The number one news in the third millennium was tragic

On the first morning of the new millennium I stared at the computer screen for a long time, refusing to accept the obvious. Both e-mail messages were in English and although I am not a native speaker there was no mistaking them: “Solomiya... Pavlychko... died... today.” A dry statement, without a single metaphor. Horror glaring me in the eyes.

Outside the window, early morning darkness was slowly drifting away and patches of dirty snow seemed the only real substance of that horrible world suffocating under dark gloom. Finally I managed to ask myself the only question anyone would have posed in my place: “Oh, God, why?”

Solia — this is how we addressed Solomiya — was a name radiating light and music, reflecting her talent as a soloist. The loss of a soloist is the worst possible loss one can suffer. Another inimitable living talent dead, a unique combination of natural gift, intellect, diligence, dedication, and purposefulness that will never be replaced or found again.

It will be a very long time before we accept the unacceptable. After all, refusing to accept someone’s death is perhaps the only way to show human resistance. The abyss around us is arrogant and so sure of itself. We can only be as arrogant in response and accept the challenge. Yet where is one to find that resolution which will keep one from venting despair and fear?

We have lost not just a woman, a first-rate literary critic and translator. In the first place, we have lost an outstanding person with a great heart, a source of warm, vibrating energy. Being near her gave one hope. She was pure creative joy and dazzling activity incarnate. Every project she initiated and headed was a real breakthrough of the Ukrainian intellectual community, reaching deep into world philosophic and cultural thought, particularly classical, modern, and postmodern. The ideas she cast forth into the field of debate are already working for our different, better future.

It is a future which feels cramped up in the current realities. Quite often she was misunderstood and even attacked, as her strained quest for truth in freedom and freedom in truth was mistaken for a raising hell. Solomiya Pavlychko belonged to that rare modern Ukrainian intellectual stratum where one’s upbringing, education, and thinking (or let us say just circumstances, time, and place) put together on a field of especially severe ethical-aesthetic tension amid the various kinds of totalitarian ideologies that continue to dominate our society. She considered resisting them her first and foremost obligation. In fact, it was not programmed but doomed. A Ukrainian intellectual really wishing to clean up some excrement in our society is doomed to be regarded by opponents as scandalous. Solomiya’s job of auditing national cultural canons, particularly in the literary domain, was quite thankless and dramatically necessary. Consistently, she scraped the gild off the statues of our classics, boldly and in most grounded revealed their human essence. This could not but meet with indignant misunderstanding, and primitive brutal accusations. Solomiya knew what she was up against, just as she knew that she could not act differently.

She had her own vision of this country. She wanted to see it different and did more to that end than she physically could (as we have suddenly discovered). The abyss that opened up around all of us would not let her continue. Death lashed out and carried her away from us a few hours before the New Year of 2000.

We are left to decipher the sign. Death on the last day of the millennium. What does it mean? Sinking into one’s time and staying there forever? Or leaping out of the current of time, moving on to a new level of being?

I no longer believe in the justice and balance of this world. I do not believe that Solomiya vanished from it because she had said all there was to say. Yet I am convinced that she is still with us. This is not simply trite self- consolation. Evidence of this is new books, debates, outbursts of passion, and her explosions of ideas. I am not given to fulsome praise and I know of which I speak. Tomorrow you will see what I mean.

Eleven years ago (we were not even acquainted), I wrote several lines the essence of which has seemed to constantly change, but today it is finally established: “I’m selling tickets for concerts with zithers and tambourines. Music is so fragile, it slips through your fingers. Street philosophers and nightclub prima donas! That’s not your solo number but Solomiya’s. It flows like a river.”

Her solo continues. Her memory will always live. May Eternity be kind to her.

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Solomiya Pavlychko was born December 15, 1958, in Lviv. Her father, Dmytro Pavlychko, is a famed Ukrainian poet. She graduated from the Romano-Germanic Department, Taras Shevchenko University (Kyiv). Since 1985, with the National Academy’s Institute of Literature, Ph.D. (Philology), professor with the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, member of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine. Author of five books: Philosophical Poetry of American Romanticism (Kyiv, 1988), Byron. A Sketch of Life and Creativeness (Kyiv, 1989), Letters from Kiev (New York, 1992), Labyrinths of Thinking: Intellectual Novel in Today’s Great Britain (Kyiv, 1993), and A Discourse on Modernism in Ukrainian Literature (Kyiv, 1997), the latter correctly recognized as an intellectual bestseller (something rarely encountered in the realm of scholarly studies). And of course numerous literary translations, including the textbook Ukrainian versions of William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover that not only successfully competed with Russian translations, but also helped overcome the biased public stereotype of the Russian version’s intrinsic superiority. The last several years of her life Solomiya Pavlychko enthusiastically worked with the Osnovy Publishers to carry out a program of world scholarly and fiction classics in Ukrainian. She died on December 31, 1999.