POETRY IN EXILE
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recurring prohibitions against it, introduced by the tsarist and then the
Soviet government, with amazing cyclical regularity from the 1870s to
the 1970s. It is because of its literature and poetry that the Ukrainian
language has come to the present-day younger generations, not just pre–
served but as rich, complex, and supple as it ever was. Poetry is the pio–
neer of language, since it is by its every essence the art of naming, des–
tined to explore vague and blurred feelings and bring them to the light
of consciousness. It is exactly what makes poetry, as
T.
S.
Eliot put it,
the most stubbornly national of all arts. In his words, "a thought ex–
pressed in a different language may be practically the same thought, but a
feeling or emotion expressed in a different language is not the same feel–
ing or emotion." He continues, "a people may have its language taken
away from it, suppressed, and another language compelled upon the
schools; but unless you teach that people to
Jeel
in a new language, you
have not eradicated the old one, and it will reappear in poetry, which is
the vehicle of feeling." This is exactly what took place in Ukraine. For
people to feel in a language different than their own, is tantamount to
their taking on a different collective unconsciousness. The Ukrainian
literati, as the guardians of a language, were thus the only real supporters
and promoters of Ukrainian national identity.
I am intentionally omitting the very complicated matters of varieties
of styles, of trends and schools of literature, instead concentrating on the
general silhouette of Ukrainian literature against the backdrop of history,
or rather of non-history, anti-history. It seems quite natural , then , that of
all the intellectuals, it was the writers who appeared to be the most
sensitive to the violent distortions inflicted upon Ukrainian identity, not
only because sensitivity is part of the writer's make-up but also because it
is the writers who tended to feel traumatically trapped . Writing in an
endangered language is very much akin to being a masochistic oc–
cupation. Osip Mandelstam was absolutely right when he said that a
poem never demands an immediate interlocutor; what it does demand is
a providential interlocutor who could appear at any time , even decades
or centuries after the poem has been created. That is God's truth, that
you can hardly write without being confident deep in your heart that
someday your message will reach its audience, like a letter placed into a
bottle and cast into the sea of time.
Imagine that the very language you write in is officially condemned
by Party doctrine to become extinct in two or three generations, that
you are watching it being extinguished and gradually replaced by Russian
in most spheres of culture. As Khrushchev claimed, with his irresistibly
charming candor, "The sooner we all start speaking Russian, the sooner
Communism will be built." But how can you reconcile the act of writ–
ing with the awareness that in the not-too-distant future your message
