Writers in the Street
“In general, I don’t know who I am anymore,” said Pavlo Zahrebelny to a crowd of about a thousand writers on Saturday in front of the Writers House at 2 Bankova Street, while an unusual number of defenders of law and order watched on in case the crowd, liberally seasoned with septuagenarians, octogenarians, invalids, and even this writer’s wife with a broken arm (she is a member of the National Council of that organization) listened. The former president of the Union of Writers, whose works have sold tens of millions of copies in both Ukrainian and Russian, went on to explain that someone might say he is not a writer, get some prosecutor to take up the case, and some district court in the Sviatoshyn district of Kyiv might well decide that he is not a writer and that his surname is not even Zahrebelny.
Why would an absolute majority of the members of the National Writers Union of Ukraine, duly registered in the building that has no hall large enough to hold them all, be out in the street listening to one of their greatest and other no lesser stars of Ukrainian literature on a cloudy day in February?
One Natalia Okulitenko, by all accounts a very nice lady with a bent for the cosmic, whose works even few of her colleagues can say they have read, was elected president of this organization by about eighty similarly obscure authors, who gathered without the prior knowledge of most of her union fellow-members but not without official sanction of certain state officials, to become the new head of an organization that boasts a fine building right down the street from the Presidential Administration and a few other assets not without significance. The same meeting elected a huge number of similarly unread writers to an organization where they are also little known and proceeded to depose the officers of that organization, who had earlier been elected according to both the statute of that organization and the laws in force. Then a district court in Sviatoshyn, a district as remote from the organization’s headquarters as the place where I live, found that Mrs. Okulitenko’s congress, officially recognized but unknown to most of the membership of the organization for which it claimed to speak, was legitimate and that the organization, to which most of the recognized writers of Ukraine belong and have and expect to have their say, was not. The distinguished Mr. Zahrebelny had a right to his doubts.
The call went out from the 600 members of the Kyiv organization, by far the largest local of that trade union of those who wield the pen both for their own time and posterity, that they should come to Kyiv and say their piece. They did so. An absolute majority of the Lviv organization was there, shoulder to shoulder with those from the Donbas — Ukrainian writers, Russian writers, Jewish writers, all. They by no means all agree on all things about their union’s internal governance, but they came to protect the integrity of what they feel is theirs. A number of the lions of Ukrainian literature spoke. Many of those, who have on occasion also rebelled against the things they saw as wrong with the current organization, were also present. They saw the whole thing as outside interference in what they considered a family affair among writers, a fraternity of individualists in a lonely profession, where one has to sit at one’s desk and confront the blank page one on one. An absolute majority of the members responded to the call of the Kyiv organization, and some of those who could not come for reasons of health called me to find out what was happening. The meeting, denied any hall because of administrative pressure, went outside the building that was too small for them but an object of contention for those who have only contempt for the Ukrainian word. The street is closed in any case, so nobody could be accused of blocking traffic. The people’s right to assemble was affirmed.
Let these words be taken as an adjunct to my official application for membership in the National Union of Writers of Ukraine. I might not be the best publicist in this country, but the issue is clear, and the supporting letters of my application are on the way. In times of trouble, it is our first obligation to support those who are clearly in the right. All the nations of the Euro-Atlantic institutions have one set of rights for all. This is what unites them. If they violate their rights today, who will defend mine tomorrow?
