Eternal renewal is the property of a real classic
Photo by Volodymyr Rasner, The Day
A favorite book is not necessarily one you read and reread; it can be one whose very presence in your life lends it a touch of mystery and predestined involvement. You can return to it once in a decade. You open it, pick a line at random and are mystified by the deep meaning it has for you at the moment.
I am not trying to be original. To a writer the book he is working on is his favorite, because if it is a success he is spurred on; he is overwhelmed by love for the subject and characters. If it turns out a failure, the author may well be destroyed. In a word, both success and failure have a mystic power that will never be dispersed by any other book he may produce. Sometimes one has to cure oneself, to let oneself loose from the bounds of such mystery being solved, when certain words, images, ideas lock one in a closed space, an eerie feeling. Getting rid of it entirely is seldom possible, but one is strongly attracted to it; it is something akin to creative necrophilia...
Man is always anxious to know what will happen in the future, what will become of him. This about sums up the philosophy of man’s activity. Just another game played according to set rules. For me personally, such favorite book is Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar. I remember my father bringing two books from the village library: Robinson Crusoe and Kobzar. I liked the former’s illustrations, each getting across with its strong message of fear, but the text left me unimpressed. It was just another adventure story. After I finished reading Shevchenko’s “Hired Woman” I cried. Only thirty years later could I look at this work completely logically. A sentimental story, a paraphrased myth about the prodigal son, this time as a prodigal mother? People will turn to Shevchenko’s works time and again and the recent upsurge of public interest in his creative legacy is additional proof. Although this time it is not so much an attempt to reread and understand things previously misunderstood or overlooked, whatever the reason, as revenge by those doomed to suffer in the confines of their own self-centeredness, unable to overcome their own innermost mystic fears in the face of harsh realities or somehow express themselves with any degree of eloquence and literary form. And yet all this is very simple. Shevchenko voiced feelings in unison with his nation’s mystic perception, and this nation will always remember and appreciate him, even if thinking and perceiving differently from the way it did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Literature will always return to Shevchenko, just like his prodigal mother returns to her child. Every such homecoming will remind it of its new hardships and ills. We might even live to see our own versions of his “Hired Woman”, in the form of big epics composed by homemakers and the wives of thriving businessmen, and of course written in Ukrainian. These women will create literary masterpieces, having inherited from Shevchenko his greatest secret, his inborn gift of prophecy.
VYACHESLAV MEDVID: “I CRIED AFTER READING ‘THE HIRED WOMAN’ “
13 November, 2012 - 00:00
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