The European paradigm of Ukraine
On September 18, Oxana PACHLIOVSKA, The Day’s contributor and head of the chair of Ukrainian Studies at La Sapienza University in Rome, celebrates her birthday.
We cordially congratulate Oxana! We wish her good health, happiness, joy, love, inspiration, and inexhaustible energy, as well as interesting projects with responsible partners so that their implementation will be easy and successful! However, it’s better to quote the poetic lines from the Song with Variations by Lina Kostenko: “Let everything unseen be seen,/ Let everything forgiven be forgiven,/ The only thing depending on us,/ Is living our life properly.” We offer our readers a short interview with Oxana: before her flight to Italy, she courteously agreed to answer a few questions.
Mrs. Pachliovska, while speaking about your mother — the prominent poetess Lina Kostenko — and yourself, you described your relationship with much love and gratefulness. How is your relationship with your daughter Yaroslava-Francesca, who is said to resemble her family in appearance and spirit?
“My relationship with Slava have been built not only on love but also on respect. Actually, that’s my mother’s influence: respecting a child as a unique but above all self-sufficient personality. My mother always told me that one should respect a child like an adult, only giving him or her more attention, talking to the child, and being able to hear. In my childhood, for example, my mother never made me do anything. But her firm ‘please’ had the most influence on me, it was an imperative. It was a valuable experience, so my relationships with my mother are always an inexhaustible source for revitalizing human, family, and professional contacts. Actually, that’s how my Slava was brought up. In my opinion, this way a child forms not only a sense of freedom, but also a sense of responsibility, not only self-respect, but also self-criticism. Today it makes me happy: Slava is not just a daughter and a granddaughter, but our big friend, a new and special dimension of our world. Her double identity is also a source of this creative interchange. She feels natural in both the Ukrainian and Italian worlds. She was recently a bridesmaid at a Carpathian wedding — my very close friend’s daughter was getting married — and she looked quite authentic in Hutsul costumes, talking in Ukrainian, English, and Italian with guests of different nationalities.
“In Ukraine she looks more like an Italian, for Italians she is more Slavic. However, this is an example of the European identity, when one identity does not exist at the expense or opposing the other, as it often happens in Ukrainian-Russian binomials, but both identities are mutually complemented. From my childhood I remember children beating me under the table with their feet in the kindergarten — so that it hurts but remains unnoticed — because I spoke Ukrainian. Such Soviet mentality at the age of four or five! Little Slava was asked everywhere in Italy: please tell us what’s the Ukrainian word for this or that; or what a wonderful and unusual name you have! Therefore, Slava didn’t have to choose between two identities, on the contrary, owing to their combination she has a free and convinced feeling of genuine European identity. As Drahomanov once said: I am a European with Ukrainian roots. Recently, she texted me from Amsterdam: “I’m standing in line to the Van Gogh Museum and feel completely North European.” I smiled because I interpreted it as a crypto-criticism of both Ukrainian absurd and Italian irrelevancies through the aspiration for the more severe, disciplined, structured, and responsible world of Northern Europe.
“Generally, I think that the phenomenon of the Ukrainian European youth has been formed. These are young people born in Ukraine but educated abroad, naturalized in other countries but maintaining ties with their homeland, at the crossroads of cultures. This phenomenon requires research, attention, and strategy. And they need help. For example, it’s unbearable for me to see that as a teenager Slava could visit half of Europe, while her friends, brilliant original personalities, often find it problematic to go abroad, study there, etc. That is the post-Soviet reality depriving Ukraine of its European future and depriving our youth of their future today. This is a cardinal problem we should tackle soon.”
What are your plans for the new academic year in your position as head of Ukrainian Studies at the La Sapienza University?
“I start the new academic year with the feeling of Ukraine’s total isolation from the civilized world, but from the possibility of Ukraine’s modernization. The globalized world is not a fantasy, it is a very complex reality. It is a videocratic, informatized, and high-tech world; education, its level and quality, is the central issue of this world. The degree of seriousness among modern countries is measured by professional, moral, and financial investments in education. No wonder that American and British universities are always in the top ten of all leading world university rankings. That’s it. The situation in Ukraine on these issues is surrealistically shameful. We have long lines near universities at 3 a.m., while in Europe and America documents are only submitted online. Let alone the corruption: journalists speak about bribes going into billions in the educational sphere. Isn’t it enough to realize that the education guided by the Kremlin can only lead up a blind alley — pathological ignorance, amorality, and lack of professionalism? Let alone the new stage of history Sovietization, removing any form of knowledge about Ukraine — isn’t it enough that the empire and the Soviet Union both collapsed, and no ideology helped?! The same will happen this time too, but with a bigger crash and more blood than in 1991. The Russian economist Ilarionov predicts the ‘third disintegration of Russia.’ However, another issue is even more important: if society tolerates this, and moreover — feeds this corruption and degradation, maybe it is not capable of anything else? Perhaps the totalitarian system deprived people of the instinct of self-preservation for good, and that is why they are no longer interested in what will happen to their children? So how can one blame the government? These exhibits of the post-Soviet cabinet of curiosities pro-mised to dismantle Ukraine — and they are doing it successfully. The task of the civic society, if it exists, is to stop this process.
“In addition, under the pressure of the globalized world, European and especially Italian universities have been reformed. Humanities are experiencing a crisis. The number of students interested in Slavic Studies decreases: we have many English and Hispanic Studies students, the Chinese and Arabic languages gain positions as well. There is a miserable number of Slavists compared with them, including Russian Studies students, despite the more strong standing of this discipline. At the same time, the Security Service of Ukraine chases historians in a country submerged in criminal corruption, impressive by its massive scope. While local politicos think they will do a big favor for Russia if they push through another law enabling the local semi-literate Russian to flourish in Ukraine. They would better take care of the hero-city Sevastopol so that feces do not float there and children are not poisoned during vacations. The lumpen Little Russia is an efficient instrument for Russian culture’s self-destruction.
“While working in Rome, I have been monitoring the situation for almost 20 years, and know it well: no matter who rules the country knowledge about Ukraine, as a culture and state, is not developed abroad. Some palliative measures are taken at best. That is why I am consciously building, so to say, an alternative project: interpreting the history of Ukrainian culture as an integral part of Europe’s cultural evolution. This is how I wrote my book The Ukrainian Literary Civilization (Ukrainska kulturna tsyvilizatsia) and that is how I teach my course of Ukrainian studies and the course ‘The Slavs and Europe’ which I love very much: it is a grandiose and in many aspects little studied topic. Regarding Ukrainian Studies, next year at least three symposiums dedicated to Ukrainian politics, culture, and social problems will be held in Italy. But I’ll do some extra writing.”
You once again “disappeared” in the Lybid Publishing House. Does it mean we can expect new books? By Lina Kostenko or Oksana Pakhliovska?
“Indeed, I often ‘disappear’ in the ‘Lybid’ Publishing House. We worked well together on the new edition of Berestechko and The Hyacinth Sun. This time we worked on a project that emerged suddenly and spontaneously, and then totally captivated us. This is Lina Kostenko’s book The River of Heraclites. It is a “mini-book” of collected works, because it includes previously published poems and some poems written in those years, which will be published later in three separate books. Actually, this is a book about time and man in time. It was structured in an interesting way: four cycles of nature which correspond to human conditions and feelings: from the most intimate part of the soul to prophecy, from artistic sketches to metaphysics, from minimalism to polyphony. Here the cyclic mythological time intersects with linear Christian time. Love dominates as a secret code of human transformation and a path to self-discovery. In fact, at the beginning mother wasn’t involved in this book. She was always more interested in writing than in publishing. But we insisted and finally mother provided us with some new poetry for this book. The afterword was written by Dmytro Drozdovsky. It is, as always, erudite and with unexpected approaches — an attempt to read Lina Kostenko’s poetry through the prism of the European poetry. It was extremely interesting to work with Serhii Yakutovych. After the baroque megalomania of his brilliant graphic art in both Mazepiana and Berestechko, he suddenly turned to a different artistic language, bordering with Vienna’s secessionism or Italian neorealism. The artist paints a woman in different states of her emotional and intellectual existence, he looks for Dionysian and Apollonian features in her. However, he outlines only a sketch, as the woman is elusive and always changeable, as his Fall that changes masks, as a mysterious epic Winter, as Spring submerged in the mystery of awakening, and a pagan Greek Summer with thunderstorms and revivals.
“In a word, it is very easy to work with them. The book is close to the layout phase. I highly prize the professionalism of the Lybid team. Director Olena Boiko and editor-in-chief Svitlana Holovko are not just apt publishers, but also professionals with the gift of intuition, with a rare sense of tact, and with the deep and concordant with the writer vision of the world and its problems.
“Concerning my most recent works, I am preparing two books of articles The Philosophy of Revolt, about European tradition in Ukrainian culture, and Mother and the Antichrist — about the Holodomor and the problems of memory formation in different European countries. And also two books of short stories.”
You surely observe the development of contemporary Ukrainian literature. Since things are seen better from a distance, please tell us: how are Ukraine and its culture perceived abroad?
“I’ll start with a seemingly simple observation. This time I flew to Italy through Warsaw. For the first time in many years, there was no information in Ukrainian on the plane, only in Polish and English. After the Orange Revolution there was always a Ukrainian text. Even last winter I remember the Austrian Airlines apologizing that not all texts were in Ukrainian — they phrased it this way: ‘We are sorry that we still don’t know Ukrainian.’ In a word, it’s a sign of respect to a country that respects itself. Conversely, this time one could hear the indifferent national and international languages. That’s it, it’s the European area. The passengers speaking the mixed Russian-Ukrainian dialect became silent and tried to utter something in English, pointing to juice and saying ‘apple.’ Flight attendants understood their awkward Russian. Only one woman peevishly imitated a flight attendant: ‘zachekat, a pochemu ya dolzhna zhdat (why shall I wait)?’ Indeed.
“The situation with culture is similar. Europe is an area of nations with very strong individual identities. It is the uniqueness and originality of each identity that enables the creation of an area of common cultural and moral values. Europe politely alienates itself from the nations that cannot protect their identity, especially from nations that don’t respect themselves. And we face an interesting situation when both certain institutions and persons constantly spread the information about the non-existence of Ukraine, inside the country and abroad. While abroad the incumbent leaders, with both their deeds and words, prove that Ukraine is really a misplaced part of the clumsy ‘Russki mir’ (Russian world). The president has the megalomaniac dream of uniting Europe and Asia. Perhaps uniting Africa with America will be the next stage: why not, both begin with the letter ‘a.’
“Regarding the intellectuals, what’s the difference between, say, some ‘postmodernists’ and the current ‘minister of education,’ who is like the head of the Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth?’ They both state that there is no Ukrainian culture, no elite, no need for history, etc. Perhaps in this case my generation is to blame: we started in the conditions when one was not imprisoned for a mocking poem recited to the face of a vexed Central Committee bumpkin. But the Soviet moral corruption was deep under our skin. It resulted in hysteric ‘feminists’ who wrote Comrades Communists yesterday, and today hoarsely appeal to vote ‘against all’; and former party’s ladies who today create the image of ‘unbiased’ Ukrainian literature, as if in 20th-century Europe unbiased culture existed at all; and drugged pseudo-machos with stories about sex and booze, and the cult of lumpen vocabulary in conditions where the smallest expression of intellectual life was eliminated physically, morally, and materially. Therefore, our economy, social life, and culture are largely a sign of pathological post-Soviet syndromes. Very few people in the intellectual world are aware of these problems and possess the required theoretical and practical tools to deal with this situation. However, thanks God, they do exist in different spheres. The Day in this sense is one of few conceptual centers for the reconstruction and development of European Ukraine.
“Actually, that’s the essence. Neither separate examples, nor separate research or symposiums can change the situation. This is more or less cursory information about Ukraine. There should be a system to everything. The image of the country will change only if irreversible internal changes take place: a real emergence of civic society, consolidating identity by means of mastering our own culture, and by means of self-respect and dignity.
“On the same plane I read two articles in Gazeta Wyborcza. One of them was dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the death of Jerzy Giedroyc. The Polish authors wrote about the ‘revolutionary prince’ with a great respect, even piety. No one ‘desecrated’ him or chewed over the details of his sexual life. They talked about his respect for different nations, particularly Ukraine; about his criticism of the unhealthy attitude of some intellectuals fleeing the necessity to oppose the government. And about Europe: that Poland will finally get rid of its geopolitical complexes (being a country stuck between Russia and Germany), with its profound feeling of belonging to the European world — only then will a strong Poland find its place in a sovereign Europe.
“And there was some information below: Poland is the only EU country that goes into economic recession in 2009, and now its economic growth rates are equal with Germany’s. That’s the difference between the European world and the Russian world: progress versus stagnation, and movement versus social decay. I was really glad for Poland. Like my Slava, I have two identities, but one continues to feel bad. Actually, that is the answer to the question how the world, particularly Europe, perceives us: one should begin with oneself. If such categories as ‘Europe’ and ‘democracy’ have specific cultural content, if Ukraine manages to really feel a part of Europe, in 15-20 years (not less) it will manage to reach the level of today’s Poland. If not, it will remain a raw material-producing appendage of Russia, which, in its turn, is an appendage of the EU.
“In addition, let’s listen to the most tragic voice of Russia — Yurii Afanasyev. In his extremely bitter interview to The Day ‘Highbrow Villains’ (August 10, 2010) he asked: ‘Shall we save this Russia — with despotic authorities, where the person and the majority became the object of oppression? My answer is no. If this Russia, owing to the ruling elite, is further reproduced, what’s the point in saving it? […] We should save Russia, but not this Russia and not this regime […] We should change the paradigm of Russia.’
“Perhaps we are in a better situation. We also shouldn’t save THIS Ukraine, which essentially doesn’t contain anything Ukrainian in it. But we shouldn’t change the paradigm of Ukraine either. We just need to rebuild the European paradigm of Ukraine. For the European Ukrainian youth. And for our own dignity. The goal is still far from being realized and it is difficult. But it is blessed.”
