Can the Shevchenko Prize Be Saved?

After Yuri Andrukhovych’s withdrawal of his nomination and resignation from the awards committee of Valery Shevchuk and Yuri Illienko, it became clear that what is supposed to be this country’s highest award for intellectual and cultural attainment is in deep trouble. Actually the grumbling began a couple of years ago when the prize was awarded posthumously to Vasyl Stus, everyone’s favorite dead dissident poet, and a whole team of authors from a subsection of the Academy of Science’s Institute of Literature headed by Vitaly Donchyk for a two volume history of Ukrainian literature.

Nobody doubts that Stus deserved the prize and a good deal more. But if there is an afterlife, he probably has enough laurels already, and if there isn’t, the prize probably won’t do him much good. The trouble with necrophilia is that the recipient doesn’t get anything out of it.

The Donchyk team’s award raised eyebrows in that a whole team of research associates from the Academy of Sciences whom nobody had ever heard of were now laureates of once coveted laurels. «They devalued my Shevchenko Prize,» one former laureate told me then. Quite a change from the days when the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia rejoiced in Lina Kostenko’s award for Marusia Churai. She could spit in the face of a Party boss in public, and even they couldn’t resist the sheer force of her talent. The prize meant something then.

Actually the problem has now got much deeper and is one of the rift between the national intelligentsia and the state and within the intelligentsia itself between those who control official assets and those who don’t. In a time of transition there are always winners and losers, but in independent Ukraine one of the biggest losers has been the intelligentsia. Intellectual property seems to have lost all value.

The problem with the Shevchenko Prize is the deeper problem of those it is supposed to honor, the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Can anyone really be surprised that there are representatives of this group who think it hard to find anything to celebrate? And this is an indication that the state is losing legitimacy of the eyes of those whom one would expect to be its foundation of legitimacy.