The Last Territory

There are regions remaining solid and true, even in their ruined and ugly condition. As for Halychyna, it is thoroughly artificial, put together by pseudo-historical conjectures and dirty political intrigues that are easily seen through. Those saying that Halychyna is just a 150-year-old invention of several Austrian ministers are right a thousand times over. A nauseatingly sweet idee fixe nourished by certain conspiratorial strategists who at one time or another set themselves the chimerical goal of expanding Europe eastward, even if just a bit. Expand Europe they did not. What they got in the end was a kind of buffer, a cordon sanitaire. The hapless Ivan Franko gave in to their mystification, hence all his troubles, all his disoriented labors of Sisyphus.

In perspective, compared to Polissia, for example, this land has a comical enough aspect. Polissia is a cosmic cradle of paganism, located in the basins of the Prypiat and Desna, having purely Aryan roots and undisturbed Derevliany tribal sources with original genetic and cultural codes, most archaic folklore, epos, dialects, lakes, turf deposits, gothic pine trees, along with traps for animals and humans slightly wounded by the pursuing wolves. Polissia is a national substrata, Ukraine's Chornobyl choice, it is reality incarnate, crude authenticity and sincerity, retaliatory campaign of the Messiah Onopriyenko along its railroads and highways. Polissia is slowness and gloom, time brought to an almost total standstill, a lingering communist eternity hatefully besieging ancient Kyiv; it is that very profoundly dark Ukrainian spirit.

From the standpoint of Polissia, Halychyna does not exist, yet it is there, but the fact is worthless. Halychyna is not Ukraine but a kind of geographical makeweight, a Polish hallucination. Halychyna is thoroughly like a dummy, an inflated doll striving in every way to impose on Ukraine its non-Ukrainian will, formed somewhere in underground Zionist laboratories. Halychyna is deprived of its own epos, ever dominated by dirty jokes. In fact, it is a rootless space convenient for any nomadic tribes, putting forth Armenians, Gypsies, Karaites, and Chassidim. Halychyna is a backyard nourishing Freemasonry and Marxism. It is misleading and false, a stinking zoo packed with echidnas and chimeras. Here only bastards like Bruno Schultz or all those smaller replicas of Stanislavsky and Kafka. And if one is not a bastard but, say, Vasyl Stefanyk, the only choice one has drinking oneself to death in a backwater town like Rusiv. "There are more geniuses in Ivano-Frankivsk now than in Moscow," sneers the sharp-tongued Ihor Klekh, also from Halychyna and also brilliant as evidenced by his latest book published in Moscow.

An ironical tone is more than appropriate, for Halychyna is thoroughly ironical and immoral, hence its eternal apostasy and time-serving, unwavering adherence to the Church Union of Brest, and children sold to America. Halychyna is as ostentatious and frilly as a French cuff, aristocratically arrogant, ridiculously bowing and scraping in all directions, kissing hands, and facing closed doors with inherent rustic lisping and lip-smacking; it is endless drowsy after-lunch bull sessions, always about Europe, the European spirit, European values and purpose, European culture and cuisine, about the road to Europe, that "we are in Europe," while all of Halychyna's cultural heritage can be placed in a medium-size Lviv suitcase. All Halychyna can do is try hard to follow in Europe's footsteps, and Europe has long been unable to accomplish anything new (as Spengler noted long ago). Halychyna is a plagiarist, made even more pitiful by selecting the most lifeless of all possible objects of plagiarism.

The rest is coffee, homemade liqueurs, pies and cakes, housewife dictatorship, needlework done on napkins, jams and preserves, rushnyk embroidered towels, carpets, tastelessness, and kitsch. In a word, Galician suburbia in full glory.

Compared to Polissia, Halychyna is just pitiful; it is postmodern.

But I have a different prospect. Rather, I have none, for I am here within, it is my territory, it is my suspect and despised world. The fortified walls surrounding it have long been torn down, moats filled with historical and cultural broken porcelain, fragments of black Havarechchyna ceramics and Hutsul tiles. My line of a defense is myself, but I have no alternative other than hold a fort which is falling apart before my eyes.