Myroslav POPOVYCH: "Disaster is not when there is evil from above... But when there is no difference between good and evil"

Myroslav Popovych is one of the few intellectuals talking with whom calms one's heart throbbing with the arrhythmia of cruel questions, which is unfortunately now our standard rhythm. He practices the philosophy of heart, so important to Ukrainian culture. He has turned into a model of the Ukrainian intellectual, something we have needed so badly over the past few years, perhaps because the bourgeois values of a stable and tolerant lifestyle seemed to us a cure-all when faced with cataclysms. At present, a humanitarian disaster is not a hair-raising prognosis counterbalanced by well-wishing calls for heeding "the voice of the intellectuals." It is a bitter reality we are faced with and which we have to resist as best we can, overcoming fears of the future paralysis of our society. Thus we turned to Mr. Popovych with the recurrent "accursed" question about the impact of such daily tranquil lifestyle on national culture and whether intellectuality is threatened with extinction.

The Day: Academician Popovych, we have lived through the period of heated debates about the intelligentsia, its role in the life of the nation, and its relationship with the existing regime. Now the question is whether the intelligentsia is necessary for its own sake.

M. P.: Among ourselves and at home this is all we talk about, but all our activity come to naught, for in reality no one needs us. It would be a sin for me to berate those in power, especially after they promised good pensions when celebrating the National Academy's anniversary (if they pay them at all). But such meetings, are not the point. The state need not make us any presents but only make it possible for us to live and work. We don't need their love. We know the dangers of being the master's pet. All we need is for them to see to it that we have a proper cultural environment.

The state is the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. One need not love the state. I love culture and I have treated it as the most precious treasure all my life. Why should I love the housing department or militia? They are paid to protect me. The state should serve culture. We wanted our own state so much, but it cannot provide more than it can provide. It is a rigid structure and has to set up institutions in which people can live with confidence. In fact, all our economic hardships are not because we have no institutions capable of securing a viable economy existing independently of the state. We started loving the economy through the lips of the state and the result is that we have powerful clans made up of people with only one advantage: they can allow, forbid, and take money for this unlawful prerogative. We need the state not to pray for but to give us the chance to live in peace.

The Day: Could this be just another myth about Mother-Ukraine that will one day foster a flourishing culture?

M. P.: Our public and political life is such that by chopping off pieces, getting culturally isolated, we can achieve nothing. Demythologization has already taken place, and things changed so fast that it begot cynicism, including a cynical attitude toward the state. Thank God we harbor no dreams of military glory, and all attempts to romanticize the tragic bloody pages from our history (as was the case with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) have failed. Neither myth-making nor demythologization can be successful today. Something real has to be done.

The Day: You say real. Does this mean that we should start fighting? The Yugoslav conflict is a very harsh reality, a war started by people doing real things.

M. P.: I think that no ethnic or religious wars are fought for a just cause. NATO's military approach to the conflict will achieve nothing, even though they are resolved to crush what is left of the dictatorships that remain in this century. This war is a return to old methods of solving problems. Sharpening the crisis only strengthens Milosevic's position. The politicians' standards of conduct has led to a dead end, because they can't go back on their word and the saber-rattling in Verkhovna Rada is evidence that the Left is prepared to concede everything possible to Russia.

The Day: What about all those calls for harmony, understanding, and unity? Another myth?

M. P.: I do not doubt for a moment that a minimum of harmony is necessary in society. It would be even worse if we started thinking that our hatred is someone else's doing. This would mean another witch-hunt. None of those claiming any important posts has the moral right to shout "get him!" Not for any social, ethnic, or religious reasons. And what sort of harmony do we mean? Hryhory Yavlinsky said once let us make our tax returns so simple they could be filled out in five minutes. Let us institute a 10% individual and 20% corporate. Now that's harmony.

Today there are three social institutions which now determine what it means to be European: market economy, parliamentary pluralistic democracy, and national statehood. Let's start from here and then go into detail. Harmony is not achieved by any congresses, agreements, or political symbolism. It is possible only when human rights are really defended.

The Day: How much is the Ukrainian political landscape shaped by religious issues?

M. P.: I am deeply convinced that religion is a strictly personal matter. I must not admit before society whom I love. Once I notice that some religious symbols or other are being imposed, I stop trusting such people, once and for all. And quite honestly, I loath that Orthodox ideology being fed us on Ukrainian Channel One. The Ukrainian state is secular. It is interesting to note that in the United States, where 90% of the people actively practices religion, teaching any confession in school would be unthinkable. I know of a case when a student filed a complaint in the court just because there was an image of Jesus Christ greeting him at the school lobby every day. He was not Christian and he took offense. The whole court upheld his complaint. Ukraine is a state where all confessions must be equally respected and it must see to it that none of the churches intrudes into politics, because this is immoral. Atheistic propaganda, on the other hand, often ruins a person's moral foundations. However, I disagree with certain Christian neophytes who insist that morality is impossible without faith. My parents were schoolteachers, from that generation of educators which is still remembered with gratitude. They were not believers, yet no one could accuse them of immorality. A person must be judged according to his ability to show solidarity with other people.

The Day: But now there is so much confusion, anxiety, and disunity. What kind of idea could help our people gain mutual solidarity between rich and poor, the intelligentsia and the state?

M. P.: It would be abnormal, for example, if the intelligentsia started advertising the "national idea" on billboards. There are people who have never said a single word in Russian in their lives, and I respect them, but I speak Russian in the street, because I seek ways to understanding other than through language. I know from sociology that most people living in Ukraine are Social Democratic in terms of their mentality and moral orientation. Try to talk to them about a "bright capitalist future" and everybody will start laughing. I know that capitalism is a much better system, with all its amenities, but I do not want to live in that world, because I cannot be indifferent to others' sufferings. And I will teach my children to struggle so one and all can live well. The Soviet heritage which, regrettably, has acquired such ugly features in our daily and political life, in reality has sound roots. Socialism has become an indecent notion, but one ought to remember that Christianity is among the sources of socialism. Alas, this force never begot an appropriate political structure here.

WE HAVE THROWN OUT
THE LEGEND OF THE GRAND INQUISITOR AND HOPE
FOR THE GRAND INVESTOR

The Day: Are there any traditions in our culture rooted in Christian social values?

M. P.: Yes, starting with the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood of which Taras Shevchenko was a member. To be precise, its membership included Berdiayev, Bulgakov, and Zenkivsky, all Kyivites and unorthodox Christians, carriers of such great values as to go down in Russian and European history. I would also say that Vernadsky also favored that trend (the man was neither mystic nor Christian, just a scientist) relating to "cosmism." And I know people determined to develop it even now.

The Day: Are there many people really willing to rely on the Ukrainian tradition?

M. P.: No, mainly because mass consciousness accepts Ukrainian tradition as traditional populism associated with a peasant wearing a homespun coat. Of late, the trend has been associated with modernism, and early twentieth century avant-gardists, but we can't go further than Les Kurbas. And I would never leave out of Ukrainian tradition Nikolai Gogol, Count Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoi, or Aleksandr Pushkin for that matter. Look at our school curricula. So-called Ukrainian studies have crowded out everything else, with stories about Ukrainian village life, superstitions, and gossip. What are they doing with our children? Ukraine has always had a broad cultural space. There are thousands of obscure quotations. How do you expect one to interpret Mykola Ge's works without knowing Dostoyevsky or if his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor is edited out of his Brothers Karamazov? We have thrown out the Grand Inquisitor and hope for the Grand Investor. Is that all? Will this make us any happier? Will we become European this way?

The Day: How much can the Ukrainian intelligentsia reconstitute itself, by using rigid analysis, viewing itself and seeing a most disgusting image? Do we now need a clinic of horrors, collective phobias, for example?

M. P.: Analytical programs and articles on these subjects are extremely popular and precisely for this reason. Within the discipline of sociology this overall state of depression that has developed over the past several years, connected with the ruin of the system of ethical and esthetic values. I believe that a government program is needed to overcome this condition, something like Roosevelt's program during America's Great Depression. We need politicians capable of coping with this problem who will take a certain positive stand to prevent an outbreak of public unrest, a revolt of the masses. Ukraine's culture and intelligentsia have survived because they have as Shevchenko said an ox-like patience. And woe unto us all when this patience runs out.

The Day: You have always stressed the woman's role in our culture.

M. P.: This is one of the sore spots of our life. Women's problems in Ukraine are more coarse and painful than in, say, North America. The equality of rights between men and women produced women working fields and wielding sledgehammers. This phenomenon is as ugly as the struggle for equality. Incidentally, this is also one of the weakest points in the programs of our various political parties - and European Social Democrats point to the fact; women's issues are one of their top priorities. Indeed, Ukrainian women play a markedly unimportant role in our politics. Except Natalia Vitrenko, but I do not consider her a politician.

I don't know whether it would make sense to create women's military or police units, I wouldn't make this some kind of cult. But a society without a cult of love, of the Virgin, being indifferent to bad mothers, cannot be whole. We have to feel a flutter in our hearts, at least once in while. So long as we cultivate cynicism toward women - and so long as women put up with it, all those sly grins on teenagers' faces - we will remain an inferior nation.

This cynicism comes to us from cheap films and pulp novels, and it can have consequences much more destructive than we now care to think. I wouldn't want to be regarded as retrograde, but I have a feeling that we are following a simplistic course. We think that if we tell our children the facts of life and how to use contraceptives we will solve all their inferiority problems for them.

The Day: Do you think that modern problems could be solved using the simplification-complication dilemma?

M. P.: Water seeks the easiest route to flow and our society, likewise, is trying to find the simplest solutions to its problems. If we seek to become like the West following simple routes we will beget Shvonders and Sharikovs with dog's hearts (an allusion to Bulgakov's Sobachye serdtse [Heart of a Dog], a scathing comic satire on pseudoscience and Soviet authorities - Transl.). We must pass through the stage of complicating world coordinates without losing the complexity of our spiritual organization, at least what is left of it. The problem is to move on and not only by borrowing someone else's standards and adjusting our indices to their patterns.

CULTURAL
ARCHETYPES

The Day: In Virgil's Aeneid we have banquets of heroes staged according to imperial protocol. In Kotliarevsky's burlesque of the same title this is replaced by Ukrainian landlord's typical carousels and instead of heroic deeds we read about heroic efforts to consume mind-boggling amounts of food and drink. Is there in Ukrainian culture another example of the cooking art in a truly aristocratic setting?

M. P.: In all cultures a banquet is academically associated with battle. A feast is like a battlefield. Vigil describes it in every detail and his style is heroic epic. Kotliarevsky portrays a period in Ukrainian culture when its upper story, so to speak, caved in and vanished. Starting in the seventeenth century, religious festivities crowded out secular culture. And I might as well remind you that Ivan Kotliarevsky was a major with a Ukrainian Cossack regiment, although the unit stood down before any engagement, and the officers and men got no pay. The period Kotliarevsky refers to was when something had to be put forth in contrast to the surrounding world. Apart from Kotliarevsky, other sparkling burlesques were written by Gogol, and of course Shelmenko-Denshchyk. It was thus an ordinary Ukrainian, khakhol, set foot in the refined European cultural realm. And Shelmenko was a very true-to-life portrayal of a sergeant that could well work as Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, smart, always with something up his sleeve, fooling everyone and ending with bulging Swiss bank accounts.

And the ground floor, as exemplified by Zaporozhzhian Cossack Patsiuk (the name means rat) with a beer belly and a huge bowl of traditional varenyky (dumplings) jumping out of the bowl into another one with sour cream, rolling, and then leaping into his open mouth. Now we can laugh at someone eating varenyky that way, meaning that we are now on the upper story looking down; we appreciate this humor, but we know that there other more important things.

The Day: This image of a politician that has gone up from the ground floor, all the way from mass culture to the top of the power pyramid, seems to have been well asserted nowadays. Don't you think it is a kind of revolt of the masses, the way Jose Ortega y Gasset warned us?

M. P.: Yes, but it is also evidence of our provinciality. You see, politics is a game, juggling with promises and realities. It takes real professionals. And even Ukrainian dissidents were not such professionals. Only now are we becoming aware of having failed to choose a platform or promises which would have entitled us to demand to know what has been actually accomplished. We chose people, individuals we liked, and the masses are fond of politicians they can see as like them. This is yet another lesson in democracy we have to learn the hard way, and the awful thing is that this society could fail to learn it and again elect unprofessional and incompetent "leaders" who don't keep their promises.

The Day: How do you see the role of the intelligentsia in this process? It has always acted as an intermediary between the ideology of power and mass consciousness.

M. P.: A musician trying to be President yields nothing. In Ukraine, there hasn't been even a brief period when those in power would listen to the intelligentsia. Unfortunately, our current politicians do not understand the important role that could be played by that middle intellectual stratum, all those teachers and doctors who are simply disappearing and often simply refuse to play any political role. For us the most important thing is not that we can't eat enough varenyky. People find it hard to survive not only because they are hungry. I lost this feeling in my junior year of university, but I have always wanted to eat. I had come to Kyiv wearing a pair of kersey boots and a shepherd's coat. My father never came back from the front and mother was a village schoolteacher. Yet I cannot even compare that situation to what we have today. We were charged with eager expectations, illusory ones as it turned out, but we all felt that life was just beginning for us. Now people feel as though their life is ending. Hence their pain. I don't use the subway, because I can't bear the sight of homeless begging children. Old people with outstretched hands is one thing, although not a single civilized society allows its elders to live in such downright misery, but when children go around all the time with their hand out, this is unforgivable.

And the same applies to my regular cooking appearances in the "Breakfast with 1+1" television show. Letters come from villages where the electricity has been cut off, and the hours they spend in front of the television is their window on the world. They want to share with that world, so they offer home recipes. This is hard to overestimate. Their recipes are very simple, because their authors have nothing special. And now and then we receive extraordinarily complicated ones, although it is obvious that the authors are by no means aristocrats. People still crave the good things in life. Despite it being hard to live, they want beauty.