How to Find Money For Ukrainian Culture?

“These types of scholarly works are very complex,” says Yevhen Karas, one of the translators. “Sometimes you have to rewrite the original text, so that the reader will understand it. Our task is, first of all, to help our readers figure out the terminology, because this is all new to us.”

“I spent thirty years in this line of work in New York City,” says Irene Stecura, who has been working in a similar area in Ukraine for the past eleven years, “and I can tell you that culture has never been profitable, anywhere. With culture, everything depends on friendly contacts and the only revenue is one’s awareness of having accomplished something of cultural value.”

Ukraine’s cultural activists recently sent a letter to the president; it’s a good-humored message proposing the creation of a supervisory board that would rigidly monitor all philanthropic donations and their disbursement. Anyway, bidding and trying to win tenders (this being very much on the agenda with the start of the official restoration policy) is nonsense. In the West, interested individuals can form communities like “Friends of the Theater” that can adequately sustain various cultural projects; some groups boast budgets of $200 million annually; the Ukrainian moneyed elite simply cannot compete with this.

Obviously, the problem is that we are unable to do anything to interest people into donating even a single hryvnia for cultural needs.

Commenting on this problem, Mrs. Stecura says: “If you can’t arrange some kind of income for people, you could at least pay for their entertainment, like a “special cultural program or a dinner party. Nothing can be achieved without giving something in return.”

Indeed, judging by the experience of all those theatergoing New Yorkers who donated a paltry three dollars for cultural development, whose names we read about in brochures, we ought to be drowning in rhetoric where our well known patrons are concerned. But who knows about them? So much for our “eight golden rules” of mutually advantageous cooperation, which all market experts emphasize throughout the civilized world.