ETERNAL RETURN

A civil funeral took place at the Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the transfer of the remains of Oleksa Tykhy, Yuri Lytvyn, and Vasyl Stus to their native land.

Watching the destiny of such a complicated and sufficiently dangerous space as cultural one, it is hard to rid oneself of a thought, which time and again enters your head. Sometimes you very clearly imagine that also at the level of active creative activity and in more remote in time spiritual layers dominant there is a whimsical game with rules set once and for good, a game of life and death. Not very merry, but too significant for everyone who really does something in our national culture.

Those remembered at the Baikove Cemetery two weeks ago last Friday understood the meaning of this game only too well, because they pursued goals that were anything but toy ones. I think that Oleksa Tykhy, Yuri Lytvyn, and Vasyl Stus held their lives dear. However, they as clearly felt that on their word, on their courage depended the decent life of many other people, even the whole country under the almost forbidden name of Ukraine. Those three men lived life to the maximum. Verse rating Nobel Prize nominations. Articles and public appearances at the level of the truth. True, on the verge of death. The terms they received afterward were the maximum in maximum security prison camps.

Yes, those camps were a highly reliable tool the regime used to win its game with its own people. The three knights of freedom died in what was probably the worst of them: Institution VS-389/36, located near the village of Kuchino in Perm oblast. And yet again the regime lost the game quite pointlessly, because with the death of the three began an entirely different history, which the regime could not outplay acting under its own rules. The transfer of the remains of Oleksa Tykhy, Vasyl Stus, and Yuri Lytvyn in 1989 turned into a real celebration of freedom from fear, a demonstration of liberty and true national unity. And again, as had been the case with Shevchenko, death became the reason and most solid foundation of the perception by many among the living of their being part of this land, this language, this culture. Such is the sinister irony, but somehow death has always proved to benefit Ukraine.

Two weeks ago on Friday there were no thousands at Baikove Cemetery, nor were any pompous speeches delivered. Instead, relatives of the deceased came, along with those who had organized that unprecedented action and those who had shared the bitter bread of prison camps with Stus, Tykhy, and Lytvyn. They remembered those now almost legendary events. What incredible, almost phantasmagorical obstacles the dying regime built. What was going on was absurd: under one Soviet law dead convicts had to remain on the grounds of the penitentiary and could not be buried anywhere else until the end of their term. Actually, this list of absurdities could be cited on and on, ad infinitum. And so the act of return to the native land of those “beloved dead,” to use the words of Osip Mandelstam, also a victim, was justified even more. Although the decade that has elapsed was mostly independent, something for which so dear a price was paid, the speeches delivered lacked confidence. Maybe it is too harsh, but it seems that our culture and the entire Ukrainian community are like that convict, who continues to serve his term even after death; we seem to have left the zone, but we have not approached freedom any closer. Maybe this is why we hold funerals on every festive occasion and funerals seem the principal color in the array of every great national holiday. How can it be done otherwise? No one knows. Of course, there are no special reasons for merrymaking, but one can start with little things, trifles that constitute our being with colorful atoms. At least by doing something in culture, and not only on anniversaries of losses and disasters, but just like that, as a matter of course. Then perhaps we will lose less.