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answered, "Yes, I am." Her next question was, "Aren't you ashamed?"
to which he replied, "Yes, I am ashamed." Pomerants cites this anecdote
to illustrate what he believes should be the ethos of the intellectual in a
totalitarian state. I believe that his countryman, in answering as he did,
rescued the dignity of a nation. As a Ukrainian, I also experienced an
overwhelming and irresistible envy of that man's shame: to be ashamed of
your government's actions implies that you feel a personal responsibility
for them. It means that you identify with the state and statehood,
regardless of whether or not you approve of its politics. It is the ethos of
"my country right or wrong." This kind of shame is the privilege of true
citizenship, and that is what made me envious.
I could not have felt any responsibility for the occupation of Prague,
because what was done to Czechoslovakia in 1968 had been done to my
country in 1919, with disastrous consequences. Since then Ukraine as a
separate political entity disappeared. It was deprived of its own voice and
became a literal nonentity. If we assume that a homeland is not just a
spot on the map but a country with whose actions one identifies, we can
say that until very recently the Ukrainians have been deprived of their
homeland. The question of whether it is preferable to have a homeland
you are ashamed or or not to have any homeland at all is tantamount to
the question of whether it is better to spend all your life in prison or not
be born at all. The question itself, as we know, is not by any means
merely rhetorical, but I do not intend to focus on it here.
My major concern is literature, for it was literature that, under the
circumstances, assumed the role of a substitute homeland for the
Ukrainian people. For the two centuries since Ukraine lost its autonomy
and fell under complete Russian domination in the late eighteenth cen–
tury, its history has had a passive voice. With just a few brief interludes,
such as the Ukrainian National Republic of 1918-1919, almost all of its
history has been imposed upon it. In the nineteenth century, such nations
were called nonhistorical. Only now, with the advent of independence, is
this coming to an end for Ukraine. It is no wonder then that through
the last two centuries, it was almost exclusively in the realm of literature,
more specifically of poetry, that the genuine vitality of Ukraine was ex–
pressed and that the suppressed collective sensibility of its people found an
outlet. In essence, it was a product of romantic nationalism, with its
ideal of nationhood based upon language. From it comes the perception
of the poet as a charismatic leader and redeemer of a nation, so
spectacularly expressed, for instance, in Polish messianism.
What is distinctive about the Ukrainian experience and what makes
it unique compared to the fate of other Eastern European literatures is
not just the persistency with which its vision survived, but rather the
continually endangered condition of the Ukrainian language. There were
