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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

LATTER-DAY AESOP. FELIX KRYVIN LEAVES UKRAINE Shortly before USSR’s collapse his books were adored by intellectuals

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

This author from Uzhhorod (Western Ukraine) won the attention of the country’s thinking strata. His parables and fairy tales feature animals and Shakespearean personae, various objects, articles, phenomena of nature. His sketches are permeated with good humor, prompting the reader to strain his wits to join the author’s game of intellect, reading between the lines, seeking innuendoes and understatements in outwardly simple narratives. Kryvin was often referred to as latter-day Aesop.

In came perestroika and glasnost. Out went Aesopian language. Few of today’s authors can boast his skill of subtextual constructions. Now the book market has been flooded by conveyor-belt thrillers. Felix has no place there, nor does he want any. The Day was probably the only periodical to allocate space for his small literary masterpieces. Regrettably, we have been informed about his imminent departure to Israel, to become a permanent resident there.

The Day met with Mr. Kryvin and the following is a parting interview.

“I WROTE POETRY DURING WORLD WAR II”

Q: Judging from your prose works, there is much linking you to Odesa. Is that right?

A: I was born in Zhdanov, now Mariupol. I lived there only a year. My father was a military serviceman so our family traveled all over Ukraine. He died when I was five. He was in Gagry, a resort town on the Black Sea. There was a storm and he decided to take a swim. His body was never found. My mother and I then moved to Odesa. I spent my best years there (from five to twelve). Then World War II broke out.

Q: Given your inherent humorous bent and free thinking, how could you survive the Stalinist epoch?

A: In the late 1940s I was enrolled in an institute and we composed a wall newspaper titled “Anti-Knowledge as a Force.” It was intended as a joke and we invented a Clear-Headed Alliance there, because two of the “editors” had flaming red hair and my hair was thinning even then. We were stupid enough to mention in the editorial that we were setting up a new party which would have nothing to do with the CPSU. Can you imagine? Almost as soon as the “newspaper” was pinned to the wall it disappeared. Vanished into thin air. We wrote another copy and pinned it in the same place. On our way home from the institute my wife did a strange thing. She walked over to the newspaper, took it off the wall, rolled it up and put it under her arm. We went home and she did not even bother to explain. The following day we were all summoned to the institute’s Party committee. They wanted to know about our “party.” But mostly they were interested in the second issue: where was it, who had taken it, and what was written in it. On an impulse we all said that there was no second issue; at least we hadn’t made any.

We knew who had reported on us. However, the Party committee must have decided to soft-pedal the case, otherwise our Party bosses would be the first in trouble with the NKVD. That time we got off scot-free.

WHY ARE THINGS FUNNY IN LILLIPUT?

Q: Mr. Kryvin, you have developed a unique literary style, your sense of humor simply cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s, not Zhvanetsky, nor any other humorists’. How would you personally describe it?

A: I just can’t think up funny things. Life is such that has plenty of material for funny stories. I have one titled “Funny Lilliput.” Imagine a person begotten by a giant and a Lilliputian in marriage. He regards all Lilliputian problems as ridiculously trifle, so he decides to immigrate to Brobdingnag, taking advantage of his father’s being a giant. He walks the streets of the giant city and he likes everything he sees: huge buildings, towering people, and especially the high living standard.

And then one day he boards a ship and returns home. Why? Because he does not think Brobdingnag funny. In Lilliput he feels a head taller than the rest of the inhabitants. This is fun. So his friends make fun of him, because they also have a sense of humor. This is why they are still alive and so is Lilliput.

I prefer to take tragic things humorously. Otherwise I would never come out with anything real funny.

I am fond of looking things up in dictionaries, scrolling various reference sources, because I often come across curious facts. I remember looking through a Russian book on biology and stumbling on this passage: “Only fulmars of the stormy petrel species nest in the territory of the Soviet Union.” (The word for fulmar also means jackass, and “The Stormy Petrel” is the title of a markedly servile story by Maxim Gorky, metaphorically glorifying a Bolshevik revolutionary getting the upper hand against tsarist autocracy, driven by his supreme revolutionary teaching; a must on every Soviet school curriculum, learned by heart and recited to get an A in literature - Ed.) Well, I read it and thought it just had to be quoted, without comment.

More often than not, scientists do not find anything funny about this quotation. All they understand that a certain species of birds has certain distinctions settling in a given territory.

I never make my characters voice any of my own ideas. I proceed from what I have: my country, environment, and the way of life I have to struggle with. Every image I commit to paper must first go through a system of filters, to be associated with certain actual phenomena, to address hard realities. I don’t like any political coloration, but I can seldom do without, it seems. I never plan political subjects. They emerge in the creative process. I can’t help it. People reading my stories prefer to dot the I’s and cross the T’s themselves. They feel proud telling one another, “Oh, I read that story, and you know what? I could read between the lines. I know what he actually means.” In other words, my readers are my co-authors.

I remember telling Samuel Marshak, “They say one must proceed from the idea to the image. For some reason or other, I can do precisely the reverse, getting from the image to the idea.” To which he said that mine was the only correct approach. His words reinforced my convictions. No one can get anywhere proceeding from just an idea, except that one will come up with yet another idea, an empty one.

Q: Your books are meant for readers with a certain degree of perception, so your reader/co-author can share your train of thought. Otherwise your text would be alien to him. How do you treat those slow on the uptake?

A: My readers must certainly understand me. If they do they have carte blanche in interpreting what you call the subtext. If they don’t — well, I recall talking to a man who did a review on my book In the Country of Things published in 1962. He asked me, “How could you possibly have arranged for this thing to appear in print in the first place? I mean things like ‘The apples were gnawed away by the worms of doubt. Some of the fruit was picked from the tree and enjoyed. Others stayed, fell off, rotted, and died.’ Do you realize that all this is actually about the 1937 purges?’ I listened to him and thought I would have never come up with such identification. I just wrote things the way I liked and left the reader to make his own associations.

Here is another example. I wrote the dialogue for the Soviet movie “Red Riding Hood.” (A very good one given the time - Ed.) When it was ready a ranking government/party commission assembled for the preview and official approval. There is a scene in which Vladimir Basov as the Wolf says on the phone, “This is Lemon 001, this is Lemon 001.” The commission was shocked: What does he mean murmuring double o one? Do you realize that this used to be the ordinal number of Lenin’s Party membership card? This episode must be edited out.” I would have never dreamed of associating the text with this. Can you imagine children watching their beloved Red Riding Hood, worried about how she will outsmart the big bad Wolf and remembering Lenin’s Party card number? Well, things like that happened and had to be taken for granted. Now all that’s history, thank God.

Soviet censors always tried to read between the lines in my books. When the Learned Stories was in the final stage before being put to bed the publishers’ editorial board was unsure whether to start the presses. They were scrutinizing every page, looking for some subtext, some innuendoes hazardous to the existing regime. They found none. Then someone in Kyiv wrote a very critical review. A poet friend of mine, Petro Skuns, went to the capital and was shown the review, strictly off the record, even without the author’s name (it was simply torn off). I was accused of Zionism, just because I wrote about the Olympus and the mountain was suspiciously like Mt. Sinai (the author of the review surmised) — in other words, I was subtly alluding to Israel (very much taboo at the time).

I could cite countless other examples of such censor’s masterpieces. My colleagues were on many occasions gathered for meetings to give me a “friendly unbiased” dressing down. I sat there and, out of habit, made notes of the things said and how they were said, always a very refreshing experience!

It is also true, however, that after one of such “friendly” meeting I started having problems with my eyesight: something to do with eye accommodation spasm or whatever. I had to undergo surgery and my left eye is still in a bad way.

Those notes I made, I return to them now and then and compare what their authors have to say these days, an amazing metamorphosis!

Actually, I hate to recall who was persecuted for what reasons at that time. Often one sees characters, who used to be exemplary local Party cell executives, obediently following every zigzag of the Party line, turn into democratic heroes, posing as victims of Soviet censorship, veteran dissidents telling stories about their past suffering and civic courage. Suffice it to say that a man I know, formerly an outspoken opponent of “bourgeois nationalism” is currently a major nationalist ideologue.

UNFORTUNATELY, HUMOR PAYS POORLY

After they went through one of my books with a fine-toothed comb in the 1970s, leaving little of the original text, I was practically denied the possibility to see my writings in print. I was formally jobless, but I continued to write; I had a family, and I was supposed to be the breadwinner. But then things started happening which I could only attribute to the Will of our Lord. Suddenly I received a phone call from Moscow, offering a series of television programs on Russian language. Then the Khudozhestvennaia Literatura (Fiction Literature) Publishers wanted me to write forewords for several books, and then I was showered with translations. That’s how I survived.

I had my short stories about animals carried by Moscow’s Chelovek i Priroda (Man and Nature) magazine. Once I dropped in at the chief editor’s office and he said, “I had a visitor before you came, a writer from Ukraine. How come you publish Kryvin, he wanted to know. The man is taboo in Ukraine. I was shocked: could it be the man specially came to Moscow to report on me? He was pissed off to see me in print. Well, we all know that wild animals taking food from man are the easiest to tame.

An ancient philosopher said that all things are in flux, which is very clever and very true. In the sense that some people keep salivating watching others’ accomplishments and others keep shedding tears.

People in Moscow treated such “tips” on me with good humor, mostly ignoring them.

Q: Perhaps because no one upstairs told them to pay attention to such “incriminating information”?

A: I seem to remember that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine passed a resolution concerning me and my books. I don’t know exactly. Anyway, people in Moscow took no orders from Kyiv, of course.

Finally, my book Hyacinth Islands came off the presses in 1978. Heavily edited, maimed. Someone told me confidently that, once my book appeared in Moscow, I would be allowed to have publications in Ukraine. In other words, that particular book was very important. It came off the presses, distorted by censorship as it was, and true enough, I was okayed to appear in print in Kyiv and Uzhhorod.

Things like that happened all the time. I can’t remember a single book that would appear without a hitch. When reading the manuscript of Circles in the Sand (a collection of verse), the editor stumbled on the one about Yorick getting the throne. A jester on the throne, no more jesting. The editor said, “Do you realize what you are writing about? Leonid Brezhnev died. Andropov is General Secretary. Are you trying to call him a jester?” And he would find faults with every other poem in the book.

Q: Your readership has changed over the years. Don’t you think that people expect more from your texts than they did previously?

A: It is true that things change with the times. Previously, my readers existed in an isolated medium. Human thoughts are like an echo; the narrower the confines, the louder its effect. Now that everything is in the open, there is no echo. Everyone tries to shout at the top of his voice, but no one hears him.

I have a miniature “Nostalgia for Cholera.” It reads that now we have the plague, while we used to have cholera. The difference is that when there was cholera we had barracks, but now the sick are just dumped in pits, and people go around and say things were better when there was cholera.

We had took the charm away from our magic circle, and now it is not charmed, just empty.

THEY STUDY ME IN MY NATIVE CITY’S SCHOOLS AS THOUGH I WERE A FOREIGNER

I love Ukrainian and Russian and I’m equally fluent in both. I know, however, that any language can be spoiled when used for political purposes. When one’s social class identity, language, or ethnicity are politicized, it’s terrible.

Q: You have never written in Ukrainian. Why?

A: A man is supposed to write in his mother tongue. I think in Russian. Of course, I could translate, but my ideas would lose their original freedom and ease. You know, I often find myself lacking Ukrainian colloquialisms in my Russian, because there are certain things that sound rather more full-bodied, meaningful in Ukrainian. By the way, when it came time to have some of my works translated into Ukraine the editor said, “You better do it yourself. Someone else could just ruin it.”

Q: A reputed author, a ranking member of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine, was asked once how he treated the presence of Russian literature in Ukraine. He replied, “You mean there is any left?” How would you answer this one?

A: I don’t think that this question is correctly formulated. Russian literature does not exist in Ukraine, just as it does not exist in any given geographic or political space. It just exists, and every man of letters is a world unto himself, creating his own literary space. They have long been debating whether Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol in Ukrainian) should be regarded as a Ukrainian or Russian author. The answer is simple: he is Gogol. After all, could you consider Dostoevsky as just a Russian writer? He belongs to the world. Let those believing that there is no Russian literature in Ukraine enjoy themselves. But they are quite wrong to assume that this “absence” will make their own writing more popular in Ukraine.

I like kind-hearted people regardless of their ethnic origin. I do not like bad people, no matter where they come from. One’s ethnic origin and parentage are an advantage. Rather, it is an accident of birth. After one grows up one has to choose one’s road in life to become a full-fledged individul.

I do not deny the existence of ethnic specificities, and I do believe that a national culture is capable of tremendous attainments. Once in Moscow I did my best to speak for my Ukrainian nationalist friends. I told them that every nation had the right to fight for its independence and national culture, because I knew what Russian chauvinism was all about.

Today, however, things are different. Of course, it is possible to separate Ukraine from Russia, but to say that Russia is a foreign country or study Russian authors as foreign ones is something else. Here I am living in this city and school students study me as though I were a foreigner. I cannot bring myself to put up with this approach.

PARTING AS FRIENDS

Q: So you’re leaving for Israel to join your daughter?

A: Yes. She immigrated to Israel because her husband had such a bad case of diabetes that they wanted to amputate his legs. My daughter said no, and applied for emigration (she wouldn’t have dreamed of it otherwise). Insulin was in critically short supply in Ukraine at the time and the man would have died. In Israel, they said no surgery was needed, and he recovered. My oldest grandson, Alex, is 22. He serves on the police force. His last name is Shevchenko, after his father, my daughter’s first husband. He considers himself one hundred percent Israeli. They did not live well in Ukraine and they are better off in Israel, perhaps because a smaller country is easier to fall in love with than a larger one.

Q: Mr. Kryvin, you are leaving Ukraine for good. What is being left behind?

A: All my life. We used to live in an isolated society ravaged by totalitarianism, yet we had many good things and experiences to be remembered affectionately long afterward. We were young, we were driven by aspirations, we wrote manuscripts, we got samizdat literature on the sly, often having only one night to read and pass it on. Those were good times, because we separated ourselves from the authorities. Today one has a hard time trying to figure out who is who, people are estranged from one another like never before.

What is left here? I earnestly hope that the good things will survive and the bad things sink into oblivion, that the time will come when all that which is good will prevail and people will live in Ukraine the way they do in any other civilized country. I would have never left this land if given a choice. I have none. My wife and I have lately been living off selling books from our home library.

I like Israel, probably because many of its residents have followed similar life paths with me. I think they will accept me and make me feel useful. For my children, grandchildren, perhaps others. I have been separated with my relatives for five years, quite a long time. Perhaps I will be able to help them in some way or another, and so will they. I have no relatives left in this country.

Writing in Israel will be difficult. I am not even sure I will have a desk to sit at and write. Here I have the kind of space I need, in which I can lock myself up and to which I am accustomed. As for Israel — I’m not sure. I spent two months there and could not bring myself to write. I couldn’t adjust to the environment. In other words, I know that there are risks involved, yet I am ready to take them. I must join my children and help them as best I can. They are not having the best time of their life there. My daughter’s husband is suffering from severe cardiac disease. He is disabled. I will be given a pension in Israel, not like the one I would receive here: Hr 48, not enough to live on, of course. I think I will write and my works be published, because there are more Russian than Hebrew newspapers in Israel. Besides, I have a very bulky portfolio, things I have written which have never appeared in print. And my readership in Ukraine has been dwindling steadily.

N.B.: The Editors resolutely disagree with their favorite author Feliks Kryvin’s pessimism, especially his words about dwindling readership. The Day is determined to cooperate with this gifted author, carrying things he has written and will write, counting on his regular contributions to this periodical.

Photo by Anatoly Lemysh, The Day

 

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