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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

OLES ULIANENKO: “GULLIVER’S TRAVELS IS THE SCHIZOPHRENIA OF OUR AGE”

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

Interviewed by
Mykhailo Brynnykh,
The Day

An engraved illustration to Swift’s Guliver’s Travels

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is my favorite book. Perhaps I like it best after The Bible. Imagine: Gulliver and the Scriptures! Personally, I find both very interesting. I understand just how different they are but I’m not certain which is personally more important for me: to spend my life writing or reading The Bible.

What can one say about a book that one perpetually wants to reread? Gulliver’s Travels is a very angry literary work full of grotesque, monstrous characters, pygmies, and talking horses. It is a burlesque aimed at the human race. I like this book because I can’t fully understand it, which is probably why I dare compare it with The Bible. Just try to enter this world.

From time to time I get lost in it. Every time I move to a new apartment I buy myself a new Swift. When I am angry I can kick it under the wardrobe. It isn’t The Bible; you can brew tea on it, and, finally, you can read it.

Swift embodies the enervation of today. He was Irish, and he was a priest. Maybe that’s why Gulliver’s Travels breaks so many biblical taboos. Swift also wrote a lot of pamphlets about Parliament and the government, angrily telling both what he thought they were worth. No society will ever want to hear the truth about itself. His greatest discovery was to hide the monstrous truth in a light-hearted fairy-tale, something I have never been able to do. In fact, I think that what makes a great author is that his works are equally adaptable to being rendered as animated cartoons or psychological drama.

I take Swift’s book, read it, toss it away, pick it up, and reread it. I think this best describes the kind of affection which has formed between the two of us. Jonathan Swift is an author I really love. There is another book I love as much. The Kobzar by Taras Shevchenko. I think this book is also a “universal purpose” one, though I don’t have a copy. But I have Swift and I think his book is miraculous, little understood and in this way being like us. All his grotesque Lilliputians are hiding somewhere inside us. This is our contemporary schizophrenia.

 

Interviewed by Mykhailo Brynnykh, The Day
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