Myron PETROVSKY: “As soon as it became possible not to lie Soviet style, they immediately, without pause, began to lie in a different way”

“Mr. Petrovsky, one of the most traditional and simultaneously indispensable questions is about your creative work.”

“When I am asked ‘Tell us about your creative work,’ I startle and nervously look around. For creative work is what Shakespeare, Schiller, and Pushkin did. What I do is just work.”

“Do you go to a certain place to work?”

“No, I’ve been working at my own desk since 1959. I never prepared myself for a lifestyle like this. I would jerk at all the doors, trying to socialize, but all the doors but this one were shut. Yet, I am glad I thus managed to avoid all kinds of Soviet outrages. We had to pay for any kind of choice. I paid for mine with obscurity and total ostracism from all structures of the old and present-day regimes, i.e., by being an outsider. I belong to no league, nor do I have a scholarly degree or title. I have nothing to write on my visiting card besides my name, address, and home telephone number. I have to cherish what I have: my name, address, and phone number.

A JOKE IS THE ATTITUDE OF THE DUMB MASSES TO THE OFFICIAL MEGAPHONE

“For many years, I have been mostly interested in the basic mass culture, including kitsch, which I study from various sources and daily observe in Kyiv. A cavalier attitude to these fringe spheres of urban culture, which involves a considerable part of city dwellers, is totally unfounded. I deal with literature for children, circus, romance, cabaret, jokes, etc.

“The current urban folklore rests precisely on such things as jokes, with all other folklore genres being either exhausted or close to exhaustion. It is not, pardon me, Soviet power but the general civilization process that is to blame. I have been looking closely at the genre of jokes; it seems to me an outstanding phenomenon. If all Soviet period published sources, but not jokes, had reached us, we would now know much less than if the jokes, but not the written sources, had vanished. The joke’s informative capabilities and its modeling capacities are impressive: it can embrace a phenomenon with an extreme depth and width by means of a dozen words. There is hardly a contemporary of ours who does not listen to or tells jokes. Far from all have read Joyce, but all are connected with jokes. Homo anectoticus is the sign of our times. But I never noticed our scholars — sociologists, students of culture, and political scientists — paying serious attention to and dealing with the genre of jokes. A mysterious discipline, sometimes referred to as people studies, can draw from a joke so many things that cannot be found from other sources.”

“In other words, you think that the genre of joke is a well- pronounced symptom of our society’s condition?”

“Without doubt. Through the typology of a joke, we can understand the special features of mass consciousness, modern mythology, mass sociology, and political science — not so primitive, by the way. A joke is a small Apocrypha, if we mean by this an unofficial myth which runs counter to the canons of official lies. You can see from jokes the way people lied in every historical period. A joke exposes official lies, showing their mindlessness and proving the absurdity of existence in the conditions of lies. So I think joke, as a piece of art, has undoubted advantages over fiction. It can also be described as the attitude of dumb masses to the official megaphone, as an attempt to restore a certain balance in the world by suppressing the roars of monumental lies with a whisper of the truth. No matter where — in a street underpass, in the kitchen, or during a party — a joke is told, it is the mechanism of restoring the social organism’s spiritual health.

“That the joke has a tremendous psycho-therapeutic effect has been proved by a simple observation. If you turned to psychiatric publications and statistics with the question ‘What subjects most often occur in clinic patients’ reveries?’ the answer would be politics and sex. All reveries of these poor things, who got a terrible social trauma, are filled with these two problems. The genre of joke is also almost fully crammed with the same two issues. What is more, even the percentages almost coincide. Laughing over a joke, our contemporary protects himself from a respective clinic. This is a variety of socio-psychiatric insurance. The joke is also an anti-reverie, a fact and factor of a nation’s spiritual health.

“I hoped very much that when Soviet censorship collapsed, people would be bursting to speak the truth to each other. I was greatly mistaken. As soon as it became possible not to lie, Soviet style, people immediately, without a pause, began to lie in a different way. What is more, this was often done by the same characters. This was a horrible trauma for me, from which I am still trying to recover.”

“But now, according to my observations, the political joke is dying out.”

“The point is the multifaceted nature of the publicly expressed political opinions makes a joke unnecessary and even out of place in this field. Any newspaper is already performing this exposing function in respect of its opponent. People are so tired of politics that they have developed a fatigue-related indifference, while social and everyday-life troubles require constant strain. This is why the political joke is lagging behind, as if it is resting and waiting for its time to come. But as soon as the information flow displays excessive propaganda, artful hush-up or biased lies (and when are lies unbiased?), the political joke is out and about.

“If political jokes were lined up chronologically, this would bring about a quaint, if instructive, picture. It would turn out that, as social insecurity or hardships were on the rise, so was urban joke creation. The bloody 1930s, the war, the years 1949-1953, the so-called thaw, and, finally, Chornobyl plus perestroika gave a powerful impetus to joke creation. Awful as it is to remember, the Chornobyl disaster occurred under the outbursts of almost hysterical laughter. Perestroika began under the sign of Chornobyl, a vision of death at the gate to a new life.”

“There is no upsurge now?”

“Now the joke seems to be on a smooth background level. I think this can be put down not least to the informational circumstances and the conditions in which the joke exists. The point is the joke came up from the underground in the late 1980s and is now a publishable genre. Earlier it opposed the printed word as a whole, but now it partially works together with it, still reserving the right to a free, self-contained, existence. Don’t forget that now the off- the-cuff joke is in vogue, which changes the genre’s function. For this reason, the joke has lost something — not in wittiness, of course, but in themes and subjects. It may seem to be able to exist, like a deep- sea fish, only under pressure, but, paradoxically, it does not go flat on the shore and continues to perform its functions. The joke itself pumps in the pressure lacking.

“As you have understood, I am not a person from a joke-creating medium who lives by fresh jokes as his informational element. Rather, I am an observer who is nevertheless ready to compose an ode to the joke. What I am doing is part of the urban fringe culture. If, God willing, I manage to complete this cycle of work, I will feel I have created at least a semblance of intellectual order at a certain stage of world cognition in order to put myself a bit closer to harmonious existence. My wife knows I will never sit at the desk before I sweep the floor in the room. Upon arriving home, she never asks whether I worked but only looks at the floor. The main idea of my efforts is to overcome chaos in the closest area of the world. I think the very phenomenon of culture implies this natural or God-inspired passion: to put things in order, a human and humane order.”

THE PARADOX IS THAT ENGLISH IS NOW THE LANGUAGE MOST IN VOGUE IN KYIV

“There is an opinion that our young state often fails due to its paucity of urban culture. In this country, the latter is not an organic and historical culture. Hence the state is in fact run by people of non-urban culture. What does in this connection mean the figure of a city resident as the bearer of certain societal notions?”

“Much to my regret, a man on the fringe is the most typical city dweller. I use this expression not as a curse word, not as an attempt to stigmatize a person of different cultural attitudes. All I do is state the fact. Kyiv has a population of at least three million: this is a large figure even in our times, when the whole world is experiencing rapid urbanization. Note that about two- thirds of these three million Kyivans are first-generation urban residents. Their social and moral orientation is somewhat off-balance. When a Soviet Ukrainian peasant settled in a city, he first tried to switch over to a language he thought was Russian, although it never really was. The reason is Russian was the official and prestigious language, so people thought that if they took it up they would come closer to all-imperial values and thus elevate their social status. But the only result of these efforts was a terrible spread of surzhyk (pidgin Russo-Ukrainian). The etymology of this word is very instructive: the Russian language has the already-inactive prefix ‘su’ which means something in the middle, intermediate (sumerki (‘dusk’) is neither day nor night, suglinok is ‘kind of’ clay). So surzhyk is the mixture of rzhy (genitive case of rozh — ‘rye’) and the seeds of wild cereals, i.e., something absolutely inedible. The etymology clears up many things: a mixture of related languages, where each of them has lost itself, comes up as something absolutely without culture.

“In Soviet times, surzhyk became a quasi-language. Now that Ukrainian has become an official and prestigious language, many have begun to switch over to it or, to be more exact, to what they think is the Ukrainian language. As a result, surzhyk is gaining strength, but this time from the other side. As a native speaker of both languages, I feel doubly unhappy because of this. I do not mean Verkhovna Rada Deputies who would do good to sign up for an adult literacy course, the point is even radio and television announcers speak this way. Thank God, these two languages have every chance for cultural existence and coexistence. But surzhyk is like a blend of soap and ice-cream: you can neither eat it nor wash your face with it.

“Once, in the early eighties, I was invited to a Kyiv school to talk with teachers and pupils about the culture of speech. This is a great philological problem on which hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written. What could I say about it in forty minutes? I understood that this conversation required only one (a necessary and sufficient quantity) thought. I told my listeners, senior schoolchildren and teachers, approximately this.

“We live in Kyiv in bilingual conditions. Whether or not you like it, this is the reality to reckon with. What do we have to do to preserve our Russian in these conditions? To learn Ukrainian painstakingly and with love. And what do we have to do to preserve our Ukrainian language? Likewise, to learn Russian painstakingly and with love.

“The pupils got my point: I judge it by the questions they asked and recommendations they sought from me. But the Soviet teachers acted the like were supposed to, so I was soon invited to a well-known and hard-to-forget institution. And Captain Ivanov (for some mysterious reason, they all were Ivanovs and captains) got down to grilling me about why I, a Jew, had suddenly become a Ukrainian nationalist. I sincerely tried to explain something to him; then he made a U-turn and began to ask me why I was a Russian nationalist. This farce ended about three hours later, when the sweaty captain asked me to help the investigation and tell them myself which nationalism I professed.

“Naturally, now I can tell this with laughter without risking anything. But is it any good, for, as before, these two languages are taught in schools by people who have a poor command of them? Meanwhile, I can still respond to the bilingual challenge only the way I did at that time. The paradox of today’s urban life is that English is now the language most in vogue in Kyiv. And there already is an urban stratum that has a better command of English than of the mother tongue. My compatriots find alien the idea that the native language should be learned as well as a foreign one. How beautifully we would be writing and speaking both Russian and Ukrainian if we spent at least a fraction of the efforts we spend for learning English on improving the command of our two languages! But please do not think I am against good teaching of English.”

WE TREAT SYMBOLS AND SIGNS, IN CONTRAST TO ESSENCES, WITH AWE

“Don’t you think that today both the rural and urban people of Ukraine live on the fringe of world culture?”

“The cultural marginality of a today’s Kyivan is determined, to a large extent, by his/her intermediate location between the Russian and Ukrainian, urban and rural, cultures. The surzhyk we talked about can also be regarded as the linguistic model of this situation. The city and the countryside represent so different cultural entities that the latter are always juxtaposed against each other. Most often, this occurs in social subjects. But if the question is about all-national culture, it has always (given the very relative status of this ‘always’) consisted in the interaction of these two components. An ethnically pure medium was, as a rule, represented by the countryside. The city was always multilingual. It is not accidental that the most famous myth about ‘language mixture’ is associated with Babel, a big city. But I think the greatest problem is not in the linguistic but in the socio-ethnic sphere. Coming to a city, yesterday’s rural dweller sees that life here is somewhat different, and the city dwellers’ mentality is also different. The brand-new city dweller interprets this difference as nothing in particular. He/she makes a groundless conclusion: if people do not live here by rural rules and traditions, this means they live without any rules and traditions. So he/she takes up, quite unconsciously again, a rule-free life and, hence, gets demoralized. This is the prime reason for catastrophe.

“The masses that flow, for the first time, into urban structures become demoralized to a staggering and highly dangerous extent. The more so that this medium produces more and more people who enter public life and power structures. They also form the new bourgeoisie, those who will rule the public roost tomorrow (and who partially do so even today). Let me just give an example, without trying to exaggerate the danger: for many years most policemen have been recruited from among country boys. To what extent can this peasant with a whistle, to use a witty phrase of Yuri Olesha, be the protector of the citizen, of a person alien to him by the way of life and moral guidelines? He has no internal stimulus for this. Nor has he an external stimulus, either. He is paid ridiculously low for his hard and dangerous work, so he can be easily bribed into serving the new rich. Will he, who protected Soviet Party bosses yesterday, defend Mafia business people today?

“In a word, there is no question of which, urban or rural, culture, is better. There is a question of transferring from one culture to another.

“As to a common city resident, he needs protection as never before. As a poor person, he receives from all sides news about growing crime, contract and spontaneous murders. Under Soviet power, the monopoly right to kill belonged to the state which made willing and generous use of it. The state was simply the main criminal. The collapse of Soviet statehood led to the restoration of private property and the privatization of the right to kill and, in general, to commit crime. Judging by the results, privatization in this field has been successful. Why? Perhaps because it came off spontaneously and without bureaucratic red tape?”

“But still, is there anything common in the urban and rural cultures? For even though juxtaposing them, we bind them with the same word, culture?”

“I believe there are more common than differing things. Similarity occurs even in prejudices. It catches my eye that my compatriots confuse, for some mysterious reason, the sign and the meaning, the symbols and the essences. We have acquired a national emblem, anthem, and flag of our own, i.e., the symbols of our statehood, while such things as economic, political, and social power are being treated as something second-rate.

“Downtown Kyiv witnesses the accelerated, Soviet-style shock- work reconstruction of old structures. Some of the items being restored are infinitely dear to me. Take, e.g., St. Michael’s Golden- Domed Cathedral: I cannot imagine Kyiv and myself without it. However, this construction is not a top priority, it could have waited a bit. Yet, it started, for it is the question of a symbol, and we treat symbols, in contrast to essences, with awe.

“The city has been swept by a high wave of street renaming, which raise its status (of course, in terms of verbal symbols). As my colleague Vadym Skurativsky observed, technical schools have proclaimed themselves colleges, institutes have become universities, and universities are now academies so now there is only one institute left in the city: that of beauty and hygiene. However, the latter, too, seems to be bearing now a more prestigious name. Of course, as a poet said, a nice name is a high honor, but has the sense changed even a little? Has it improved the quality of teaching, and the plight of those who learn and teach? I see behind this renaming extravaganza a certain vestige of mythological thinking, an almost sorcery-like belief that if we give a sick person a different name, we will get a different, of course healthy, human being.

“No doubt, culture also needs symbols. But isn’t it time we took care of the essence? And the essence is that our culture (and all of us in general) has no other greater problem than the economy. All our considerations and debates inevitably boil down to this. For it is nonsense when the state does not pay salaries to teachers and doctors, but still wants to levy taxes on this unpaid remuneration. This will just not do. It is a subject for a new joke. According to the Russian humorist Taffy, it is fun to listen to and tell jokes, but it is intolerable to live inside the joke.”