Interpreting the language of the culture ministry
The journal of foreign literature, Vsesvit [Universe] has just marked its 80th anniversary. The most striking thing about the gala night to celebrate this milestone was the glaring absence of any representatives from the Ministry of Culture or the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting, whose official job is to promote book and magazine publishing.
I am not saying that the journal’s editor in chief and staff need customary greetings from government functionaries. I am talking about the need for officials to finally make their vector or position known: Whose side are you on? When this foreign literature journal was founded in Ukraine in 1925, it was a triumph of the vector established by Mykola Khvylovy, who put the question squarely: “Europe or “prosvita”?” In other words, the founding of Vsesvit was a vaccine against the Little Russian “tradition of narrow-mindedness and lack of taste” (Ivan Dziuba). Notably, in his analytical studies of international literary influences Khvylovy reached some geopolitical conclusions: “A social criterion is unthinkable without a psychological Europe.”
In contemporary Ukraine such a position is known as European integration. Its antithesis is kitschy folklore, which is reproduced by “humanists who derive their name from the word Uman” (Pavlo Zahrebelny). When the masses that are infected by them adopt the philosophy of Maryna Mednikova’s “heroine” ( “I’m no different from, say, Leonardo Di Caprio, except I lack his looks, talent, and earnings) or standup comedian Mikhail Zhvanetsky’s stage persona (“What is this Oistrakh? Take away his bow, violin, tuxedo, and ballpoint pen, and who will be standing in front of you?”), then the basis of comparison and the test of our Europeanism in the form of Vsesvit’s publications will be absolutely unnecessary.
We arrive at a simple syllogism: since the culture ministry does not need a journal of world literature, then this “sunny abode of irresponsibility” (Svitlana Povaliayeva) does not need European integration either. You say: it cannot be that the president of the country is pointing in one direction, while government officials are craning their necks to look in the opposite direction? What about Kostusiev, the chairman of the Antimonopoly Committee, who has plastered Kyiv with posters of his face and the slogan “God and Russia are with us!” As Chekhov would say, “What a smell, what a miasma!” Has Mr. Yushchenko already fired this agent of influence from his government post?
“Today one of the gravest problems facing Ukrainian humanities studies is their disconnection from the cutting-edge achievements of Western European and international scholarly thought” — James Mace’s words are totally applicable to our literature. Outside of Vsesvit, foreign literary works are not published in Ukraine. That is, they are published, but exclusively with foreigners’ money, which is why they are not always the freshest fish in the market. But let us not look a gift horse in the mouth. Instead, let us figure out why the French, Germans, Dutch, and other Americans [sic] need to spend taxpayers’ money on the enlightenment of Ukrainian readers. It’s as simple as this: the image of a cultural nation instills in foreign consumers a desire to buy other kinds of imports from this nation after books, even junk, as long as it originates in the countries of Rabelais, Goethe, Erasmus, or Salinger.
This is why foreign ambassadors in Ukraine are urgently asked about increasing the number of Ukrainian translations. Meanwhile, our ambassadors have no orders to work with translators and publishers in host countries to promote Ukrainian literature, which would create more demand for Ukrainian-made consumer goods. Why, we have no money now to open Ukrainian “British Councils” around the world.
Hold on a minute. What about the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Moscow? The British Council in Ukraine is offering our publishers publishing rights to translate works by winners and nominees of the Booker, Orange, Dublin, and Nobel prizes. Meanwhile, did the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Moscow offer Russian publishers any publishing rights to translate at least this year’s Shevchenko Prize winners (Matios, Krymsky, Slaboshpytsky, and Kotsiubynska)? Has anybody even thought about this? A few months ago, when a ranking ministerial delegation traveled to Moscow to inspect the center, they did not discuss its Ukrainian bookstore, which used to occupy the center’s entire ground floor and is now stuck in a cramped room with a smaller assortment of books than a railway station kiosk’s. More important questions were raised: one official persistently tried to find out if perhaps it was already time for the local restaurant to change hands in favor of somewhat more “orange” owners. “How meaningful and sweet doing nothing can be” (Taras Prokhasko).
Since independence a little over 200 translations of French books have appeared in Ukraine, 150 of them published with French money. Meanwhile, in only six months of 2005 the Russians translated and published 472 French books. A certain proportion of them, noticeably smaller today, was also funded by the French foreign ministry. Consider the performance of the Ukrainian foreign ministry based on the statistics of the Russian Book Chamber: only one Russian translation of a Ukrainian book was published in the first half of 2005.
The Ministry of Culture of Ukraine has been allocated 11 million hryvnias of taxpayers’ money to support literary journals. If their list does not include Vsesvit, then what journals are we talking about? Meanwhile, the front cover of its Russian counterpart, Inostrannaia literatura [Foreign Literature], which comes out in a three times larger pressrun, bears the inscription: “This journal is published with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation.”
Co-authors:
Mykola KHVYLOVY. Ukraina chy Malorosiia? [Ukraine or Little Russia?] Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 1993.
Pavlo ZAHREBELNY. Brukht [Scrap] Kharkiv: Folio, 2002.
Maryna MEDNIKOVA. Krutaya plius. [The Cool One, Plus] Lviv: Kalvaria, 2005.
Mikhail ZHVANETSKY. Moi portfel [My Briefcase] Kyiv: Makhaon-Ukraina, 2004.
Svitlana POVALIAYEVA. Zamist krovi [Instead of Blood] Lviv: Kalvaria, 2004.
Anton CHEKHOV. Sobraniie sochinenii [Collected Works] , vol. 2, Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1929.
Day and Eternity of James Mace, Kyiv: Ukrainian Press Group, 2005.
Taras PROKHASKO. Neprosti [Difficult Ones] Ivano-Frankivsk: Lileya-NV, 2002.
