Bohemian Rhapsody 

Maybe what I am about to say will be regarded by some as an encroachment on someone's regional patriotism, yet I will say it. Suppose we have in our society that dubious and suspicious stratum, known as bohemia, then I would say that Lviv is the most bohemian of all Ukrainian cities. This did not happen yesterday but a hundred or more years ago. I think that a number of different external objective factors were involved, a geographical one included. Lviv is considered to be most "Westernized," in terms of openness and borrowing ideas and things, adapting them and making them part of its authentic cultural heritage.

For a long time this specific feature of the city did not attract close attention. The latest to have noticed it and written a book about it was Petro Karmansky, leader of the young literati movement. His brilliant Ukrainian Bohemia was published in 1936. There is also Ihor Kalynets' We Pray to Distant Stars. What makes this story so dramatic is that the author wrote about Lviv's coffee and book shops, workshops and narrow streets forming labyrinths merging into a small secret world of freedom while outside this freedom, in the barred confines of the Lviv penitentiary in 1972, lies a year rich in arrests of Soviet intellectuals.

And now Neborak and his book. Latter-day testimony marking the end of the 1990s and "the first independent decade" in "independent Lviv." It is a summary (if you will pardon the cliche, as everybody seems to think that his book is a summary, this is a mark of the times, no doubt). And to quote further from the annotation, "an attempt to recreate the very creative atmosphere of Lviv using some fixation method or another."

Who are the characters of Return...? I think that there are only two. The time and the place. Or should I say Time and the City? Time, of course, when most fantastic dreams began to come true, when one and all felt charged with an indescribable enthusiasm and experienced unbearable disillusionment, accompanied by inflation, degradation and lumpenization; a time of petty machinations and (begging Mykola Riabchuk's pardon for paraphrasing him) a "jump from 30 to 40." And the City. It is very special, worthy of the times, located in a boundlessly ambivalent landscape composed of dumps and European facades, the City that constantly makes one aware of its presence and which is a quotation unto itself.

As it is, there are a lot of characters in the book. The author in the first place, at times identified as Kvadratobyk (i.e., Squared Taurus, according to the Oriental calendar and signs of the Zodiac), Memory (often playing him false, especially in little things like the correct spelling of English "Lead Dirigible" or the date of Brezhnev's death, but never faltering in important essentials), and Vision, his imagining, versions of the times and his city, meaning Ukraine and the rest of the world, all of us. And his portable tape recorder which seems to live a life of its own.

Also painters, musicians, poets (I will not mention names because each has long raised above and beyond any listing), legendary and funny, with their bees in their bonnets, whom another reviewer described as an "internal proletariat that smugly admits to leading a parasitic life." Wrong! That reviewer sees as parasitic what is actually a great deal of honest and hard work of human souls, done in a place where no one over the past independent decade has agreed to bow and scrape to the rich and the famous, painting for underworld lords, composing short verse for Tampax and Coca Cola commercials, so as to discard their "parasitic" status in our "hard-working" world.

I wish to address words of sincere gratitude to all of those carefree brothers and sisters living like birds in Leopolis.