By Yuri Andrukhovych,
The Day
I don’t know Yaroslav Yasinsky. I have never met him or heard of him. Among piles of letters, cards, manuscripts, files, and clippings that I have to plow through every day his 40-page pocket-size collection of verse had to wait its turn. The title read “The Flowers of Prague.”
Like perhaps a million other Ukrainians I like Prague and I personally consider it a unique city, a landscape architecture microcosm. In a word, one of the most beautiful places in the world. I first saw it as a kid, so my present obsession with the cultural and historical phenomenon of Central Europe may well be rooted in that childish impression from the Czech capital. Prague seems the quintessence of all possible mysteries, adventures, passions, an alchemy of grand and petty gestures. It is one of the few seats in the audience of the World Theater from which reality and surreality, the physical and metaphysical can be seen as an enigmatic unbreakable whole.
However, there is another Prague. During my visits I sometimes had a glimpse of it when exploring narrow streets away from the downtown section and bumping into people wearing rags and smelling of bathtub gin. Yasinsky’s book of 34 poems is about precisely this Prague inhabited by Ukrainian laborers pouring in by the hundreds (thousands?), legally and illegally, to sign up for back-breaking work for low pay. A city within a city where these people live and die in misery, spending nights in flophouses and days looking for odd jobs, shoplifting, getting caught... A city where the populace hates the newcomers and where any of them can be beaten unconscious by a local Mafia thug for the slightest transgression of the local “rules.”
I do not know whether anyone will ever be held responsible for all this (no one has been punished for committing even worse crimes). All I know is that a terrible aberration has taken place. Now that we are to enter the third millennium a most authentic proletarian poetry is being created. In Ukrainian! Yaroslav Yasinsky writes precisely the way they did 100-150 years back, maybe even earlier. Characteristically, his verse lacks style, his vocabulary is limited and rhyme stilted or missing where it should be, but he is very sincere, as though saying, “Sorry, it doesn’t sound right, but it’s all true and I had to write it, to let people know.” This was how prison and camp inmates wrote their poems and songs about life outside barred windows and barbed wire and workers about the horrors of faulty machinery and idiotic management. Now we hear the same leitmotiv: day labor, living amid garbage heaps, despair, melancholy, boozing, and blind hatred of the rich and the famous. Who will answer for making us live according to Marx in the late 1990s? For proving that “being” really determines “consciousness” in our country?
Memories bring me back to Prague. Old trees and stone, countless small restaurants, cafes, bars, baroque music playing outdoors, distant church bells, fountains, the river flowing slowly, the water seeming thicker than it should be. And multilingual street crowds. And the general atmosphere of well-being, when people are finally firmly established in life and can afford to travel, fall in love. In a word, when people can live like anywhere else in the modern civilized world. Here is Europe for you and Prague is its perfect embodiment, perhaps the best example of getting back to normal after several decades of the totalitarian “paradise”...
And yet away from brightly lit streets and laughing tourists, deep in the city bowels, citizens of Ukraine dispose of garbage collected in basements over centuries, toiling 12 hours a day. People belonging to a country whose leaders use every occasion to stress their “European choice.”
Yaroslav Yasinsky writes: “Europe’s carcass in a hearse, // Death-spotted bluish thighs. Glassy eyes. // Rotting flesh stinks to the skies.” This is how he sees it. Can we really blame him?






