Cheerful melancholy in a playful line
A wonderful bird, oriole, sings in different ways: now in flute-like modulations, now in catcalls. Poets, of course, prefer the flute, except for Sergey Yesenin who vested it with the unnatural faculty of weeping. The ear of a politician would hear the oriole depending on the situation: they would catch the sounds of a harp in one and a March-time meow in another. Unfortunately, we take this attitude to many things, catching what is easy to catch but does not at all characterize its essence.
This summer the electronic and print media began to discuss Ukrainian literature. No, it is not about works and authors. The debate is on the origin of it as such. This resulted in three views on Ukrainian belles-lettres. The first: what can be considered Ukrainian literature is only the fruit of the Ukrainian language and national talent. The second: any opus created on the territory of present-day Ukraine can play this role. The third: if the author himself says he is part of Ukrainian literature, let it be so.
It is quite easy to see the hand that moves these three thimbles across the field of public attention. The ostensibly literary polemic clearly shows the ears of copyrighters who lurk in the bushes. The ambush is the same old story. The thimbles shift from the far right camp to the far left one and vice versa. The objective of the game is to draw the huge center, i.e., the majority of common-sense people, into the battles of the minority: communists, radical nationalists, and other marginal groups. Is it clear where the wind is blowing from and who needs two Ukraines with different poles of culture?
When accountants come into literary studios with intent to classify and systematize “the creative moment,” there will be no good. That there can be no national literature without the national language is an axiom. Can you imagine British literature without the English language? I cannot. At the same time, it is artistic merits, not the language, that determine the value of a work. Franz Kafka, a Czech Jew, wrote in German and the South African-born John R.R. Tolkien in English, as did the Russian nobleman Vladimir Nabokov. The Pole Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who was born in Berdychiv and had brilliant command of Polish and French, became a great British novelist known as Joseph Conrad in the twilight of his life. The Irish playwright Samuel Becket used to write in French.
When state borders are being erased and communications allow us to disregard distances and differences in the ways of life, can a writer be isolated from this process? The Cubans considered Ernest Hemingway as one of them by spirit and creative ways, although he never refused to be called American prose writer. Marie Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal, did not love his native France too much, but he sang praises of Italy. Jaroslav Hasek, who is widely known outside the Czech Republic, is much more liked by the Russians than by the Czechs. The relationship between societies and litterateurs is not so simple. In general, it is very difficult to systematize writing on any, particularly national and political, basis. Therefore, the dispute about a better “birth certificate” for Ukrainian literature is absurd in itself. Let the Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking poets, novelists, documentarists, and essayists write as they please and use any alphabet, and readers will decide what literature they belong to.
Now, in the 21st century, the contemporary writers will never be a nationwide property by contrast with their colleagues in the past centuries. There are no uniform systems and standards that shape the people’s outlook, and there can be no author who would affect everybody in the same way with his word, feeling, and thought. A totally unrestricted multitude of creative manifestations is perhaps the only criterion to appraise the literary process. The Americans came to this conclusion almost 200 years ago in a polemic about the particularities of their national literature. The idea belongs to the poet Henry Longfellow who pointed out that the most universal literature is, in the long run, the most national one.
Unfortunately, it is not only in literature that we are sliding 100 or 200 hundred years back. For some mysterious reasons, this country does not wish to address its problems on the basis of the experience civilization has already gained. We are looking for a way to prosperity on the overgrown trails of the medieval, communist, and pre-Christian pasts. We are rejecting the ever best security system and remain stuck in dire straits – without friends in the north, east, south, and west. We are throwing millions to dredge silt from the Danube, while the cleaning of waterways usually begins with small rivers and rivulets. We are endlessly rewriting the Constitution without living a year in the spirit of its clauses…
In a word, there is so much stupidity around that it is time for Ukrainian writers and journalists, irrespective of their lexical particularities, to close their creative laboratories and put up a sign that reads: “All are away to fight idiotism.” This battlefield emerged long ago, but now we can see more active hostilities in all directions: from such an unimportant (from the commanders’ viewpoint) thing as literature to such a strategic field where gas, grain, and sweets turn into the levers of pressure. The customary ways of the Russian propaganda machine are combined with the customary responses of the Ukrainian authorities and media. The authorities keep silent, while the media are whipping up fears. “A full-scale trade war,” “Putin left the Kremlin and is planning in a secret bunker to seize the Crimea,” “A new Georgian scenario for Ukraine!” The online space is crawling with headlines like these, and their tonality is perhaps supposed to scare the weak Ukrainians into running in panic to the Customs Union and the strong ones into running in the opposite direction. Consequently, all are satisfied with this special operation on both sides of the front line. Some are rallying society around Viktor Yanukovych “whom Putin is going to topple,” others are rallying the people around a Kremlin protege who can appease the enraged neighbor.
Do we perhaps hear only one song of the oriole? The Russian poet Yesenin says it weeps “hidden in a tree hollow,” as wood grouses do in a pine-tree forest. But on our outskirts, these birds neither weep nor live in hollows. Somersaulting in fresh haystacks near Ukrainian villages, you can’t possibly hear a little forest-edge yellow bird and a portly master of the thicket. Here, the songs of the feathered ones and the ones who wield the pen are not so highfalutin – they are closer to reality. Yet, in the news lines and debates on the already solved problems of humankind, cheerful melancholy is brimming over – both in our and their place.
