• Українська
  • Русский
  • English
Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Two Jubilees

22 December, 1998 - 00:00

Two old acquaintances - I would feel presumptuous calling
them friends - have celebrated jubilees, George Shevelov and Yevhen Sverstiuk.
They are both, to paraphrase Churchill, modest men with little to be modest
about. Rather, one takes pride simply in knowing them.

I first met George Shevelov, now ninety, back in the early 1980s. I
had read his excellent collection of literary criticism, written under
his literary pen name of Yuri Sherekh, Not For Children, some years
earlier and knew that this was an intellect to be reckoned with. "Sherekh"
had been editor-in-chief of the journal Suchasnist, then the leading journal
of the Ukrainian Diaspora, and when it became known that Shevelov and Sherekh
were one and the same, the KGB, the fish-eyed director of the Soviet Ukrainian
Institute of Linguistics Bilodid, and Harvard Professor Roman Jakobson
all joined forces to discredit this courtly, gentle scholar as a supposed
Nazi collaborator, and to some extent they succeeded. Still, Shevelov's
reminiscences of his ordeal is written completely without rancor and precisely
for this reason is all the more touching and tragic. To see this frail
old man, bent over and slowly walking with his cane, one would never suspect
the continued youthful vigor of his mind seen, for example, in his writing
about Yuri Andrukhovych.

I first read Yevhen Sverstiuk's Clandestine Essays, excellently
translated into English by George Luckyj and a monument of Ukrainian dissident
thought, back in graduate school, but I met him personally only this decade.
Watching him run to catch a bus or helping him tie his tie on the road
(he still has not learned the secret of the four-in-hand), one would never
think he is now seventy. His picture in this issue somehow failed to capture
the perpetual, youthful gleam in his eyes. But if Shevelov lives in the
world of literature and language, Sverstiuk, while also a brilliant critic
and president of the Ukrainian Pen Club, has fixed his gaze on the eternal.
He is above all concerned with the Orthodox faith and man's relationship
with God. It is hard to believe that the Communists could have stolen twelve
years from the life of this gentle, erudite man. And to think there are
some who want to give them a second chance...

 

Rubric: