If one were to believe Russian humorous Mikhail Zadornov and America’s Ernest Hemingway, disheveled nations tend to hold round-the-clock celebrations. Even though Ukraine will never be like Spain and many other Latin American nations with their exhausting carnivals, daily siestas, and unpardonable cheap wine, the Ukrainian thirst for bread and circuses turns each calendar year into an endless chain of anniversaries, jubilees, presentations, and other festivities, official and otherwise.
One man I know demonstrated (using his own experience) that if one were to observe all the religious, national, and Soviet holidays, one would inevitably turn into an alcoholic. This is especially true of intellectuals, people too scrupulous to pass up a Mao Tse-tung anniversary or of the transfer of Shevchenko’s remains to Kaniv, the students’ death at Kruty fighting the Bolsheviks, the Battle of Austerlitz, Halloween, John the Baptist’s night, 6 o’clock June 6, the murders of John Lennon, Aleksandr Mehn, and the Kennedy brothers, the Crucifixion, Lermontov’s death, you name it. In a word, world civilization has packed our life with so many occasions to celebrate or mourn that I am taking the liberty of suggesting to our domestic intellectuals one more, an extremely flexible anniversary which could be celebrated this and another two or three years running.
It concerns all people involved in or with modern literature—literati readers, even critics. My idea is to organize, within the next couple of months, a gala show commemorating the mess in which book publishing in Ukraine was in ten years ago. Some experts could object that in the late 1980s book publishing was at a satisfactory level, so the anniversary should be celebrated later. Well, I think that it is worth holding now, because there is every reason to expect that this mess will be over. A Ukrainian intellectual’s age-old temptation to sit in a bourgeois backyard and mourn his sorry lot is not as attractive as an opportunity to get a stable job with a stable pay which is being treacherously offered our authors by the Russian publishing tycoons EKSMO, Lokid, Azbuka, AST, etc. Trying to resist their experience for reasons of “creative value,” pouring oil on the fire of crisis, much to the delight of our Soviet veteran hacks, would be as futile as defending the theory holding that the Earth is held up by three whales, disregarding the obvious proof to the contrary found in astronomy. Only a handful of totalitarian-minded critics continue to complain about the reader’s passivity, stubbornly refusing to notice Ukrainian publishing initiative, even if not strong, because we do have Folio in Kharkiv, Stalker in Donetsk, A.S.K and Alterpresa in Kyiv, aimed at printing books by domestic authors.
Anyway, I write all this to prove my point: is it not worth postponing the anniversary I propose for another year or two. My esteemed intellectual friends, we may lose a holiday which you have so courageously championed on the pages of Literaturna Ukraina, a cause to which you have dedicated so much time and energy, destroying at least ten literary periodicals which were not so bad and turning publishers into ghosts; a holiday which still allows you to stay “underground,” in “cultural opposition” and “elite isolation” without any grounds (particularly ideological).
Once a war is started, it has to end sooner or later. A fact which first dawned on the literati in Parliament, because we must thank them for the proposed festive occasion in the first place, we owe it to their heroic passivity. It is their selfless struggle to “save” and “develop” Ukraine and its culture which is fully embodied in a big middle finger solemnly flipped at their former comrades-in-arms on the literary front. Despite their own spectacular careers, neither Yavorivsky, nor Oliynyk, nor Pavlychko, nor Drach (along with dozens of their smaller caliber counterparts) could revive friendly contacts between the state and literature. Of course they tried, as evidenced by countless interviews. One can only marvel at the courage and dedication with which they mourned the lamentable condition of Ukrainian book publishing. So now it is their sacred duty to march at the head of all victims and architects of this 10-year literary silence in Ukraine—certainly together with the Writers’ Union battalion and its generals.
Many of my readers are likely to regard this “festive initiative” as clownish and think that maybe fooling around is another way to protect oneself against harsh realities. As far as I am concerned, literary life in Ukraine has reached the apex of absurdity and cynicism, so that any irony in this context should be taken rather seriously. G. K. Chesterton said once that only a truly religious man can joke about God.
Photo by Oleksandr Rodchenko, 1936:
From the impoverishment of the circle of reading to totalitarian parades is but a short step







