Remembering Solomiya
Ukraine’s seasonal merrymaking was marred by one irreparable loss. On New Year’s Eve Solomiya Pavlychko perished in a tragic household accident. I had known her for a good decade, but I cannot say we were ever really close friends. Still, of all the fellow members of my forty-something generation, I loved her perhaps the most. I loved her for her efforts, whether in literary criticism, translation, advocacy of feminism, or whatever else she did. I still cannot quite believe that she is gone.
We met on the cusp of the 1990s at the annual Ukrainian studies conference at the University of Illinois. She began to explain Ukrainian feminism to me. I may not be a very good feminist, but at least I know the basics.
“Have you read Simone de Beauvoir?” I asked.
“You know, it’s Marxist and not really what we need in Ukraine.”
“Read Simone de Beauvoir,” I insisted.
She did, and thanks primarily to her there is now an excellent translation of The Second Sex in Ukrainian, a welcome addition to the discussion of an issue, to which this country is yet to be adequately sensitized. Its seems that wherever she put her finger, it left a mark that endures.
In a country crippled by a discourse of malapropisms, she knew what words meant both here and abroad. In fact, she was a one- woman industry, an intellectual powerhouse, Ukraine’s youngest doctor of sciences (philology), publisher (Osnovy), professor (my colleague at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy), and women’s tribune (Gender Studies Center). I cannot say that I loved everything she did. For example, her attempt to give Lady Chatterly’s Lover a working-class accent without resorting to surzhyk, which is how the local working class really talks, did not seem to me to have quite come off. But that does not really matter. What matters is that it seemed no job was too big for her, no problem too thorny for her to attempt to solve, and no terror too fearsome for her to face.
At times I despair that it is already late for my generation. We seem so few: Mykola Riabchuk, Ihor Rymaruk, Oksana Zabuzhko, Volodymyr Morynets, Yevhen Bystrytsky, and a handful of others. We are all old friends. We know we can quarrel in print, but we also know that the reader will get something out of both sides of the argument. How lonely we will all be without Solomiya! All deaths may be senseless, but this one was so particularly meaningless, so untimely and so painful. We share our grief not only with those who were near and dear to her. Ours is the grief of an entire generation. We feel a vacuum that nothing can fill, an empty space where once there was such a generator of ideas. We are all the richer for her having been among us and all the poorer for her passing.
