A Book on the Desk is not A Toshiba Recorder Under the Couch

Until recently I was sure that the clandestine agencies were really good only at their jobs, like spreading carefully engineered disinformation, following (also openly) certain individuals, planting bugs, providing “protection,” opening letters, and eavesdropping, even on the presidential premises.

No, I am not even for a moment doubting the intellectual virtues of all those gentlemen sitting in their secure offices and planning cloak-and-dagger games. In fact, I know that quite a few of them and their men are with fantastically high IQs.

Be it as it may, I was genuinely surprised to receive a present the other day, a tourist guide titled Bukovyna: Singular Places of Interest. I opened it and read something that made me gasp. Was it possible? But there it was in black and white. The book had been approved by the SBU in Chernivtsi oblast.

Well, on second thought, I told myself that Europe had always kept a sensitive finger on the pulse of the times. Europe? Yes, because most of modern Bukovyna was part of Austria- Hungary in 1775-1918. And it was while part of that aging and ailing empire that the book Bukovyna was published in 1899. You will assume that it was produced by local history zealots. And you will be right, except that those local history experts were officers of the local gendarmerie. The foreword, written by gendarmerie CO Colonel Georg von Katargi, reads that “the officers and men, being convinced that this work will remain a memento... worked diligently, collecting and processing the required material, thus proving that there is much the department can do even in an unfamiliar field of endeavor.”

Their contemporary counterparts in Bukovyna must be given credit; they handled that huge corpus of data — geography, history, culture, architecture, economy, personae, and photo illustrations — quite effectively. Except perhaps the body of the text; it should be more modern and dynamic. But that is a matter of taste, of course.

In any case, the book is interesting to read and it makes a good birthday present. The more so that every page contains a parallel text in English. I don’t know if anyone will question the expedience of books being published by agencies that are not directly or even otherwise involved in or with the publishing business. It all depends, you know.

Despite all our official enthusiasm about this business growing, soon to flourish in Ukraine, I have my sad doubts. Can we really feel proud about a print run of 1,000 in a country still inhabited by 48,000,000? It is a big country and its people often have to make do with large circulation imported second-hand books. Why?

Is it just because book-publishing is not a segment of a problem known as the political situation in Ukraine?

Seriously, perhaps Volodymyr Radchenko & Co. ought to challenge Ivan Chyzh’s undertaking — and the whole parliament — and put together a library titled something like “Modern Ukraine Which Is Not Yet Dead, Although Begging for Daily Bread — and for Books to Read.” Because there are still people aware that every generation must leave some mementos behind and prove that they “can do much even in an unfamiliar field of endeavor.”

After all, you can’t expect to go down in history with a Toshiba cassette recorder under the couch.

But maybe you think differently.