Vasyl HERASYMIUK: The Air Has Become Empty
A poetic text shows a high degree of self-sufficiency, so squeezing out of the author something he hasn’t written wouldn’t seem proper. However, a living culture means not only creating texts, but also playing with the senses, expanding the scale of values, saturating the surrounding semantic field. Perhaps wishing such co-authorship with a newly created text was what prompted this author to meet with Vasyl Herasymiuk.
He is the author of the collections of verse Smereky [Fir trees], Potoky [The Currents], Kosmatsky Uzir [The Shaggy Style], Dity Trepety [Aspen Children], Osinni Psy Karpat [The Carpathian Autumnal Dogs], Serpen za Starym Stylem [August, Old Style], and the latest, Poet u Povitri [The Poet in Midair], that was the topic of our discussion. He is the recipient of several literary awards, including the Pavlo Tychyna Prize.
“I CONSIDER MYSELF NEITHER SERVANT, NOR MASTER OF THE ELEMENTS”
The Poet in Midair sounds a bit strained but vibrant. The question is, do our modern poets lack fresh air?
The key to the title of the collection of verse is, of course, that air is one of the elements. Among the punitive and cleansing elements of fire and water, the first and final adobe, the earth, air is where the poet resides. Even those fleetingly acquainted with the Holy Bible know that who else is in that element. However, I consider myself neither servant, nor master of the elements. As for lacking fresh air, the poet is not the only gasping for it, his father does and his grandfather does, giving up the ghost on the morning of St. George’s Day. Even a candle gasps and goes out... My grandfather was a commander of the Sichovi Striltsi [Riflemen of the Sich] and he died on the morning of St. George’s Day which is the most important red-letter day in the Hutsul calendar. My father would remember it for the rest of his life. He told me about it. My book begins and ends with the word “poet,” for even though being a tribute to the elements, it is dedicated to the poet. Actually, there are two leitmotivs: gasping for breath and choking back disgust. It is about politics where the poet preys on dead flesh like a raven.
The word “poet” sounds not only as a metaphor, but also as a universal cultural notion, an archetype. Meanwhile, the current Ukrainian literary process is such that several generations can and are working with a matching intensity and degree of representation; sometimes these people build round themselves solid walls of misunderstanding. How can the poet breathe in an atmosphere where so many people do not notice that the magic ringing in the air has faded in the corporate hustling and bustling?
You must refer to all those boys that entered literature in the 1990s. I’d rather discuss creative personalities than generations. Personally, I have good relationships with the “men of the sixties,” particularly Leonid Talalayev. I dedicated a poem to him, and with the new generation: Anatoly Dnistrov and a lot of others. I don’t see that corporate spirit which is being mulled over so much, especially by young people. Yes, we have the Ukrainian Writers Association, but it’s not based on the age scale. For example, Borys Nocheroda was an UWA member, but there are very young ones like Sofiya Andrukhovych.
As for that ringing fading in the air, you’ve just inadvertently quoted my mother. She said, “Now, with the coming of spring, I can no longer hear that ringing in the air.” They destroyed age- old forests in the Carpathian Mountains in the mid-20th century; you can see those glorious floats of timber in folk paintings. Indeed, there is no ringing in the air. The air has become empty. It’s a fact and they take it for granted in the Carpathian Mountains. For me it has become metaphorical, as His Heart, painted over, in my collection of verse. Although this is not entirely metaphorical, for I saw such painted-over hearts. People kept icons of the Savior in their village homes, but in the churches falling under Russian Orthodox jurisdiction such “open hearts” were painted over... All this, chopping down forests, painting over hearts, mothers pregnant with babies of our generation, fleeing persecution by the new regime (in our part of Ukraine the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was active till the mid-1950s) formed the tragic reality of the mid-20th century, a reality in which I grew up. I tried to convey in my collection that rhythm of escape, nervously rocking babies to sleep, when even the ancient melodious lullabies didn’t help, that thin suffocating atmosphere.
At that creative soiree at the Taras Shevchenko National Museum, Ihor Rymaruk quoted Vadym Skurativsky as saying that your creativeness is a “semantic alternative” to the regime-oriented arts...
I believe that a new aesthetic reality will emerge. All postmodern reminiscences and playing absurd are what the Russians call cashed bills. I saw something entirely new, a new literary mood in Taras Prokhasko after reading his book of prose. Despite certain analogies, it shows an outburst of fantasy.
“VERY CLOSE TO THE DIVINE TOUCH”
Talking about a new aesthetic reality, one feels like introducing your metaphor, the poet in midair. And there is a tempting analogy: since the air is one of the elements capable of uniting all the others, the poet is like a metacultural reality, born on the crossroads of what is here and somewhere else, out of our reach.
Right, it’s one of the key problems, the convergence of different realities. I have never been given to reminiscing, yet there are reminiscences in this collection. I italicized them. The book contains both specific everyday life and universal motives. It has what has always been known as the “Carpathian motives” in my creative effort, although it’s actually another means of expression. I specially made different realities converge in my book, starting with cultural and ending with daily realities. There are also interpretations of motives from the Old Testament, especially in Jezebel (featuring a modern woman). I saw the focal problem of the 20th century in the woman’s fate. Perhaps the same is true of every century in Ukraine. Through the elders’ experience one is reminded of the times when a fiancйe would visit every home, kissing and inviting everyone to her wedding. It was a Carpathian folk rite, it had vanished without a trace after WW I. It’s a metaphorical moment...
This convergence of different realities helps me understand a lot of things, primarily myself. It is also true, however, that it creates a discordant situation, a conflict of contradictions. It’s almost like Blok’s “sweet poison of antagonisms.” As man is sometimes treated with snake venom, so that “sweet poison of antagonism” is used to understand exactly what’s going round you.
Your collection of verse shows the confrontation of the big Hrehit “dark as the myth about the fallen deity” and the real Yevbaz which one has to cross to get to the all-night kiosk. Here the problem of identity, sameness seems inevitable...
Hrehit is one of the Chorna Hora peaks closest to my beloved Kosmach. I can see it from a window of my home. And it sounds nice. Hrehit, like when you step over stones. The word means rock-covered top of a mountain (there are several Hrehits in the Carpathian Mountains). When the sun sets behind that mountain Hrehit towers dark and invincible, with strikingly sharp contours. Yevbaz (Jewish bazaar) is a totally different reality. It’s the name of a residential district in Kyiv. I lived there when I was 35-38. A critical age for a poet... There is the Ukraine Department Store and the Circus a short walk from where I lived. And Victory Square. Once the place was known as Yevbaz, acronym for Yevreisky Bazar, the Jewish Bazaar. And earlier it was Halytska Street, for people traveling from Halychyna would enter Kyiv through it. All this, together with the House of Paradzhanov and “St. Sophia’s Cavalry” formed a certain mosaic pattern.
Yet I wouldn’t want to contrast today’s Yevbaz with Hrehit at the metaphorical level, that it was the place of my happy barefooted childhood and now I live in this dark forbidding Kyiv, “the city of the dead.” I grew by Hrehit and lived the first fifteen years of my life; in Kyiv I spent the next thirty years (with a short stay in Kolomyia). Yet there is some sense in such contrasting and these two realities will always haunt me.
Now we are slowly approaching the poet’s true home. But where is it? Bohdan Ihor-Antonych, probably with a foreboding about his quick passing, wrote: “my home isn’t here, it is beyond that star...”
It’s an attractive maze... I remember being impressed by a bolt of lightning I first saw when a small boy, it’s sharply bent pattern, spreading across the night sky like a huge pine branch, something you can probably see only in the mountains. In the instant blinding light you seem to see the vault of a temple. A heavenly temple painted in the child’s eyes with a flash of lightning. It reminds me of the poet’s temple. It appears all of a sudden and vanishes in the same instant. Now it’s there and the next moment it’s gone. It’s very close to the divine touch of the Word, its highest manifestation. That home is not above the stars, it’s up there in the sky...One must see that instantly appearing and vanishing heavenly structure at least once in the lifetime. In my book I wanted to convey a tranquil mood, that of the temple that has stood for ages. Yet even in that temple, existing for an instant, emerging from a bolt of lightning, one can sense a divine quiet and lasting heavenly continuity. For what is an earthly temple, even if standing for ages, compared to the cosmic passage of time?
POETRY IMBIBING FROM LIFE AND DEATH
There is another aspect to your collection of verse I’d like to broach. It’s the confrontation of this and a different world. A wonderland? It is especially apparent in your “Kyiv Story” with its water expanses...
Wonderland? Let’s face it. It’s death. That’s precisely what I meant. Rilke, the [German] poet, said that death is just the other darker side of life. Poetry, however, imbibes from both life and death in equal measure... “Kyiv Story” was written in memory of a friend, an engineer by training and writer by vocation. He represented our middle generation. His name was Viktor Mykytiuk. He died and he is now watching the Dnieper from the Footbridge, seeing “a hundred times one hundred faces” in its mirror, faces passing by us, headed for Kyiv, Olbia, and way beyond the Pontus Euxinus. He is also looking at the mirror of the swimming pool. It’s a fact. Viktor lived in a semibasement flat on Voloska St. for some time, looking up through the window to marvel at women’s thighs “amidst the clouds of crepe de Chine.” He wrote about Podil in the mid-19th century. Now there is a swimming pool in place of his home.
Viktor Mykytiuk wanted to write a story but died. I risked doing it for him. He told me that, watching kids in the swimming pool, he seemed to see through the water the walls of his room, the cheap carpet with the hunting scene print hanging above the bed. He said he would start the story by saying he found himself thinking that his sole desire was to wait for the children to leave the pool, steal into the place, and take a dive. There, in the water, he would see the print with the wolf hunt. In my poem there is an association with the present day. One of the names of the hunter is Marauder. I wanted to say, “Guys, your hunting season seems a bit too long.” The wrong kind of hunting. Everything wrong... Except the wolf, it’s real. As a consequence of sharp bends in the life path, when everything gets topsy-turvy, when a tragedy becomes a farce. You realize that what really arrests your sympathy is the victim in that cheap print, with those decoratively painted drops of blood on the grass. You can see that the wolf is the only authentic thing. Suddenly you are that wolf, hunted down and killed. No, it’s not some mystic hunting. What is almost mystic is the lasting pillage in this country. That print is the only reality, it is true, something you see every day.
And yet a true poet, even in this condition, has the time to see “A spider weaving the image of the Mother of God on the rock under the sun.”
Yes, but that’s from a different roundup, the poem “Sygla.” A man, one of few surviving UPA soldiers, is fleeing a Soviet roundup, he heads for a bunker in the thick of the forest (syhla in the vernacular) where no one is likely to find him. His wife told him they would look for him and that they had to hide all documents, family relics, and money. They hid everything far from home, at a stable in the polonyna valley where Soviet soldiers wouldn’t be likely to appear. (The poem is based on a real story; the prototypes actually went to that stable and hid their papers and things in the crib, covering them with humus.) So when my hero enters the stable the last time he sees a cow finishing a shawl. No trace of the documents and sheets with riflemen’s songs. He realizes that he has been followed and sold to the Soviets by his own people. Whereas previously he knew who the enemy was, Nazis and Soviets, now he has an enemy in his home. Just as he reaches the forest he sees all his things hanging from pines. How could this happen? What kind of a world he lives in? He asks himself and there is no answer. Writing the poem, I noticed that the plot was so twisted it would simply blow apart from its own negative energy unless I found a cheerful aspect... Thus appeared the little spider weaving an image of the Mother of God under the sun. That image made from cobweb is perhaps the only positive thing left on this sinful earth. If he didn’t see it life would have no sense...
Where do you see the junction of divine and human creativeness? Where is the boundary line?
I think there is no boundary line, for He works in mysterious ways which we are unable to comprehend. I wrote that I praised the Lord for being unable to understand His intentions. Divine creativeness is most often manifest in music and canvases painted by great masters. It is written that man was made in His image and after His likeness. Some of the press followings have it that I show distrust of the Creator in my verse. Untrue, it’s just that I convey the character’s mood. He had to say it, but it doesn’t mean that he really thought so. There is a certain stage in man’s cognizance of the world and if he doesn’t say so he won’t be authentic.
