OKSANA ZABUZHKO: "WHERE THERE ARE NO KNIGHTS, A ROBBER BARON WILL TURNUP"

"I don't like the word young applied to our generation. It's recidivism to the old communist youth League. Everyone who has not gone completely bald and gray are 'our youth.' I think our generation of roughly 35-45 year of age is the middle generation, which in principle is the most active one in any society. In social terms it is the central generation. We always have the greatest reserves of initiative and the energy to carry out our initiatives. This is why when somebody calls me young I react not like a coquette or woman like from an electric shock. To be young means to have something ahead of you. I am working normally and actively in culture."

"You have traveled a great deal. What primarily interests Western people in Ukraine?"

"I have taught several semesters in US universities, I often attend international writers' forums, and present the translations of my books all over the world. I don't think I will say anything new here, but Ukraine's international image is pretty vile. Thus I always have to work from the opposite side to overcome the existing stereotypes. Here is one of the most insulting 'compliments' I recently heard in Budapest at the International Book Fair, where I presented the Hungarian translation of Field Research on Ukrainian Sex: 'You are the most atypical Ukrainian I have ever seen.' Incidentally, Viktor Yerofeev was also at the event, for we were guests of the same Budapest-based Europa publishers: I brought my Field Research and he his novel Russian Beauty. We always spoke English with other forum visitors and with each other, not as a matter of principle, it just happened.

"Suddenly Yerofeev asked me: 'Oksana, where in America do you live?'

"I replied, 'I live in Kyiv, not in America.'

"He paused and his face was absolutely dumbstruck. This was one of the few instances when he was at a loss for words, for in general he is quite talkative. I am telling you about all these things, for I, frankly speaking, am tired of such experiences. Every time I heard such back-handed compliments I felt pain for this country. Take another example. A very nice and well-mannered Bavarian family began to tell me that they traveled by car all over Ukraine as far as Kyiv, and nothing happened. And you sit like the worst idiot, and think: 'Well, what did you expect? To see a jungle and the Mafiosi with machine guns?' Or I receive an e-mail from a Western publishing manager: 'We can send you an official document, but does the mail work?' These are only my freshest impressions.

"Every time we go outside our native cultural space, in which we can think whatever we like about ourselves: geniuses, of high culture and special spirituality (by the way, I also like the purely Soviet stereotype: 'OK, they live well over there, and their lawns are neatly mown, but we are so spiritual'), it turns out that this is, to put it mildly, not completely like that. And it hits painfully like a wet towel every time you introduce yourself as Ukrainian and always come across a cautious attitude: 'We are very afraid of Ukrainians.'

"The only story on Ukraine I read in The Herald Tribune for half a year was, 'In Ukraine, a serial killer murdered over 50 people.' In this sense, I want to say that if we won't talk about ourselves, others will do it for us, and this is already a general cultural problem, a vestige of the colonial syndrome. Ukraine has never known how to talk about itself. Ukraine understood itself the way Russian literature described it, for it did not hear its own voice; it didn't believe in its own thought. And now when Ukrainian journalists do not supply information to the foreign press, when Ukraine is silent about itself, it is small wonder that foreign journalists come here more often to interview the Zhytomyr maniac than Oksana Zabuzhko."

"Who do you think can be the voice of Ukraine today?"

"I know that there are several world-class people in absolutely all fields of culture. Really first class. I do not say there are many. I am not a cultural optimist. But these people win acclaim not so much on behalf of their country, which does not support and often even does not know them, as in the name of their talent.

"Ukraine stubbornly does not love its heroes. Whoever you speak to, from Viktoriya Lukyanets to Andriy Zholdak, you will hear that people, who really try to work on behalf of Ukraine and create a modern Ukrainian culture, a continual process as part of the global whole, have been left by their state to the mercy of fate. It is good that at least professionalism is now a concept without borders. (In literature this is a bit more complicated because of the language barrier, and to become a genuine part of world literature, a work has to be adequately translated into English. No other language can replace English, for it is the international currency just like the American dollar).

"On the one hand, I don't much like it when artists begin to make claims on the state: I think our relationship with the state was molded in Soviet times as 'leave us alone.' But, on the other hand, there is such a thing as cultural policy, and it clearly shows to what extent the state respects itself. A few months ago in Munich, the very prestigious Deutsche Museum hosted an exhibition of artists unknown even in Ukraine, and no one knows who organized the show. Who decides to represent our art, according to what principles and on what basis? We lack not only a thought-out cultural policy but even a policy of cultural representation. Maybe this is all right: complete spontaneity where you wither sink or swim. But it is bitter and painful when participants in a certain super-prestigious international writers' forum begin to boast: one says his country's embassy organized an official reception, another says his embassy partially sponsored him and visited, in a body, his reading. Only you sit with nothing to boast of, for the Ukrainian embassy has not even responded to the official invitation sent by the organizers. So this makes you wonder if you have a state of your own at all.

"Or take another, I would say, archetypal example. Last fall there was the centennial of Liatoshynsky, our national pride. But, on the same evening, there was a recital of none other than Kobzon. So our President and his wife chose Kobzon's soiree. As we know, there's no accounting for taste. But the crux of the matter is not taste. The issue is that our President represents a certain system of cultural priorities such that it is clear whether or not there is national self-respect. This is in fact the problem of the image, which has to be formed in a planned and thought-out way, and, incidentally, at state expense."

"You are one of the Ukrainian writers who have many admirers in the West. What is their attitude to your poetry, for translations are always inadequate?"

"I gained an impression that, in spite of translation, I have a bit more admirers there than I do here. A book of my poems in English translation came out in Toronto two years ago, and I presented it at the Harbourfront Writers' Festival. This forum, named after a Toronto district, is one of the most prestigious writers' forums in the English-speaking world. During ten days, each of the invited authors spoke three times: at the native-language-reading soiree, at the translation-reading event, and during an onstage interview. Admission to all these actions was for a fee. I was deeply shocked to see that my English-language reading (it is not a Ukrainian-language function attended by the Ukrainian Diaspora) and especially my interview drew about a two-thirds full house. But there I am a Cinderella from an unknown literature. And people paid $13 to come and hear this Ukrainian writer. This immediately conjures up a picture: some Abdur Rahman comes from far-off Africa, a well-known poet there, and is interviewed by Mykola Zhulynsky at the National Opera or Ukrayina Palace. How many people would have paid at least 6 hryvnias just to come and listen? But there they come with family members and buy season tickets for the whole program... This is about spiritual richness and poverty.

"I am stunned that no higher educational institutions all over Ukraine hold poetry seminars similar to those held in almost all Western universities. If asked, I am personally ready to conduct such a seminar. People should be taught to read and understand poetry. Since poetic art is subtle and complex, it requires as much a prepared audience as does classical music."

"A question about your personal cultural priorities: why do you choose such well-worn subjects as sex or Shevchenko?"

"Allow me to disagree and take offense. It seems to me I never take up exhausted topics. Even when I write about Shevchenko, I write about the unstudied and misunderstood Shevchenko, who has passed through time with people stubbornly failing to see him. As for sex, here I wrote not quite about the sex peddled on street corners. I was not satisfied with the way this subject was studied and presented, and, in general, I am not satisfied with the level of reflection in culture. So then there is nothing else to do but to set off a little underground explosion, mine the place, and show that everything is not at all like ' we were taught in school'."

"To what extent do you think the myth of Shevchenko should be desacralized? Is it worth tearing down the iron and concrete idol Shevchenko was turned into?"

"Of course, it is. I think the myth will vanish into thin air if one simply reads Shevchenko the way he ought to be read. Beginning in school. I first read Shevchenko the right way when I was 30, and I was surprised: gentlemen, he turns out to be a good poet! But in school, he is hidden away, covered with concrete and asphalt, so that you never reach the truth.

"A very natural process now underway in culture is revision of the heritage handed down to our generation in the shape of ready made, compiled, and tabulated data from coffin-like textbooks. Roland Barthes once said criticism means that each successive generation has to translate the classics into its own language, for each generation has a language of its own. Unless translated into the language of each new generation, the classics become reinforced concrete which not only fails to stir any feelings but scares people away."

"How do you see your reader?"

"My reader is mainly the middle class which our state suppresses by taxes and tries bet into the ground, but it still sprouts up. I am interested in writing precisely for my reader, I don't care for the pulp they sell on commuter trains. However, the latter is, by all accounts, the savior of national literature as a whole. American literature is not so much Faulkner or Salinger as Steven King who you can talk about with your hairdresser (you won't talk about Faulkner in the beauty shop!). The Ukrainian hairdresser has no Steven King of his/her own. Here again, our low bow to the state which has done its utmost to have the Ukrainian book market colonized by its Russian counterpart. The point is that a Ukrainian King will only be commercially viable when it costs cheaper than Marinina (a Russian mystery writer - Ed.). But it cannot cost less than Marinina because the Russian state has exempted book production all taxes, while we have one of the highest taxes on books in Europe. Commercial success depends not just on the text. This is also a commodity. To be competitive, the commodity has to be cheap. You don't buy a pineapple not because it is less tasty than an apple but because it costs three times more. There can be no commercial literature in this country while we don't have intelligently regulated legislation concerning books. Our state has successfully drowned this industry. For example, I had more than once to sign a book for three or four students.

"I asked, 'Are you related?'

"They answered, 'No, we all chipped in.' They can't afford to buy a book for seven hryvnias!"

"It is believed that corporative solidarity is not typical of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, that an outstanding person is pushed out of the milieu. Did you feel this yourself?"

"Without a doubt. You know, I've had Many emotional problems in my life, but what I never had is envy. I do not understand this feeling in principle and I am surprised whenever I see it turned toward me. Ukraine does not love its heroes. Our colonial consciousness does not favor it when some of 'ours' do not toe the line. I would say this is a historico-cultural problem. Once Yevhen Malaniuk  defined it as a lack of the feeling of hierarchy. The Tartars blocked our path precisely when Europe saw the beginning of the Christian religious wars and the formation of knightly orders. What does the ethos of knighthood lie in? In the principle of loyalty to one's liege: I fulfill myself by giving all my strength and intellect to serve a superior idea larger than my own life. These are very deep-seated things which today help form political parties and coalitions: this allows the retinue to manipulate the king so well that nobody will feel hurt. But in this country, everybody is a lord unto himself. And where this is so, foreign lords eventually come around. It is this attitude of 'why him and not me?' that actually provokes intrigues, spite, and, in the final analysis, the atomization and disintegration of the whole into a quagmire."

"We can disagree with you here: we did not go through knighthood, but we see now the formation of the principle of clan solidarity, of closely-knit packs that defend what they have all means fair and foul."

"Yes, where there are no knights, a robber baron will turn up. I do not believe in the solidarity of a criminal pack. There is another problem here. We came out of a criminal state. 'The unbreakable union of free republics' was built, starting with the October coup d'etat (incidentally, an utterly unlawful action), as a criminal state. It bet on illegality; the ruling party structure imitated a gangland hideout. Stalin, was a godfather according to all the considerations of cultural studies. Recall Solzhenitsyn: there is a 'small prison zone' and the 'big prison zone' occupying a sixth of the globe. I am still waiting for a good and wise book, a research into the laws of criminal sociology and psychology by which we lived for seventy years. When I hear someone saying 'Look what they're doing now!' I am surprised: nothing new is being done. The point is what was formerly done in a more or less veiled fashion is now on the surface and runs wild. What we have is not postcommunism but neocommunism, it is too early for us to talk of democracy and the market. For democracy provides for legal coverage and law which is not changed every month.

"We all have something to do with prisons, one way or another. When, under Khrushchev, the generation of our fathers began to come home, the camps brought a certain romanticism of the underworld: by the logic of one Latin American leader, if a gangster is in power, the honest man must be in jail. It's sort of like Robin Hood Soviet style. And about 20 years later, in the 1980s, we liberal-arts students in Kyiv University sang cheerfully, sitting around a bonfire and strumming the guitar: 'On the prison bunk, my brother...' But what was once sung around the bonfire is now ringing out from the stage, underworld pop music that make your hair stand on end. You can't enter a restaurant or a beauty parlor without your ears being assaulted by the music you didn't order."

"Which of the outstanding Ukrainian cultural figures do you regard as models?"

"I would start with Lesia Ukrainka, who, incidentally, is also unread and covered in concrete. It is a good idea to reread her at least because of her truly noble origin, from a fourteenth century ducal family. She should be read with proper interpretation of the European knightly myth. For me, she is in many respects the indicator of an alternative, not pie-in-the-sky and entirely non-Soviet, Ukrainian culture. By the way, this is a figure whom the Soviet tradition of literary research even failed to desecrate, to which she was so alien. Now Natalia Vitrenko decideds to take an embroidered towel and put her portrait on stage, which was a total culture shock to me and a symbol of our absurd life: the noblewoman in an embroidered towel, and, beneath her, our Natasha. In terms of indicators, this is the same cultural mishmash as Vierka Serdiuchka (a slapstick TV character - Ed.).

"I like very much the intellectual discourse of Lypynsky. Also appeals to me the emigration line: Kostetsky, Shevelov, and, in a way, Chyzhevsky, i.e., the intellectual Ukrainian elite done away with in 1929. By all means, Vasyl Stus. His is very philosophical poetry with miraculously high inner self-discipline and colossal ethical level."

"Why, in general, do you deal with the problem of knighthood and knightly ethos?"

"Well, this is connected with my personal origin. A direct ancestor of mine in the seventeenth century was a Kaniv colonel, then, after the fall of Hetmanate, the family declined, for it refused to become Muscovite. In the twentieth century, my relatives have included both Petliura's colonels and Ukrainian Galician Army officers. In all probability, I am exactly one of those who were not supposed to survive in this country, one of those who miraculously cheated death. Back in the eighties, I wrote the lines: 'That you and I survived is such an accident.'

"I was born in Lutsk , and when I came there 25 years later, I understood this was no accident. For Lutsk like no other city preserves an authentic Ukrainian urban culture (for Lviv, not without reason called Little Vienna, is not so much a Ukrainian as visually an Austro-Polish city). Lutsk is a fragment of fifteenth and sixteenth century princely Ukraine, an authentic Ukrainian city: with a castle on a hill and beautiful Cossack-baroque architecture. My personal genus stems from there. This is why my feeling of Ukrainian culture is so deep. Nobody will convince me that our culture is the Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament and his ilk."

"Do you have any personal taboos on certain subjects, words, or images in your creative work?"

"There is only one clear-cut moral imperative in belles lettres: thou shalt not lie. There are no taboos on words or themes outside this. Everything can be made to cater to high art if only the writer has an inner honesty with him/herself. This is why, I consider Ukrainian Soviet literature, but for a few exceptions you can count on the fingers of your hand - like Hryhir Tiutiunnyk and a few others - is deeply immoral, for it tells half-truths about everything. It cannot serve as a document of its time and thus is utterly worthless. Take one small example: it is common knowledge that the absolute majority of Soviet Ukrainian writers came from the village. Over decades, they tirelessly swore allegiance to the latter, sitting in state-run dachas. At that moment, the tremendous disaster to civilization begun in 1933 was drawing to a close: the Ukrainian village, as a sociocultural phenomenon, died out, when, after a quarter of a century of Stalinist collective-farm slavery, peasants were issued internal passports, and all things living and breathing took to the city, where they formed a new social stratum, urban marginals. Ukrainian peasant civilization, which had existed for centuries, vanished like Troy. And all that our ostensibly 'rural' literature told generations-to-come about this are Hryhir Tiutiunnyk's two short stories Katria Married Off and The Son Has Come."

"You try to pronounce the word Soviet as coldly as you can. And, in general, what is your attitude to the all-pervading overly hysterical deification of the Soviet past?"

"When I am told we are surviving, rather than living, now, I reply that we were surviving the same way throughout the seventy years of Soviet power. I remember 5 hour-long summer lines for boots which cost your monthly salary. Why do people, so nostalgic about those times, forget this? We used to stand in the same line all our lives. We suffered horrible hardships, struggle for cheese and meat. Remember butter being taken from the city to the countryside. And in that countryside, pensions were twelve rubles.

"One more thing Soviet has always left me with heartfelt indignation. Then all were supposed to be equal, at least nominally, but in reality that society was deeply caste-ridden. A certain district Party committee low-level executive was in fact part of the ruling elite which looked upon the populace as cattle. Suffice it to read classical Ukrainian literature. Who is the main antihero there? A clerk who speaks the pidgin Russian of Mr. Holokhvastov and is literally bursting to pour scorn on the people from which he arose only yesterday. All this concerns our today's so-called elite: it is totally infected with the Soviet syndrome. As soon as somebody begins to publicly swear allegiance to the people, I can't help seeing in him/her a district committee parvenu clerk. In general, 'people' is a very bad word. George Shevelov said he would like to impose a ten-year moratorium on use of the word people, for this word has been so debased.

"I think this absolutely Communist division between the Party, sorry, 'the elite,' and 'the people' originates from Hrushevsky Street (the address of Verkhovna Rada - Ed.). The glass dome there is a metaphor for our regime, an autistic system. In this sense, it is difficult to speak about any realistic thinking by our politicians at all. In the last elections, I voted for Mr. Teriokhin whom I liked for his program and normal European mentality. Then I read a tabloid interview where he tells in a Khlestakov-type bragging tone how he plays golf with foreign diplomats. As the poet said, 'We've had a whist of our own.' One term in Parliament, and the person completely loses his sense of reality. There they constantly discuss who is whose friend and whose enemy, who said what about whom, what kind of intrigues there are, and you add to this that they should also have time to read the laws they vote for, then it becomes clear they have a 25-hour working day. As satirist Zhvanetsky said, 'Damn the audience, if there is such an interesting life inside the theater!' I don't know where they have their cars serviced and where they buy food. If this is also a limited-access system of service, then there is no hope they will ever face at least a shade of reality. Speaking with our lawmakers, democrats at that, about the book policy I mentioned, I saw that the comrades simply did not understand the point, sincerely and honestly. They are totally isolated from reality.

"From a psychological standpoint, nostalgia for the Soviet past is, if you like, the product of the collapse of youthful illusions inevitable in any young nation. The late Merab Mamardashvili's diaries contain an excellent thought, dating back to the 1980s: 'Independence is also to see who we really are.' A strikingly precise expression. While Moscow was solving everything for us, Ukrainians simply had no chance to see themselves in the mirror of their own actions and to get to know what kind of people they really were. On seeing it, they disliked themselves terribly. Look what a low national self-image reigns in our society, I think the lowest in Europe. Growing up, taking a realistic view of oneself - without euphoria but also without humiliating self-flagellation - is always a hard test and an ordeal, both for individuals and nations."

"You are a person prone to shocking others. Would you tell us what recently has shocked you most?"

"Making public the annual incomes of our presidential candidates. I just wanted to shed a tear and hurl an appeal: ladies and gentlemen, we are 50 million, let us throw at least 10 kopiykas at each to those poor creatures who earn 8,000 hryvnias a year. Let them at least not sport patches at international summits and have good suits tailored for themselves! It seems they are simply not aware of the amount to be entered into the declaration, so that it looks more or less true to life and simultaneously does not irritate those who live on a hundred hryvnias a month."

"Aren't you disappointed with the profession of a writer?"

"You know, my Field Research taught me so much on the professional plane. If you recall, the first accusations were that all this was, so to speak, my personal life story. Then I received hundreds of readers' comments: 'Thank you, this is all about me, this is my story. I felt as if we had sat together in the kitchen, and I was telling you my life story,' etc. That is, complete self-identification of women from the ages of 25 to sixty with my heroine, whom critics identified with me. For myself, this was completely unexpected and at the same time revealing: what a mean and wonderful profession it is! Mean, because you don't live through all the things others do - directly - but you are always like a potential text, like a rough verbal material, so you roll all this to the city square, sorry, I mean to the bookstore. It is a public profession, there's no denying. But it suddenly appears that you somewhat mystically apply sound not to your own words but to those of many thousands of specific living beings who suffered and largely remained silent, as if they did not existent at all: all that is not expressed in a words very quickly sinks into oblivion. By giving voice to something, you allow it to exist. And that's fantastic."