead Dirigible" or the date of Brezhnev's death, but never
faltering in important essentials), and Vision, his imagining, versions
of the times and his city, meaning Ukraine and the rest of the world, all
of us. And his portable tape recorder which seems to live a life of its
own.

Also painters, musicians, poets (I will not mention names because each
has long raised above and beyond any listing), legendary and funny, with
their bees in their bonnets, whom another reviewer described as an "internal
proletariat that smugly admits to leading a parasitic life." Wrong! That
reviewer sees as parasitic what is actually a great deal of honest and
hard work of human souls, done in a place where no one over the past independent
decade has agreed to bow and scrape to the rich and the famous, painting
for underworld lords, composing short verse for Tampax and Coca Cola commercials,
so as to discard their "parasitic" status in our "hard-working" world.

I wish to address words of sincere gratitude to all of those carefree
brothers and sisters living like birds in Leopolis.

 

 

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