Taras FEDIUK: Our powers that be behave as foreign occupiers

Taras Fediuk is a Shevchenko Prize winner, president of the Association of Ukrainian Writers, editor in chief of the journal Suchasnist, and a poet by God’s grace. Having absorbed the experience of the world’s best poets, he is genuinely Ukrainian by “the blood composition” of his poems and “a brainchild of our era” by mentality. As a versifier, Fediuk is not inferior to the best masters of the 20th century’s first half, but his feelings and thinking clearly show the wind of achievements in computer science and outer-space explorations, informational frenzy, and political chaos but not in the meaning of “messed symbols.” The point is that the dangerous present day is diluted in the poet’s exposed soul which can show itself in an original and breathtaking way and harmonize the reality. Fediuk means philosophicalness and melancholy that turns into tragicalness; it is the medicating pills of the truth embedded in images and unconventional metaphors and shining in an unfathomable way, as if they were stars…

“All Ukrainians are now deep in some kind of pessimistic reflections,” Fediuk says. “It sometimes seems to me that the Ukrainian nation has been eliminated in the 800 years of slavery. It is like a tree: you cut off a branch, it grows; you cut off another, it continues to grow. But then you cut off the main bough, and the tree begins to die. What is left is that which grows from the roots – some weak shoots, – and no one knows if they will grow into a tree. This is what I feel about my native nation, even though there seems to be some freedom, you can march forward, Ukraine has supposedly gained an opportunity to become Ukrainian (this gets in my hair, too), but then I come to know that, according to public opinion surveys, the number of families that speak Russian has risen by 2.5 percent…

“Russification is on, although we understand that the demise of a language is, in fact, the demise of a nation. There are a lot of difficult problems in this country today. You look at what is going on and begin to think: Are we really so inefficient and unlucky that we are Europe’s only nation that has failed to create a state of its own in 1,000 years? It’s as if someone had lost us playing a card game, for there has been bloodshed and tragedies, and the people were unable to overthrow all kinds of invaders. It was bitter to hear that there are attempts to apply to us the political formula ‘failed state.’ It is too bad that none of our politicians and statesmen is thinking about the prospects, trying to take advantage of the happiness that has fallen on their heads in the shape of a ministerial portfolio; instead, they are feverishly grabbing their profits and solving the problems of their relatives.

“During the war, the Germans would carry away chernozem, cows, and grain… But, oddly enough, the Ukrainian powers that be are also behaving like foreign occupiers. It is perhaps most tragic that they do not view Ukraine as their fatherland, a place where their children and grandchildren will be living. They have the mentality of an invader: I came, I looted, I built a villa abroad. Their children and relatives are already there, and they will soon join them. The only comfort is that, after some time, they will end up in a place where all of us will unavoidably be.

So what field is your “tram” heading for? What “lagoons” do you see now?

“I mostly see them with my inner vision. The Iron Curtain seems to have fallen, but in reality, it did not. Because now there is a different iron curtain: artistically minded Ukrainians so far do not have normal contacts with their colleagues abroad; we do not know one another. But it should be a normal and regular thing, when I could travel freely, say, to Paris and enter the circle of my acquaintances among journalists, artists, and writers, instead of staring at the Eiffel Tower. Incidentally, all architectural monuments look much more beautiful on television than they do from a tourist bus window.

“What is most important for me is to be able to mingle, argue, and agree to carry out some joint projects. The lack of this is an echo of the Iron Curtain plus our ignorance of languages, which has historical roots. When I was young and studied English at school or university, I knew only too well that I wouldn’t be allowed to travel, and who cared about such blinkered ones as we in capitalist countries? Soviet people were only allowed to walk about in a group accompanied by a couple of ‘interpreters’ who didn’t let us mingle with anybody and translated what was permitted.

“I first went abroad – to Poland – during the perestroika. English was functionally unnecessary, so I never learned it. It is perhaps too late now: you memorize ten words in the evening and can’t recall even one in the morning. It is an inferiority complex that is rooted in the past. It will naturally take Ukraine some time to be able to fully integrate into the world space, and we will then live a normal life…

“Let us take such thing as the Latin American magic novel. Its creators have absorbed all their Columbian, Peruvian, Venezuelan, Argentinian, and Brazilian problems, and the ethnic taste of their life, but they still studied at the Sorbonne, Cambridge, Oxford, Paris, London, or Zurich, and they maintain close contacts there with publishers and authors and can directly offer their manuscripts. When you read, say, Death in the Andes, a novel by the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa about a sergeant stationed in a mountainous border area, you first take interest in the coloration and only then in the problems of human loneliness and separation from the outside world. What is more, this has been raised to the level of common human problems.

“Obviously, Ukrainians could also offer Europe and the rest of the world many interesting things – when a universal context and common human values rest on an ethnic platform. I think Ukrainian literature does have a future, and what we have now is a slow movement of ideas, works, and writers.

“I have not been abroad lately because I feel disgust: I don’t want to queue up in embassies, overpay for visas, and have to do with the frauds who hang about near the embassies. I have my own human dignity. In principle, I also feel good in Ukraine. And when the paper-pushers become adequate people, as we will, when I can use my Ukrainian passport to get on a bus, plane, or train, and show it everywhere, then there will apparently be true contacts. Maybe, I won’t live to see this. In the meantime, serious internationally acclaimed authors, publishers, and critics are not exactly rushing to Ukraine.”

You can hear sometimes: “Look, these are Ukrainians, second-rate beggars…”

“There is an attitude like this. But it is groundless. It may be true to some extent in the economic sense: they have a criminal leadership that steals, the people are poor, but this in no way applies to the world of art because, just on the contrary, art tends to flourish in such problem-ridden countries.

“Poetry died long ago in the well-fed West. I provocatively say in a small poem that Apollinaire was Europe’s last poet. Somebody asked: ‘And Prevert?’ I replied: ‘Prevert is the most last one.’ ‘And Yves Bonnefoy?’ ‘And Bonnefoy is a Ukrainian poet,’ said I.’

“Anna Akhmatova once said that ‘in Europe painting has eaten up poetry.’ She meant the Impressionists. I think these words are only partly true, because poetry was swallowed by the Impressionists and affluent life. In general, affluence eats up art – not literally and physiologically but by way of moral satiety, i.e., complacency, egoism, and a thirst for pleasure and entertainment, when one has everything, worries about nothing, and takes little interest in things. So why should one torment his soul? So I don’t think we must elbow our way to Europe, carrying forth our art. Let them come to us.”

What names would you like to remember and recollect? Who has struck you in the last while, when you read and – “Oh my!” – were enthralled?

“The more you read, the fewer ‘Oh my’s!’ I’ve had my fair share of ‘Oh my’s’ and I can be hardly surprised with anything, for I have seen very much in my lifetime. Maybe, immediate perception has been somewhat blunted by the acmes that I have encountered and hold deep in my heart, but still it is always interesting for me when a good poet comes up with a very good poem and a good prose writer with an excellent novel.

“Incidentally, I think that Oksana Zabuzhko’s new novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is the best of what she has written. I like very much the novel Black Raven by Vasyl Shkliar – it is one of the apexes in Ukrainian literature over the past 20 years, and I am glad that we were the first to begin to print it…

“There are other delightful events, too, when, for example, you read the poems of a young poet and find an unexpected metaphor or a turn of thought that impress you. It is not necessarily a complete poem, for very few poets can still surprise you with a complete poem… As for those whom I want to remember, it is Mykhailo Stelmakh (who noticed my poems and published them when I was still a schoolboy), Vasyl Zemliak, the brilliant and underestimated poet Borys Necherda, and my friend Ihor Rymaruk…”

The Day’s Fact file

Taras Fediuk was born on Oct. 6, 1954, in Ananiev, Odesa oblast. He graduated from the Kyiv branch of Odesa State University’s School of Philology. The first book of poems, Cranes at Dawn, was published in early 1975. He is the author of the collections Face to Face, Two Minutes of Attention, …And Did not Dare to Keep Silent, The Flight of an Autumnal Bee, Black in White, Cross-Shaped Southern Snows, and The Gold of the Incas. Fediuk was member of the League of Ukrainian Writers from 1980 to 1996, vice-president of this league from 1997 to 2000, and has been president of the Association of Ukrainian Writers since 2000.