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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

Myroslav POPOVYCH: "Disaster is not when there is evil from above... But when there is no difference between good and evil"

27 April, 1999 - 00:00

Interviewed by Diana KLOCHKO, The Day

At a time when the world arena is turning into a theater of war it might
perhaps be indecent to hold small talk behind the beige curtains. Mikhail
Bulgakov's dilemma of the contrast of being is anything but rhetorical
now that we are used to the idea that a happier future can be achieved
only by a major breakthrough, by attack and storm. It is not rhetorical
for the intelligentsia in the first place, because culture with its stable
traditions and search for a peaceful middle course gives way before the
militant onslaught of civilization with its cult of force.

Myroslav Popovych is one of the few intellectuals talking with whom
calms one's heart throbbing with the arrhythmia of cruel questions, which
is unfortunately now our standard rhythm. He practices the philosophy of
heart, so important to Ukrainian culture. He has turned into a model of
the Ukrainian intellectual, something we have needed so badly over the
past few years, perhaps because the bourgeois values of a stable and tolerant
lifestyle seemed to us a cure-all when faced with cataclysms. At present,
a humanitarian disaster is not a hair-raising prognosis counterbalanced
by well-wishing calls for heeding "the voice of the intellectuals." It
is a bitter reality we are faced with and which we have to resist as best
we can, overcoming fears of the future paralysis of our society. Thus we
turned to Mr. Popovych with the recurrent "accursed" question about the
impact of such daily tranquil lifestyle on national culture and whether
intellectuality is threatened with extinction.

The Day: Academician Popovych, we have lived through the period
of heated debates about the intelligentsia, its role in the life of the
nation, and its relationship with the existing regime. Now the question
is whether the intelligentsia is necessary for its own sake.

M. P.: Among ourselves and at home this is all we talk about,
but all our activity come to naught, for in reality no one needs us. It
would be a sin for me to berate those in power, especially after they promised
good pensions when celebrating the National Academy's anniversary (if they
pay them at all). But such meetings, are not the point. The state need
not make us any presents but only make it possible for us to live and work.
We don't need their love. We know the dangers of being the master's pet.
All we need is for them to see to it that we have a proper cultural environment.

The state is the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. One need not love the state.
I love culture and I have treated it as the most precious treasure all
my life. Why should I love the housing department or militia? They are
paid to protect me. The state should serve culture. We wanted our own state
so much, but it cannot provide more than it can provide. It is a rigid
structure and has to set up institutions in which people can live with
confidence. In fact, all our economic hardships are not because we have
no institutions capable of securing a viable economy existing independently
of the state. We started loving the economy through the lips of the state
and the result is that we have powerful clans made up of people with only
one advantage: they can allow, forbid, and take money for this unlawful
prerogative. We need the state not to pray for but to give us the chance
to live in peace.

The Day: Could this be just another myth about Mother-Ukraine
that will one day foster a flourishing culture?

M. P.: Our public and political life is such that by chopping
off pieces, getting culturally isolated, we can achieve nothing. Demythologization
has already taken place, and things changed so fast that it begot cynicism,
including a cynical attitude toward the state. Thank God we harbor no dreams
of military glory, and all attempts to romanticize the tragic bloody pages
from our history (as was the case with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) have
failed. Neither myth-making nor demythologization can be successful today.
Something real has to be done.

The Day: You say real. Does this mean that we should start
fighting? The Yugoslav conflict is a very harsh reality, a war started
by people doing real things.

M. P.: I think that no ethnic or religious wars are fought for
a just cause. NATO's military approach to the conflict will achieve nothing,
even though they are resolved to crush what is left of the dictatorships
that remain in this century. This war is a return to old methods of solving
problems. Sharpening the crisis only strengthens Milosevic's position.
The politicians' standards of conduct has led to a dead end, because they
can't go back on their word and the saber-rattling in Verkhovna Rada is
evidence that the Left is prepared to concede everything possible to Russia.

The Day: What about all those calls for harmony, understanding,
and unity? Another myth?

M. P.: I do not doubt for a moment that a minimum of harmony
is necessary in society. It would be even worse if we started thinking
that our hatred is someone else's doing. This would mean another witch-hunt.
None of those claiming any important posts has the moral right to shout
"get him!" Not for any social, ethnic, or religious reasons. And what sort
of harmony do we mean? Hryhory Yavlinsky said once let us make our tax
returns so simple they could be filled out in five minutes. Let us institute
a 10% individual and 20% corporate. Now that's harmony.

Today there are three social institutions which now determine what it
means to be European: market economy, parliamentary pluralistic democracy,
and national statehood. Let's start from here and then go into detail.
Harmony is not achieved by any congresses, agreements, or political symbolism.
It is possible only when human rights are really defended.

The Day: How much is the Ukrainian political landscape shaped
by religious issues?

M. P.: I am deeply convinced that religion is a strictly personal
matter. I must not admit before society whom I love. Once I notice that
some religious symbols or other are being imposed, I stop trusting such
people, once and for all. And quite honestly, I loath that Orthodox ideology
being fed us on Ukrainian Channel One. The Ukrainian state is secular.
It is interesting to note that in the United States, where 90% of the people
actively practices religion, teaching any confession in school would be
unthinkable. I know of a case when a student filed a complaint in the court
just because there was an image of Jesus Christ greeting him at the school
lobby every day. He was not Christian and he took offense. The whole court
upheld his complaint. Ukraine is a state where all confessions must be
equally respected and it must see to it that none of the churches intrudes
into politics, because this is immoral. Atheistic propaganda, on the other
hand, often ruins a person's moral foundations. However, I disagree with
certain Christian neophytes who insist that morality is impossible without
faith. My parents were schoolteachers, from that generation of educators
which is still remembered with gratitude. They were not believers, yet
no one could accuse them of immorality. A person must be judged according
to his ability to show solidarity with other people.

The Day: But now there is so much confusion, anxiety, and
disunity. What kind of idea could help our people gain mutual solidarity
between rich and poor, the intelligentsia and the state?

M. P.: It would be abnormal, for example, if the intelligentsia
started advertising the "national idea" on billboards. There are people
who have never said a single word in Russian in their lives, and I respect
them, but I speak Russian in the street, because I seek ways to understanding
other than through language. I know from sociology that most people living
in Ukraine are Social Democratic in terms of their mentality and moral
orientation. Try to talk to them about a "bright capitalist future" and
everybody will start laughing. I know that capitalism is a much better
system, with all its amenities, but I do not want to live in that world,
because I cannot be indifferent to others' sufferings. And I will teach
my children to struggle so one and all can live well. The Soviet heritage
which, regrettably, has acquired such ugly features in our daily and political
life, in reality has sound roots. Socialism has become an indecent notion,
but one ought to remember that Christianity is among the sources of socialism.
Alas, this force never begot an appropriate political structure here.

WE HAVE THROWN OUT

THE LEGEND OF THE GRAND INQUISITOR AND HOPE

FOR THE GRAND INVESTOR

The Day: Are there any traditions in our culture rooted in
Christian social values?

M. P.: Yes, starting with the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood
of which Taras Shevchenko was a member. To be precise, its membership included
Berdiayev, Bulgakov, and Zenkivsky, all Kyivites and unorthodox Christians,
carriers of such great values as to go down in Russian and European history.
I would also say that Vernadsky also favored that trend (the man was neither
mystic nor Christian, just a scientist) relating to "cosmism." And I know
people determined to develop it even now.

The Day: Are there many people really willing to rely on the
Ukrainian tradition?

M. P.: No, mainly because mass consciousness accepts Ukrainian
tradition as traditional populism associated with a peasant wearing a homespun
coat. Of late, the trend has been associated with modernism, and early
twentieth century avant-gardists, but we can't go further than Les Kurbas.
And I would never leave out of Ukrainian tradition Nikolai Gogol, Count
Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoi, or Aleksandr Pushkin for that matter. Look
at our school curricula. So-called Ukrainian studies have crowded out everything
else, with stories about Ukrainian village life, superstitions, and gossip.
What are they doing with our children? Ukraine has always had a broad cultural
space. There are thousands of obscure quotations. How do you expect one
to interpret Mykola Ge's works without knowing Dostoyevsky or if his Legend
of the Grand Inquisitor is edited out of his Brothers Karamazov?
We have thrown out the Grand Inquisitor and hope for the Grand Investor.
Is that all? Will this make us any happier? Will we become European this
way?

The Day: How much can the Ukrainian intelligentsia reconstitute
itself, by using rigid analysis, viewing itself and seeing a most disgusting
image? Do we now need a clinic of horrors, collective phobias, for example?

M. P.: Analytical programs and articles on these subjects are
extremely popular and precisely for this reason. Within the discipline
of sociology this overall state of depression that has developed over the
past several years, connected with the ruin of the system of ethical and
esthetic values. I believe that a government program is needed to overcome
this condition, something like Roosevelt's program during America's Great
Depression. We need politicians capable of coping with this problem who
will take a certain positive stand to prevent an outbreak of public unrest,
a revolt of the masses. Ukraine's culture and intelligentsia have survived
because they have as Shevchenko said an ox-like patience. And woe unto
us all when this patience runs out.

The Day: You have always stressed the woman's role in our
culture.

M. P.: This is one of the sore spots of our life. Women's problems
in Ukraine are more coarse and painful than in, say, North America. The
equality of rights between men and women produced women working fields
and wielding sledgehammers. This phenomenon is as ugly as the struggle
for equality. Incidentally, this is also one of the weakest points in the
programs of our various political parties - and European Social Democrats
point to the fact; women's issues are one of their top priorities. Indeed,
Ukrainian women play a markedly unimportant role in our politics. Except
Natalia Vitrenko, but I do not consider her a politician.

I don't know whether it would make sense to create women's military
or police units, I wouldn't make this some kind of cult. But a society
without a cult of love, of the Virgin, being indifferent to bad mothers,
cannot be whole. We have to feel a flutter in our hearts, at least once
in while. So long as we cultivate cynicism toward women - and so long as
women put up with it, all those sly grins on teenagers' faces - we will
remain an inferior nation.

This cynicism comes to us from cheap films and pulp novels, and it can
have consequences much more destructive than we now care to think. I wouldn't
want to be regarded as retrograde, but I have a feeling that we are following
a simplistic course. We think that if we tell our children the facts of
life and how to use contraceptives we will solve all their inferiority
problems for them.

The Day: Do you think that modern problems could be solved
using the simplification-complication dilemma?

M. P.: Water seeks the easiest route to flow and our society,
likewise, is trying to find the simplest solutions to its problems. If
we seek to become like the West following simple routes we will beget Shvonders
and Sharikovs with dog's hearts (an allusion to Bulgakov's Sobachye
serdtse [Heart of a Dog], a scathing comic satire on pseudoscience
and Soviet authorities - Transl.). We must pass through the stage
of complicating world coordinates without losing the complexity of our
spiritual organization, at least what is left of it. The problem is to
move on and not only by borrowing someone else's standards and adjusting
our indices to their patterns.

CULTURAL

ARCHETYPES

The Day: In Virgil's Aeneid we have banquets of heroes staged
according to imperial protocol. In Kotliarevsky's burlesque of the same
title this is replaced by Ukrainian landlord's typical carousels and instead
of heroic deeds we read about heroic efforts to consume mind-boggling amounts
of food and drink. Is there in Ukrainian culture another example of the
cooking art in a truly aristocratic setting?

M. P.: In all cultures a banquet is academically associated with
battle. A feast is like a battlefield. Vigil describes it in every detail
and his style is heroic epic. Kotliarevsky portrays a period in Ukrainian
culture when its upper story, so to speak, caved in and vanished. Starting
in the seventeenth century, religious festivities crowded out secular culture.
And I might as well remind you that Ivan Kotliarevsky was a major with
a Ukrainian Cossack regiment, although the unit stood down before any engagement,
and the officers and men got no pay. The period Kotliarevsky refers to
was when something had to be put forth in contrast to the surrounding world.
Apart from Kotliarevsky, other sparkling burlesques were written by Gogol,
and of course Shelmenko-Denshchyk. It was thus an ordinary Ukrainian,
khakhol, set foot in the refined European cultural realm. And Shelmenko
was a very true-to-life portrayal of a sergeant that could well work as
Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, smart, always with something up
his sleeve, fooling everyone and ending with bulging Swiss bank accounts.

And the ground floor, as exemplified by Zaporozhzhian Cossack Patsiuk
(the name means rat) with a beer belly and a huge bowl of traditional varenyky
(dumplings) jumping out of the bowl into another one with sour cream, rolling,
and then leaping into his open mouth. Now we can laugh at someone eating
varenyky that way, meaning that we are now on the upper story looking down;
we appreciate this humor, but we know that there other more important things.

The Day: This image of a politician that has gone up from
the ground floor, all the way from mass culture to the top of the power
pyramid, seems to have been well asserted nowadays. Don't you think it
is a kind of revolt of the masses, the way Jose Ortega y Gasset warned
us?

M. P.: Yes, but it is also evidence of our provinciality. You
see, politics is a game, juggling with promises and realities. It takes
real professionals. And even Ukrainian dissidents were not such professionals.
Only now are we becoming aware of having failed to choose a platform or
promises which would have entitled us to demand to know what has been actually
accomplished. We chose people, individuals we liked, and the masses are
fond of politicians they can see as like them. This is yet another lesson
in democracy we have to learn the hard way, and the awful thing is that
this society could fail to learn it and again elect unprofessional and
incompetent "leaders" who don't keep their promises.

The Day: How do you see the role of the intelligentsia in
this process? It has always acted as an intermediary between the ideology
of power and mass consciousness.

M. P.: A musician trying to be President yields nothing. In Ukraine,
there hasn't been even a brief period when those in power would listen
to the intelligentsia. Unfortunately, our current politicians do not understand
the important role that could be played by that middle intellectual stratum,
all those teachers and doctors who are simply disappearing and often simply
refuse to play any political role. For us the most important thing is not
that we can't eat enough varenyky. People find it hard to survive not only
because they are hungry. I lost this feeling in my junior year of university,
but I have always wanted to eat. I had come to Kyiv wearing a pair of kersey
boots and a shepherd's coat. My father never came back from the front and
mother was a village schoolteacher. Yet I cannot even compare that situation
to what we have today. We were charged with eager expectations, illusory
ones as it turned out, but we all felt that life was just beginning for
us. Now people feel as though their life is ending. Hence their pain. I
don't use the subway, because I can't bear the sight of homeless begging
children. Old people with outstretched hands is one thing, although not
a single civilized society allows its elders to live in such downright
misery, but when children go around all the time with their hand out, this
is unforgivable.

And the same applies to my regular cooking appearances in the "Breakfast
with 1+1" television show. Letters come from villages where the electricity
has been cut off, and the hours they spend in front of the television is
their window on the world. They want to share with that world, so they
offer home recipes. This is hard to overestimate. Their recipes are very
simple, because their authors have nothing special. And now and then we
receive extraordinarily complicated ones, although it is obvious that the
authors are by no means aristocrats. People still crave the good things
in life. Despite it being hard to live, they want beauty.

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