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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

“EAST-WEST” FESTIVAL IN THE PICTURESQUE TOWN OF DEY

12 October, 1999 - 00:00

Looking up Robert, one will discover that Dey is a small town known only for the local white wine Claret de Dey. The wine really is fine, but Dey's 4,500 residents are proud not of the wine but of the fact that most homes have no VCRs or even television sets. The reason is not poor living standards: simply the presence of audio/video equipment is considered a sign of loneliness. People in Dey prefer personal contacts.

Over ten years ago, this romantic Gallo-Roman town surrounded by mountains accommodated a Dutchman named Ton Wink who founded the West-East festival to spark interest in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Traditionally, it is financed by one of the national branches of the Soros Foundation. This year, after the former Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Albania, and Georgia, the Days of Ukrainian Culture were held at Dey, supported by the International Renaissance Foundation.

Local media moguls organized a Book Salon. Among the first events was a round table conducted by journalist Antoine Spire and attended by writer Andriy Kurkov and this author. Our meeting with readers took a totally unexpected course. We were addressed by people who had read Gogol, Babel, Bulgakov, and Viktor Nekrasov. No one was interested in Ukrainian literature. Instead, they wanted to know how different Ukrainian is from Russian, how widespread Ukrainian is in Ukraine, whether educational instruction is conducted in Ukrainian, whether we felt that the Iron Curtain had come down, and how this affected our creative endeavors and world views. When we finally managed to get back to the subject of Ukrainian literature we heard that our literature should not drift apart from the Russian and Jewish branches of the Ukrainian tree. Rather, we should stay close to them.

Among other questions were why, if we feel that our literature is so interesting, our government is not propagating it abroad, particularly in France. How could a Ukrainian author answer this, considering that there is no propagation of Ukrainian literature in Ukraine? And the next one was whether there is a Ukrainian О migr О community in France (there is, and quite active —Ed. ). If so how come it does not translate books from Ukraine, offer them to local publishers and make money to help Ukraine (they have translated and write their own books, which as a rule lose money —Ed. ). In other words, they were helping us find a scapegoat, because the local Diaspora, rather than glorify continental Ukraine, has been in a hurry to glorify itself in Ukraine. Of course, the situation was caused by the absence of Ukrainian intellectuals and Ukrainian studies in the curricula of European universities. Meanwhile the Ukrainian Diaspora did not sit on its hands, filing complaints with the Ministries of Culture of Ukraine and France, stressing that what Days of Ukrainian Culture held were actually Days of Jewish-Muscovite Culture.

A writer cannot exist without text. Small wonder that none of the French journalists even bothered to write down the names of Ukrainian literati we consider noted, even outstanding. The Ukrainian stand at the Book Salon looked miserable, compared, say, to that from Albania, let alone the Russian one boasting classical and modern authors, including even Joseph Stalin's incomparable Fundamentals of Leninism (reading it really will save you the expense of a lobotomy — Ed .). Visitors arriving in Dey from neighboring towns and villages approached people wearing festival badges to consult on what was best to buy.

The salon also had round tables dedicated to Chernivtsi and Odesa, Western European detective stories, Chornobyl, Yiddish literature, Cossacks in general, and the Ukrainian Cossacks in particular. Toward the end of the Salon, Lyon's publishing company presented the periodical Diagonals: East-West specializing in East European problems, with that particular issue dedicated to Ukraine. Its editor-in-chief Bruno Giczar and the issue's executive editor Ren О Martin wrote about the difficulties of translation and the hard time they had venturing to give room to an unknown country and selecting material about it. The front cover displayed white snow as seen through the window of a village house. To the French, Ukraine remains a blank page. Will it ever be filled with lines of words read elsewhere in the world?

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