By Viktor MELNYK, The Day
"My nation, I will still return..." The painful anguish of these seemingly
optimistic words of Vasyl Stus is caused not only by the tragic circumstances
of his life - it is also prophetic in itself, for even decades after death,
even under official recognition, the return is no less painful. One can
feel this seeing the extreme difficulty of raising funds for his collected
works being published volume by volume owing to the truly selfless efforts
above all of his son Dmytro and a small group of initiators. But the return
is all the more painful because it often becomes a chip in the political
game of expediency. Let the poet be forgotten immediately, even by his
family, if the politicians achieve what they have thought of.
When in 1997 the Vinnytsia city council announced an all-Ukrainian contest
for a monument to Vasyl Stus, we believed the ice was at last broken. At
first, the concept took one's breath away: it was planned not only to erect
the statue on the teachers college plaza but also attach his name to the
institution, which only shortly before dropped the name of Mykola Ostrovsky,
and to Red Banner Street, as it was located at the intersection of this
street with one named Leningrad.
The action immediately proved ill-considered and ill-balanced. At first
the college faculty wanted their educational institution to be named after
Vinnytsia-born Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky who had received pedagogical education
and taught there as a young man. Then the street got its historical name,
Prince of Ostroh, and Stus Street appeared somewhere else, about four kilometers
away. (It occurred to nobody to rename Leningrad Street, though the city
had been renamed long before).
The only hope left was that at least the monument initiative would be
erected. This looked certain when the jury identified on May 29, 1997,
the contest winner, a sculpture by Anatoly Burdeiny who called his work
Bird of Heart. Already on June 12 the city council passed resolution
No. 471 which distributed jobs between departments and authorized deputy
chairman Bondarchuk to supervise the carrying out of the decision. The
resolution mentioned no dates.
It was decided and forgotten. The winner was the first to feel it. Even
to receive the honestly-won 5,000-hryvnia prize, he had to pester the city
council for two months, where he was looked upon as an oddball. At last
he managed to get the money.
The lull lasted until the fall, when he saw the last ray of light. Burdeiny
was summoned to the city council and made to face the fact: they celebrate
the poet's 60th anniversary in three months and must urgently erect the
monument. The sculptor explained that such tempo is nothing but nonscience
fiction. To make a six meter concrete and sheet-copper-bound monument,
a team of seven or eight men have to work for about 18 months. You can
also do it in a year's time if you work 12 hours a day without weekends.
It was clear they would fail to play this trump by the time of the jubilee
or the March elections. City mayor Dmytro Dvorkis and his team lost interest
in the project.
Burdeiny had nothing to do but seek other chances a few months later.
He turned to some members of the Ukrainian political elite (Chornovil,
Drach, Movchan, and Oliynyk), and they supported the idea of erecting a
monument to Stus in Vinnytsia, but in words only. He gained no real help
from them as well as from the then oblast chairman Matviyenko.
In February 1998 Burdeiny wrote a letter to the President requesting
him to help solve the problem. Financial expenses for the monument were
minimized to 262,000 hryvnias, and he even agreed to pay something from
his own pocket. The answer (a write-off, to be more exact) came not from
the President, his staff, or the Cabinet but from Deputy Minister of Culture
Novokhatko: the national budget does not have an item for the monument,
so it can only be built at the expense of local budgets.
The next appeal to the mayor resulted in the same: no cash. Little wonder,
for elections to local government bodies had already been held.
Now, in the heat of drawing up 1999 local budgets, I phoned Vinnytsia
deputy mayor Halyna Verheles and asked about the prospects for a Stus monument,
but what I heard did not inspire me. The city's financial dire straits
do not allow allocating money for it. Further prospects are so far dim.
Only the current chairman of the oblast administration Chumak has authorized
financial support to the project provided that the city shows some initiative.







