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PARTISAN REVIEW
will become completely incomprehensible for posterity, with the excep–
tion of a handful of stodgy scholars who will approach it as if it were an
ancient Hittite manuscript? How can you write bereft of the insurance of
time, of the hope that your message has a chance of finding a provi–
dential interlocutor, casting your bottle not in the sea but in the sand?
This is the problem that has loomed over the Ukrainian literary mentality
until just this past year, a problem our counterparts in neighboring Eu–
ropean cultures have not had to face. It perhaps explains why writers
were the first to start the velvet revolution in Ukraine that finally led to
the formation of an independent state.
In 1989, it was the writers who initiated the popular mass movement
of Rukh, who, without any special political skills or training, succeeded
in uniting all the democratically oriented elements of Ukrainian society
around the Rukh platform. It may have been the last manifestation of
that charisma that so appealed to writers' audiences through the
centuries. Today, the Ukrainian parliament boasts perhaps the greatest
number of writer-parliamentarians in the world. It could be called the
"Vaclav Havel phenomenon"; an even more apt analogy is the 1916 Irish
Easter Uprising, five of whose six leaders were poets.
Yet must the expression of this sense of responsibility, which finally
compelled most of the recognized Ukrainian writers to be swallowed up
by the leviathan of political activism, necessarily determine the artistic
worth of a writer's work? Must it be the evaluative criteria by which a
work is judged? The answer to this question can be found in the
posthumous fate of the works of Vasyl Stus, without doubt the greatest
postwar Ukrainian poet. Imprisoned under Brezhnev, Stus died in 1985
in a prison camp on a hunger strike - nearly half a year after Gorbachev
came to power.
It
is significant that the immediate evidence used to
convict Stus was the doctoral dissertation that he wrote on Pavia Ty–
chyna, the remarkable talented poet of the 1920s who, in Tychyna's
words, preferred to "kiss the Pope's [i.e. Stalin's] slipper" during the
traumatic 1930s. Tychyna adjusted to the demands of the doctrine of so–
cialist realism and joined the ranks of the Soviet literary establishment. He
paid for the capitulation of his conscience with the loss of his own po–
etic voice. From the 1930s onward, he was never able
to
produce any–
thing but drumming limericks eulogizing the Communist Party, the
Young Pioneers, collective farms, the genius of Stalin. Thus it was that
for revealing the intrinsic and intimate mechanism of degradation of an–
other poet's "captive mind ," Stus received five years of harsh prison camp
regime and five years of exile.
Today, we witness a kind of Stus cult. He is worshipped as a hero–
poet, to use Thomas Carlyle's term. The collection of Stus's poems,
published in Ukraine a few years ago in an edition of 40,000 copies, dis-
