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Dangerous Potency

15 December, 00:00

By Andriy OKHRYMOVYCH From time to time it occurs to me that we have simply been unlucky in being fatally wedged between East and West or, one is tempted to say, between death and life. Of course, provided one knows what to understand as life: dynamic self-destruction and being accustomed to a well-heated toilet, as proposed by technocratic Western civilization, or a static Zen-Buddhist meditation of world creation practiced by the hallucinogen-smoking East, traditionally contemplating its own naval. For Ukraine with its limited capabilities all this has essentially symbolic meaning. In the compound sentence of world existence this country is a conjunction, not an independent clause, which automatically pushes us off the stone pediment of tangible realities and into the quicksand of sweet fantasies and endless talk (savoring of debility) about being a nation chosen by God, a land of supermen and colossal potency. The probable model of the spiritual synthesis which Ukraine should propose the rest of the world, on the strength of its geopolitical status, seems to have been postponed until some vague future time. Its balancing on the line between the two worlds smacks not of blood and power, but of defeat. Today's marasmus unfortunately, is not counterbalanced by even illusory promises of tomorrow's being better. There is no one to paint such an illusion, and the reasons are found not so much in Ukraine's geopolitical position as in its national elite's inability to abstract from one's own pocket and petty squabbles, what they singularly malapropos call politics. Taras Shevchenko wrote, "There were times in Ukraine with cannons roaring..." and recalling such words is like turning the knife in our wound. The poet reminds us of those bygone years and outstanding statesmen who could not, however, resist the dynamic against them. Finally, they got lost in Karl Marx's beard and let slip the single chance given them by God in 1918. They began to fight among themselves and their fighting spirit went to sleep comfortably after the last war, surrendering command of a force the likes of which the world never has and never will see. They lacked the will. The worst crime ever committed. The intellectual weakness of Vynnychenko, Ukraine's 1918 head of government who could not understand the need to organize an army, led to hundreds of gallant Ukrainian military cadets slaughtered by the Bolsheviks at Kruty. Our latest crop of leaders have shown mainly ambition and have already been defeated. We are used to it. Two million unborn Ukrainians is also their fault. They are panic-stricken at these unborn, for they constitute an army, an army of victors.

Newspaper output №:

№45, (1998)

Section

Culture