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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

A VICTIM OF THE STATE THAT WAS

3 March, 1998 - 00:00

This time we will not discuss an officially orchestrated murder that happened almost 30 years ago. That regime, which many now tend to regard as care-free was in reality ruthless, demanding human sacrifice, unmistakably zeroing in on "undesirable elements" amid the gray downtrodden masses. There were so few of them, only a handful in Vasyl Stus’ words. Theirs was precisely the required number which seemed to make the regime’s task all the easier. But it only seemed so, because handling millions of zombies was immeasurably easier than several dozen cranks who refused to oblige.

The only alternatives were to buy or to destroy them. One of those destroyed was a woman artist by the name of Alla Horska. Her story is the most horrifying of many others. Like a horror script written by a pervert, with maniacal moods and pathologically overstated effects. But it is no fiction. A documentary book titled The Red Shadow of Guelder Rose, written by her son, Oleksandr Zaretsky. I have read it several times and every time I felt like I was standing on the edge of an abyss, like the one described by Nietzsche, staring up with its bottomless eye. This evil was above and beyond the regime with its playwrights and performers, somewhere at the metaphysical level.

The only thing capable of challenging this evil was the live artist’s image. Her pulsing life, powerful spiritual energy, her ability to love was the first and foremost evidence of her creative presence. She was strongly attractive, the seismic, biological, and creative center of her own world, and at the same time self-sacrificing. Her work was physically demanding; she had to overcome the resistance of material: huge plane surfaces, stones, cement, metal, clay. This work taught her to resist. "My work drives me crazy, twists my body and soul, takes things away from me and then gives me other things," she wrote in a letter to Opanas Zalivakha, another powerful creative personality that was totally alien to that "united and happy society" and who had thus been placed in a labor camp.

In fact, her letters to Zalivakha are a true literary memorial. I am trying to be unbiased, so I state here and now that few other literary texts I know contain as much tenderness, anger, irony, wisdom, expletives, and such strong beliefs. Hers is a style stemming from the roots of existence, as powerful as a primitive man’s heartbeat. "My heart was broken and then became whole again..." "They wanted us to repent and we could not understand why we had to become whores..." "I saw one officer of the camp guard. His mug was as big as two labor camps; his sheepskin coat was as dark as a heavy rain cloud; he had metal teeth and a fang protruding from the side. And you know what? I was fascinated." A mug as big as two labor camps. Such stylistic portrayal was unpardonable. It was too realistic, ruthlessly accurate. She put too much heart into it.

Other observations, more social, so to say. She wrote this in Krasnodon thirty years ago: "The ground here is old, overburdened with waste piles. The people are strange. Women are rough, with big tits, heavy buttocks, and thick legs. And sex. Sex everywhere. Women live hard and unhappy lives. Constantly drunken husbands, children who have to be fed and sent to school, and money that has to be earned somehow." In another letter: "I do not understand this government. So much is being spent on raising all this scum. Time seems to come to a standstill — I mean I have this feeling watching the permanent process of creating this scum."

Least of all I want to describe yet another Ukrainian heroine, another victim of the merciless system. It is a well-worn subject. Besides, as time passes, I become increasingly convinced that that we are being taken for a ride again, for the umpteenth time. We now have all the usual rights and liberties. But do we? Who is the real beneficiary? Horska wrote something which sounds like a warning addressed to us, thirty years later: "They are papping you up, as though the only thing you can really do is pray." One cannot step in the same river twice, let alone a hundredth time. We ought to remember that there are other vast opportunities as evidenced by that woman’s eventful but tragically short life. There is a delicate line between getting bought and getting killed. This line is the final great loneliness which is already outside the world of the living, but which demands the severest resistance.

 

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