Love Oklahoma!

I can only greet with joy meeting Oleksandr Irvanets, somewhat less middle-aged than I and one of the most entertaining wags of the contemporary Ukrainian literary process, on the pages of this newspaper, with which I have the honor to be associated, within the context of a literary discussion begun by Prof. Vira Aheyeva, my colleague at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Please see both articles in p.6). In truth, the Prof. Aheyeva’s original interesting remarks at times betray a bit much of the shadow of a certain forgettable ancestor ensconced in the subtleties of Ukrainian literary criticism on the banks of the River Charles, one who has partaken perhaps a bit too much of the heady French deconstructionist wine fermented by one Jacques Derrida, a vintage that is perhaps already going a little stale.

Let me be honest. I am neither a writer nor critic, only a historian by training, analyst of political realities and pedagogue by calling, publicist by circumstance, father (and stepfather) by the Grace of God, and through some unexpected twist of fate the acquaintance, sometimes friend, of many outstanding Ukrainian writers, living and dead, of our times. I have neither the expertise nor the desire to judge, say, whether Ihor Rymariuk or Vasyl Herasymyuk will stand higher in the legacy of the history of Ukrainian literature that the current generation of Ukrainian poetry each will inevitably leave behind. I simply know that they cheer each other’s attainments, and I cheer them both in both what they have accomplished and surely will. Ihorko was even a little embarrassed that he received his Shevchenko Prize before Vaska, but it matters little. Vaska got it the next year, and both will inevitably leave something in formaldehyde that will be appreciated by those who have to dissect it only after it has had some hears to air out in their minds. I could say the same of Ivan Drach and Dmytro Pavlychko, friends of an older generation, the former of whom was the first to write modern European poetry in Ukrainian, while the latter has verses so fine that they are sometimes sung as folksongs with the singer blithely indifferent to the fact that the author is still among the living.

I can understand perfectly my friend Sashko’s not wanting to be part and parcel of the process by which I, for example, had to learn the first lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English, basically a foreign language in the Oklahoma where I grew up and encountered with all the fear and loathing that a girl in high-school biology dissects a frog plucked from a jar of formaldehyde.

Sashko immortalized himself in a truly brilliant parody of Volodymyr Sosiura’s “Love Ukraine,” a poem not only of great literature but also and in defining the Ukrainian identity that even the post-Stalinist Communist authorities saw had to be in the curriculum (the issue of national identity in Soviet Ukraine would require an essay longer than this newspaper, and I leave it to others to fire the first shot at that particular verbal shootout). Yet, author of the original universally recognized classic would also probably turn over in his grave to learn that students find it easier to chew bricks than learn his friend Pavlo Tychyna’s verses.

The same goes for Edgar Alan Poe, who wrote “The Bells,” for which in English there simply is no better illustration of onomatopoeia, the art of conveying sounds into words. Incidentally, Poe was dead and buried before he was either Sashko’s age or mine. And Sashko has offered a bit of comic relief as important after the pathos unavoidable in Ukrainian literature as Shakespeare’s Falstaff is to relieve the sheer weight of the tragedy in which the author placed this character. Of course, if Sashko really likes it, the Bu-Ba-Bu group of poets has other things that could well either supplant or complement him: Viktor Neboraka’s “Zhulbars Hanged Himself,’” a truly wonderful mock epic about a suicidal dog, or another pearl about his apartment where everybody runs around and the author-daddy does nothing but comment on the commotion all day long.

About Yury Andrukhovych, Sashko’s other Bu-Ba-Bu brother, there is little I can say. Much of his work might be a little complicated for tender youth. He has also written why he did not want the Shevchenko Prize, which sounds to this particular literary wino a bit like sour grapes, but this newspaper once published a small diamond called “In the Language of the Original.” In it, the author recalls how, as a student in the days before perestroika in Western Ukraine, he listened to the old push-button radio, known fondly as the lie-box, while breakfast only to hear some Kyiv philosophy professor turning to Russian to quote Immanuel Kant “in the language of the original,” when everybody knows that the philosopher, also regularly pulled from the formaldehyde, wrote German. This particular gem might well have some relevance for schoolchildren who today often have to come school to teach their Russian-speaking parents Ukrainian.

Literature, if worth reading, is written for the living. It was a form of entertainment and edification long before there were radio, television, and video games to offer a parody of their own that perpetually blurs the line between culture and kitsch. Another young poet and polemicist, Mykola Khvyliovyi, protested against this several years before he blew his brains out just over seventy years ago at the ripe old age of 39 on May 13, 1933. Unfortunately for Khvyliovyi, returning his works to the national consciousness and thus restoring an interrupted process of cultural development is just not possible without forcing the young to chew some of bricks he laid in what he wrote, and there is plenty in, say, Korniychuk that one can take out. Any writer worth his salt despises what he did as a diversion for those whose taste that runs to something more refined than Duke Nukem or the kind of movies reviewed in Texas by Joe Bob Briggs being served up like formaldehyde frogs to the young, but that is what learning literature and acculturation is all about. The author of Shadows of Forgotten Classics — the title itself a parody of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a classic both in Ukrainian literature and film to which I took the liberty of alluding earlier — has to know that nobody ever posthumously asks authors, whether they wanted to have their blood drained out of their works that have crossed the Stygian ferry and embalmed, but anybody who takes up the pen had better get used to it.

Perhaps, in order to understand this less than appetizing phenomenon, one might do well turn to the theory of alienation, originally created by Hegel as a theodicy, a justification of God, intended to explain how the Lord in his Heaven could possibly create a world with so much evil in it as we encounter at every turn. At the risk of gross oversimplification, it means that whatever is created is no longer part of and can even become opposed to its creator. I have also written some things that might one day wind up in the school curriculum in formaldehyde for students yet unborn, but it is risk we all have to take.

Now let us return to that Harvard professor of Ukrainian literature now looking forward to retirement and whose shadow I saw cast in the article that began our discussion. He introduced himself in a lecture tour here two decades ago, when I thought that I would never be allowed to come because I decided that there were topics not worth a visa. He proclaimed to an audience starving for any contact with the world from which he came (and I could still feel it during my first visit here in 1990), repaying Caesar in his own coin, that such emigre nationalist writers like the late Yevhen Malaniuk and the New York school of Ukrainian poets, among whom I am also honored to have friends, were in general “not literature.” I could not hear the lecture, but I also have friends that did and I must rely on their memory. Indeed, some of my near and dear friends put off reading Malaniuk, a poet and thinker, who also wrote his share of the contemporary classics, if only his obituary of Maksym Rylsky, of whom he said that his group had to trash their Soviet brother in life, if only to save him from the wrath of the Caesar whose tribute had to be paid in order to save Rylsky was trying his best to. Only after Rylsky’s death could Malaniuk express the love and eternal respect he and his generation in emigration retained for a man whose dilemmas they knew all too well.

Scholars as well as poets live through complicated times that present their own moral dilemmas. Why attack the late Oles Honchar for his Standard Bearers? Yes, it had its moments of praise of the naive young boys who fought for the fatherland and Stalin. He was among them. Should Ukraine write off from its history the whole generation of men who were thrown out of their homeland and watched their closest friends die as they slogged their way from Stalingrad, Leningrad, and Moscow all the way to Berlin and Prague? For all the horrors of Stalinism, did they not also liberate the Nazi death camps and free humanity from one of the two truly evil systems of the twentieth century? And Honchar did everything he could to preserve what he could of Ukrainian culture. If you don’t like Standard Bearers, you can always replace with his Cathedral, which after the 1972 Shcherbytsky-Fedorchuk General Pogrom of the Ukrainian intelligentsia courageously laid the cornerstone to give those who want to build the Ukraine that is still under construction on the basis of its own extremely complicated history. Honchar does not deserve to be relegated to the category of forgotten ancestors, and the generation that preceded him will only welcome his presence among them once they are restored from the oblivion to which an evil system consigned them. There is plenty of other to be expunged.

I met the late Oles’ Terentiyovych only once, as the literary titan who kindly invited me to his dacha for dinner and as the sickly but wise old man with whom I had an unforgettable conversation. Among other things, he told me that he had written his Standard Bearers because he wanted to rescue Ukrainians from the taint of wartime collaboration, a taint that he knew full well had been unfairly cast upon his cohorts on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I also know from my wife and others, who also run the risk of pedagogical formaldehyde, that in 1986, when I still did not dream of every being allowed admission to the country I was studying from abroad, how at a historic plenum of the Ukrainian Union of Writers Honchar stood at the rostrum in the presence of KPU First Secretary Volodymyr Shcherbytsky and head of state Valentyna Shevchenko. In an act of some courage, he began to explain what the newly proclaimed policy of glasnost meant in terms of all that had been expunged from the Ukrainian nation’s history, but not its memory.

I was not there. Like a certain ancient Greek named Thucydydes, who invented the art and science of history, here I can rely only on the memories of those who were where I was unable to be, but his work has stood the test of time rather well. I have also delved into the art of oral history in the form of a three-volume collection on Holodomor Manmade Famine, which the late, great Honchar told me read like a black Iliad of the Ukrainian people. In the West oral history is a recognized methodology and memoirs are used as a historical source, except perhaps in the field of study that embraces this part of the world. While those who were there at that moment in 1986 are still very much alive and well, why not organize a contest of describing a truly heroic moment they shared on the road to the rebirth of a Ukraine that is still in the process of becoming? Alas, I have nothing to offer as a prize but that same jar of formaldehyde.

Scholars and writers, indeed all of us who live in this imperfect world, are faced with choices in difficult times. In my generation of those in my discipline it was how much to compromise for that coveted visa to the land of Soviets or whether to do something that was forbidden and risk the lifetime of self-accusation inevitable for someone who could never see what he sought to know about. Those slightly older than me faced the choice of whether to write what was called a “locomotive” to earn the right to write what was really important to get through the censor or lose irreplaceable years behind the barbed wire and in internal exile. Those of us from the West risked only a comparative trifle in terms of career advancement, and I ended up gaining far more from my decade in Ukraine that I might have lost by not working in some American university where virtually nobody had heard of the country I have attempted to understand. I thank the stars that there is a God in Heaven to judge all of us who faced murky choices in the moral quicksand we all confronted in one way or another. I cannot judge those were here, but I have some standing to judge those who sacrificed their integrity to come here. Thank God, they will stand before a judge higher than I.

But the barbs leveled at Honchar still leave a bad taste in my mouth. It reminds me of the movement in contemporary America to ban Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from school libraries because it contains a character called Nigger Joe, a Black slave who represents one of the most human figures in all American literature. The word nigger has, of course, become politically incorrect for perfectly good reasons, but the children have all heard it in a far worse context than this classic gives it. Banning it completely seems to me as silly as denying the existence of sex until youthful virility demonstrates that not only do people cause accidents but sexual accidents cause people, and it might well be better for the young to be exposed to the pitfalls before they fall into the pit with all the consequences arising from a false step in the dark. In the Victorian age an English published named Bowdler endeavored to protect the young against deleterious influences by publishing an edition of Shakespeare with all the morally questionable passages cut or modified to fit the sensibilities of his day. Do we really want to bowdlerize Ukrainian literature?

I somehow doubt that the Good Lord will judge harshly those who were brought up to be militant atheists and soldiers of the Party because they had to be but then took the first opportunity to take as moral a stance as they could. I do not agree that literature can be seen outside the historical context of those who shaped it. In this world the wheel of good and evil, of what needs to be remembered and what is better forgotten, will continue to turn as it climbs its way to somewhere over the hill we ourselves are denied the privilege of seeing. Khvyliovyi and his generation did what they could, Honchar and his did likewise, as did that of Drach and Pavlychko, and the later generation that achieved prominence in the 1980s did the same. Like it or not, my younger friends are on the same train where we all embark and depart at different destinations. And my friends of the Bu- Ba-Bu group should make up part of the welcoming party.