By Yuri ANDRUKHOVYCH, The Day
On the night of March 27 I received an e-mailed anonymous message from
Moscow. It began as follows: "The khokhly (a less than affectionate
term for Ukrainians) are inferior and cowardly people who have neither
historical prospects nor a metaphysically motivated right to further existence."
Then followed an explanation why it is Moscow that has again decided to
deny us this right: "Those rascals have been bombing Serbia (as well as
Montenegro!) for 4 days. And what is Ukraine's reaction?"
The list of accusations is long enough. Kyiv skinheads and soccer fans
did not hurl insults, as their Moscow counterparts did, at Western embassies
and offices. Ukraine did not break, following Moscow, all ties with NATO.
Verkhovna Rada does not debate, like the State Duma, the possibility of
supplying weapons to Yugoslavia.Ukraine's regions are not making, as Russia
is, lists of volunteers for a probable war in Serbia, etc.
The final sentences of this fraternal message to the khokhly
draw the last and merciless line: "Ukraine and the Ukrainian people have
in all their history lived by the principle 'My house is as far as I go.'
Divine Providence decreed that they live on the fringe, the fringe of history
and civilization, on the frontier of various empires. Ukrainian metaphysics
lies in provincialism, marginality, being second rate, inferiority, and
emptiness. The Ukrainians have never stopped being provincials, 'Little
Russians,' plebeians and marginal creatures of the historical process!.."
We are undoubtedly being provoked. I say "we" because it seems to me
the anonymous writer from Moscow sent his aggressive letter to all the
addresses in Ukraine he knows. No doubt, he wants to arouse or, at least,
anger us with those allusions and derogatory tone. No doubt, we are being
tested.
And the problem is not just Yugoslavia, which is especially cynical.
Everything is too entangled and horrible there, showing us another proof
of the coming end of a beautiful epoch, our strange decade, our dreams
of a harmonious world. European intellectuals had scarcely spoken themselves
out about the spiritual consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
outlines of a New Europe, the end of history, the beginning of decency
in politics, and so on, when there was a terrible reminder of history and
categorically called into question the very possibility of any future,
bright or not.
"Now that we witness the genocide of Kosovo Albanians and the deepening
of the Yugoslav tragedy, we have to postpone our forum," writes my Polish
friend Krzysztof Czyzewski. His home town Sejny near the Polish-Lithuanian
border was to host in mid-April a meeting of artists and politicians under
the slogan "The brand of the fallen wall." Now it is finally clear that
the true Wall has not been torn down. A brutal and quite metaphorical reality:
a part of its participants could not have arrived due to closed borders,
ruined roads and congested airports.
Yes, there is a horrible knot, Yugoslavia, a tourist paradise, where
everything abounds, where hatred has been accumulated for centuries, where
there is the world's best music, where nobody is used to giving up anything
to anyone else, where there is plenty of wine and automatic rifles, where
it is "sweet and honorable to lay down a life for the Motherland," where
shooting pregnant women is considered military gallantry, where great-power
pretense will not recognize the true state of affairs and finally surrender,
where Nostradamus's prophecies, of all things, come true.
There also is a larger knot, Russia. It has its own great power pretensions,
ethnic crisis, depression, a decade long aftertaste of historic defeat,
and hysteria. It is clear that it again wants to repartition the world,
and is there a better place to start than over there, among her truly lesser
Balkan brothers, under evergreen and corrupt racist and religious slogans?
Meanwhile, Ukrainians are being tested whether they are ready to join
in, whether they will hear the voice of their Slavic blood and again consent
to be the cannon fodder of the Russian army. This and this alone is the
crux of the matter.
This is why the phrase "my house is as far as I go " really means "my
home is my castle." It is not worth dying in the Balkans for somebody else's
great power. Let us, on the contrary, remember the Carpathians: they still
might stand us in good stead.






