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The second difficulty, however, is much more profound and may be regarded as uniquely Ukrainian. Unlike our western and northern neighbors, the Czechs, the Poles, and the Russians, we in Ukraine, in terms of literature, still remain for the Western mind an undiscovered country, one that is hardly distinguishable from Russia and in the past was prefixed by the dreadful article 'the' (the Ukraine), which implied that it was a geographic area incorporated into Russia both politically --which was true in part before the 1991 declaration of Ukrainian independence -- and culturally. The latter, however, has never been true. Sadly for me, such a misidentification proves that in the present-day world, cultural communication is much more dependent on political facilities -- on an army and navy -- than on mere cultural value. The fact that, in order to obtain an articulate voice that will be heard overseas, culture and literature have to be protected politically does not say much for present-day civilization. This explains why I cannot present you with representative names that would be as immediately identifiable as Czeslaw Milosz for the Poles or Joseph Brodsky for the Russians. Ukrainian poetry does not boast any Nobel Prize winners as yet, for reasons of literary politics. When Pavlo Tychyna and Mykola Bazhan, both remarkable world-class poets, were nominated for the Nobel Prize, the Soviet Authorities forced them to write letters of refusal. A third poet, Vasyl Stus, the greatest Ukrainian post-war poet, who was imprisoned under Brezhnev, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1985 but died in a prison camp that same year, six months after Gorbachev came to power and announced that there would be no political prisoners in the USSR. Thus, all three writers failed to break through the wall of alienation that has surrounded Ukrainian literature. One inevitable digression must first be made. The totalitarian regimes that ruled Eastern Europe until recently regarded poetry as a permanent source of trouble and a constant cause of concern -- for a rather subtle reason. In "The Captive Mind", Czeslaw Milosz astutely observed that once the mind of the average Eastern European has been trained to accept ideological fetters, then his resistance to the imposed set of values remains predominately emotional. In Milosz's words, "It survives, but it is beaten whenever it has to explain itself in rational terms. A man's subconscious or not-quite-conscious life is richer than his vocabulary. His opposition to this new philosophy of life is much like a tooth ache. Not only can he not express the pain in words, but he cannot even tell you which tooth is aching." One must not forget, however, that it is the very exploring of the not-quite-conscious life and the giving of names to formerly unnamed feelings that is the appropriate realm of poetry. Of all the arts, poetry is the pioneer of name-making. It always attempts to enter a prohibited zone. There is always a danger that it will help an audience to realize which tooth is aching. This is what made poetry dangerous by definition in the view of the regime. In the case of Ukraine, the 'danger' appeared to be twofold. Ukrainian poetry, which has always been our national pride, expressed the sensibility and emotional life of a people condemned to party doctrine to disappear as a separate national and cultural entity, to become more and more like the Russians, to be merged with them into a new community, the so-called "Soviet people," held together by the Russian language and Russian political traditions. So, from the time of Stalin until the advent of 'glasnost', the minutest hint of Ukrainian cultural uniqueness was vehemently attacked as 'bourgeois nationalism,' which was, under Soviet law, punishable -- under Stalin by a death sentence and under Brezhnev by the notorious formula of 'seven plus five' (seven years of prison camp and five years of exile). Thus, everything that poetry did could be designated as 'nationalism' (I mean, of course, genuine poetry, and not the sham one, adapted to the demands of socialist realism). Using an archaic ornamental language was nationalism. Playing with Ukrainian mythological themes was nationalism. Alluding to some figures and events in Ukrainian history was tantamount to an overt political challenge. When Volodymyr Sosiura, a rather mediocre poet who belonged to the Soviet political establishment, published a poem called 'Love Ukraine' in the early 1950's, he was subjected to a disgusting campaign of denunciation and was forced to write a letter of recantation. Here lay the crucial difference between the status of Ukrainian and Russian poets. Unlike our Russian counterparts, we were not allowed to love our country. But love for one's country is not just a slogan of romantic nationalism. In terms of poetry, it is perhaps the most crucial point, for it suggests that the poet considers his or her mother tongue, the one he or she writes in, to be the most valuable thing on earth. Without such an awareness, writing becomes a barren and worthless occupation, a playful game of indolent spirit, a meaningless gesticulation that only pretends to possess significance. Truly, you cannot write without feeling confident deep in your heart that your message will be heard, that the letter you put in a bottle and cast into the sea of time will one day, even if that day is very distant, reach its addressee. Now imagine that the very language in which you are writing has been officially condemned to become extinct in two or three generations, and you watch it being extinguished, being gradually replaced by another language in most spheres of culture. When I started to school in the late 1960's, Ukrainian had already been proclaimed an elective subject in Ukraine. Throughout my university years, writing a doctoral dissertation in any language other than Russian was officially prohibited (even if the dissertation was on the Ukrainian language itself!) This measure rapidly caused the heavy Russificaiton of undergraduate studies as well, and finally of the republic's entire intellectual life. Under the circumstances, it appeared to be literature that had assumed exclusive responsibility for both feeling and thinking in Ukrainian. That is why, for our authors, writing turned out to be either a trauma or an act of overt defiance. How can you otherwise write in an endangered language? How can writing a poem be reconciled with the knowledge that in a few generations your message will become illegible, that you cast your bottle not into the sea, but into the sand? How can you write without this assurance of time, unless you believe that the very existence of our language depends on you personally? These are, of course, rhetorical questions, but they show the problem that loomed over the Ukrainian literary mentality until the last few years. It is a problem that our Eastern European and Russian counterparts have never faced and, more often than not, can hardly comprehend. Thus Ukrainian poetry has been destined to be in opposition to the government -- not because of any political messages it might convey, but simply by definition, because it maintained national identity by giving a voice to a particular collective unconscious and by promoting a language beyond the boundaries marked for a dying species. On the other hand, in the eyes of the reading public, such a position endowed poets with the irresistible charisma of national heroes. When the generation of the sixties appeared during the Khrushchev 'thaw', i.e. when young poets were allowed to publish poems that broke the fetters of socialist realism in state publishing houses and thus acquired access to a larger audience, it turned out to be a sort of national explosion. Never before had poetry been read, loved, worshipped, hated, and cursed so much. Poetry readings resembled popular demonstrations. I was a little girl then, but I remember this atmosphere of national agitation and those slim volumes of poetry, poorly designed and printed on shabby paper, that were recopied by hand, passed from person to person, and changed and recited by my parents and their friends at parties. Most of those verses were embedded forever in my memory. It was in an atmosphere of vague and nostalgic reminiscences of that time that my generation, the 'New-Wave' generation engendered by 'glasnost', was brought up. After the Ukrainian cultural revival of the 1960's was brutally suffocated and the generation of our literary parents was ruthlessly smashed, good Ukrainian poetry became an underground genre. This occurred not because of any political content, but simply because if was deliberately and defiantly written in Ukrainian, with its rich and refined vocabulary and with its distinctly tragic resonance, sometimes raised at the height of a sombre clairvoyance, which perfectly depicted the deplorable state of mind of Ukrainian society under Brezhnev. It was the poetry of a lost generation, violently separated from its audience. The greatest achievement of that generation was the prison poetry of Vasyl Stus, whom I mentioned earlier. It was the posthumous fate of his poetry that showed in a most spectacular way how this inertia of the underground worked in the perception of the audience. When a book of Stus's poems was first published in Ukraine a few years ago, twenty thousand of the forty thousand copies were sold in Kyiv in less than two hours. The place was so crowded that the manager of the bookshop called in the mounted police to disperse the crowd. Of course, I don't mean to say that every poet's cherished dream is to see his or her poetry sold under mounted police guard. Nevertheless, for the Western poetic mentality there is a sort of temptation about this: the lack of an audience seems to be what North American poets most frequently complain about. It must be admitted that the constant perception of the invisible, but omnipresent, support of an audience considerable influences both poetry and the poet's philosophy of art. On the one hand, it burdens you with a tremendous responsibility based on the belief that poetic words do have the potential to change the fate of a nation by shaping the mentality of generations for decades to come. That is why Ukrainians are accustomed to the cult of poets. The most recent example of this has been the cult of Stoups: he posthumously received the greatest national literary award, the Shevchenko Prize; there can hardly be a young poet who has not dedicated a poem to his memory or a young singer who has not composed a song to his words; and in the late 1980's and early 1990's you could see pictures of Stus everywhere -- on badges, posters, t-shirts, and bumper stickers. Does this mean that poetry, having collided with mass culture, was swallowed by it? Surprisingly enough, not a bit. Although mass culture continued to exploit the image of Stus as a victim of the regime, his complex and elegant poetics still remain difficult for digestion even by serious literary critics. Thus, in the perception of the audience, a poetic personality came to be split into a social position (that of a martyr) and the poetic text itself, which finally appeared to be cleansed of any traces of non-literary approaches. Of course, for the living poets coming out of the underground, this turned out to be a much more painful process. To speak of an underground is to imply that some 'ground' does exist, that some evil force need to be opposed. That is why those authors who were made famous by the underground and 'samizdat' have become helpless. The most talented of them, Ihor Kalynets, made a most desperate decision -- he simply stopped writing. He explained this in an interview by saying that he is a ruiner, an underminer, that he used to be subversive. Now, when it is time to be affirmative of reality and to face it directly, not through the distorting prism of omnipotent power, he feels confused and disoriented. So, what we are experiencing now may be called the fall of the 'poetry-as-opposition' tradition. The 'New Wave,' the generation to which I belong, is actually the first one in six decades that has been freed from the obligation 'to save the nation.' Thank God the nation does exist, its development guaranteed by new-born statehood, so that we are not forced any longer to bear exclusive responsibility for its historical fate, to be national heroes and redeemers. Of course, under these circumstances, our popularity, by comparison with that of our predecessors, has tangibly decreased. This is quite understandable: we have lost charisma. But if this is the price that poetry has to pay for its freedom, then I accept it enthusiastically."
"A Kingdom of Fallen Statues" Born in Lutsk in 1960, Oksana Zabuzhko graduated from the department of philosophy at Kyiv Shevchenko University in 1982 and received a doctoral degree in aesthetics in 1987. Since then she has been an associate of the Institute of Philosophy at the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kyiv. She taught Ukrainian culture and literature as a writer-in-residence at Pennsylvania State University in 1992 and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University and the University of Pittsburgh in 1994. Oksana Zabuzhko is the author of three collections of poetry: 'May Hoarfrost', 'The Conductor of the Last Candle', and 'Hitchhiking". She has also translated the poetry of Sylvia Plath into Ukrainian. Her fiction includes two short novels, 'Extraterrestrial Woman' and the best selling 'Field Studies in Ukrainian Sex', for which she received several awards. As a scholar, Zabuzhko has published 'Two Cultures, The Philosophy of the Ukrainian Idea and its European Context', and a number of literary and cultural essays. In English Zabuhko's writings have appeared in 'Agni', 'Glas', 'Harvard Review', 'International Quarterly', 'Massachusetts Review', 'Mr. Cogito', 'Nimrod', 'Partisan Review', Ploughshares', 'Poetry Miscellany', the 'Slavic and East European Journal', and the 'Ukrainian Quarterly', and have been performed by the Yara Arts Group.
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"Anyone who dares to write about Ukrainian poetry for an English-speaking
audience faces two major difficulties. One of them is rather common
-- the fact that this is a poetry written in a strange language,
a poetry for which, regrettably, few satisfactory English translations
are available. This is more or less like trying to explain the taste
of some exotic food to a person who has never tasted or smelled
it. Poetry is hardly reproducible in any linguistic code other than
the one in which it was originally produced. Sartre elucidated this
peculiarity about poetry by saying that the poetic attitude towards
language, unlike the prosaic attitude, 'considers words as things
and not as signs.' This means that language is not simply a medium
for poetry, a transparent vessel that conveys a message hidden within
it. It makes the most immediate sensations sonorous, visible, and
tangible and provides the building material needed to construct
a meaningful metaphor or, in Sartre's words, 'to catch a fleeting
reality' in a verbal trap. It is the physical aspect of language
that poetry utilized, and by this it is destined to remain a permanent
captive of its original tongue. Thus I address a quite comprehensible
problem that concerns any non-English poetry. 