Two Jubilees

I first met George Shevelov, now ninety, back in the early 1980s. I had read his excellent collection of literary criticism, written under his literary pen name of Yuri Sherekh, Not For Children, some years earlier and knew that this was an intellect to be reckoned with. "Sherekh" had been editor-in-chief of the journal Suchasnist, then the leading journal of the Ukrainian Diaspora, and when it became known that Shevelov and Sherekh were one and the same, the KGB, the fish-eyed director of the Soviet Ukrainian Institute of Linguistics Bilodid, and Harvard Professor Roman Jakobson all joined forces to discredit this courtly, gentle scholar as a supposed Nazi collaborator, and to some extent they succeeded. Still, Shevelov's reminiscences of his ordeal is written completely without rancor and precisely for this reason is all the more touching and tragic. To see this frail old man, bent over and slowly walking with his cane, one would never suspect the continued youthful vigor of his mind seen, for example, in his writing about Yuri Andrukhovych.

I first read Yevhen Sverstiuk's Clandestine Essays, excellently translated into English by George Luckyj and a monument of Ukrainian dissident thought, back in graduate school, but I met him personally only this decade. Watching him run to catch a bus or helping him tie his tie on the road (he still has not learned the secret of the four-in-hand), one would never think he is now seventy. His picture in this issue somehow failed to capture the perpetual, youthful gleam in his eyes. But if Shevelov lives in the world of literature and language, Sverstiuk, while also a brilliant critic and president of the Ukrainian Pen Club, has fixed his gaze on the eternal. He is above all concerned with the Orthodox faith and man's relationship with God. It is hard to believe that the Communists could have stolen twelve years from the life of this gentle, erudite man. And to think there are some who want to give them a second chance...