Tymofiy Harvryliv
>Ukrainian Memories
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Timothy Snyder @ New York Review of Books reports on the struggles of historical research in the Ukraine.
On summer evenings, the people of the west Ukrainian city Lviv come to sing: under the statue of Taras Shevchenko, the great poet who prophesied Ukrainian independence in the nineteenth century, on the street that was renamed Liberty Boulevard when Ukraine emerged from Soviet rule in 1991. The songs tell of beautiful dark-eyed girls pining for brave soldiers. In one song, young men must leave their homes to fight for freedom as partisans; in the next, they are overwhelmed and killed by Soviet forces. One of the more bellicose songs ends “We’ll cry out ‘Glory, glory, glory’ until the earth shakes,” accompanied by the stamping of feet on the cobblestones. These passionate Ukrainian laments overlook the fact that Lviv was once Polish Lwów, and before that Habsburg Lemberg. Well into the twentieth century it was a Polish-Jewish city. During World War II the Germans killed the Jews and the Soviets expelled the Poles, leaving the city to be resettled by Ukrainians from the countryside as it was annexed to an expanded Soviet Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom played a part in the elimination of Jews or Poles, fought desperately and courageously against Soviet rule. The songs celebrating them forget the people who used to live in Lviv, and the part the Ukrainian nationalists played in their removal.
Tymofiy Havryliv discusses contemporary Ukrainian literature in dealing with the country’s recent past @ Eurozine.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In Ukraine, authors can write about everything. Twenty years ago, such a claim would have been seen as an unrealistic hope, despite perestroika. Not all that many years have gone by since then. If one was to take artistic freedom as a measure of democracy, one could say without qualification that democracy has successfully established itself in Ukraine, and what’s more, as a normal democracy, and not as a controlled one.
In reality, the freedom of art is the result of its social marginalization. Art has a jester’s license. In the 1990s, it increasingly became something of interest to a small circle of initiates. Its carnivalesque entry onto the scene immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union was short lived, and it found itself once again part of the underground. It returned there for a reason far more banal than persecution or dictatorship: there was no more money for art. The huge publishing houses of the Soviet era, which in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities had published in over 140 different languages, had become leviathans out of water, stranded and unwieldy. Like the concert halls and opera houses, they led a woeful existence, renting out their famous, often wonderful, but also notorious rooms, until losing them one by one in hopeless and unfair court cases. Not all, but many. Bookshops, that once represented an exemplary Soviet marketing network that included every large village, lost their profile in order to catch up with contemporary demand: cosmetics shops, hairdressers, film-developing studios, department stores, electronics retailers, toilet roll and newspaper kiosks, bureaux de changes, chemists, boutiques.
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