By Yuri ANDRUKHOVYCH, The Day
It is for almost eight years that I have heard heart-rending wailing from
all sides about "disrupted ties." It might seem Russia and we have been
separated cruelly and painfully from each other by a certain impregnable
wall or, for that matter, scattered over the most faraway civilization
oceans, and this cannot be undone. In reality, suffice it to turn to the
newspapers, radio, television, or even simply look at your compatriots,
listen, together with them, to their favorite music, remember the names
of favorite actors, television hosts, or even poets ("Well done, Pushkin!")
to put the record straight. Disrupted ties? Who wants me to believe it?
No doubt, it is worth saying something different: there have never been
ties as such. There was a lengthy existence of Ukraine in the gravitational
field of Russian culture: this affected all regions without exception,
for even Galicia turns out, on close examination, to lie far more eastward
than is usually thought. For ties to exist, there should be reciprocity.
But Russia has never treated Ukrainian culture as equally authentic with
its own. Of course, our songs were sung by somebody somewhere. Or, say,
some of our writers, especially official award-winners, were published
in translation. But neither Stus nor Kalynets were ever published, in spite
of the quite freethinking air of the capital.
Or perhaps these much-lamented ties are only beginning to materialize
precisely now? Could this perhaps at long last be the beginning of Ukrainian-Russian
cultural ties? Perhaps it was the essence of the "southern accent" to make
it clear that there is a certain southern country, a certain "wet" language,
and a certain different literature?
Imagine a four-hour literature-cum-music "gala-concert" involving a
dozen of Ukrainian and several dozen Russian authors in the magnificent
and pompous hall of the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Moscow. Imagine all
those surroundings (security guards, noiseless elevators, luxury and magnificence,
the late-Brezhnev design, and the irreproachable poise of the officials)
and this public. About a hundred gathered there, and the audience undoubtedly
looked somewhat scattered in a hall like this. However, it was an audience
you can always recognize: the same bash of the bohemian, no matter whether
in New York, Stanislav, or Africa, brothers and sisters, mamas and papas,
flower children. They were terribly out of sync with the blinding interior
befitting a much richer country, they irritated you with their attire and
tattoos, you always expected some escapade from them, for example, uttering
an uncensored word. A group of bemedalled veterans walked out, I think,
after the number by Dmitry A. Prigov himself. He was to be followed by
Rubinstein, Nekrasov, Koval, and all those new belle-lettres Ukrainians
brought from the South.
I do not know to what extent those present understood the untranslated
(and in many cases untranslatable) Ukrainian poetry. What remains unresolved
is the problem of correlation between the timbre of voice, articulation,
phonetics, semantics, and accent. However, what also remains behind is
a sweet and teasing sensation of captive proximity, contact, and comprehension.
History is being made not only before our eyes but also by our hands, as
a national mass media joke has it. The festival seems to have peaked the
interest of not only the secret police (by the way, what about the "disrupted
ties" among them, I wonder?).
What has been left for history is a festival booklet with never-translated
Ukrainian poems and sometimes comically-translated prose, a bilingual billboard
with the motto "Budmo!" and also a bilingual collection of Russian-Ukrainian
criticism, where we find on the first page the adventuristic idea of the
publishers that the most advanced Russian book-pushers are soon likely
to begin reading in the two related languages, Ukrainian above all, for
there already was the experience of such aberrations in the nineteenth
century, when Kotliarevsky's baffoonery-filled Aeneid saw 32 editions
published in Russia.
I begin to think that this world actually has changed greatly. And I
also begin to think over a return move, perhaps a festival called The Northeastern
Accent.






