Remember about dignity

Marking a significant day in the life of a person I deeply respect, who is very dear to me and whose supporting shoulder I have felt throughout my creative activity, I would like to offer to The Day‘s readers a collection of his aphorisms. For a long time now I have wanted to single out this mini-genre in his works. Pithiness is Sverstiuk’s inherent trait — it is his natural ability to bind thoughts in aphoristic nodes.

Ivan Koshelivets, well-known diaspora literary critic and publisher, described Sverstiuk as a “critic by calling” and “always separate” to underline the clarity, inviolability, and existential self-identity of his life and publicistic position. “Sverstiuk’s figurative language,” Koshelivets wrote, “has a suggestive power to place the reader in the standpoint of the author.” This is one of the secrets behind the influence that his publicistic-meditative essays have upon the reader, whenever they were written — in the “thaw period” in the 1960s or today, in the complicated atmosphere of “democracy’s saturnalia.”

On moral values he says: “where there is no ethic hierarchy there cannot be either selection or healthy conditions for decision makers to emerge.”

Spirituality, honesty, patriotism, and dignity — these concepts have been overused in speech, devalued, and damped. And yet they still make their way through the thick of imitations, sometimes flashing the picture of our ethic ruins. Sverstiuk is one of those who never get tired of reminding us of moral virtues and high purposes, stubbornly insisting that his efforts are not in vain.

At the height of the new parliamentary clownery a newpaper published his article on dignity of all things. His intelligent face with a seal of thoughtfulness, low unhurried voice, and his desperate efforts to reach out to people’s consciousness all sound as an alarm bell proclaiming both a disaster and a hope.

“Contrary to patriotism, dignity is organic and hidden deep inside. Patriotism can be faked, turned inside out, demonstrated, and, after all, changed.

“Society values not the rich, successful, certified, or high-ranking but those whose wealth and success are secured by their trustworthy, unchangeable personal dignity.”