POETRY IN EXILE
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appeared overnight from bookstore shelves. In Kiev, one bookstore
manager had to call the mounted police to disperse the agitated crowd
demanding copies. Pictures of Stus are seen everywhere - on posters,
badges, bumper stickers, T-shirts. It is always the same photo: Stus in ex–
ile, standing behind a barbed-wire fence with a firm jaw and invincibly
burning eyes, the embodied nightmare of Kundera's heroine in
The Un–
bearable Lightness oj Being.
One might say that every cult produces its own
icons and in the end tends to turn everything into kitsch. Yet surprisingly
enough, not a single book concerning Stus's work itself has appeared in
print. His poetics, to be sure, are sophisticated, visionary and mystical,
possessing a sort of magical clairvoyance. (At an early stage, he was
greatly influenced by Rilke, whom he translated into Ukrainian.) But in
any case, the dazzling halo of martyrdom has thoroughly overshadowed
the poetic text. It is no longer the poetry but the personality of the poet
that interests the audience. This is the price literature has to pay for its
forced participation in the making of national history.
Paradoxical as it might sound after conjuring the throngs struggling
for a slim volume of poetry, literature bears also the problem of loneli–
ness, one which the literature of Ukraine shares with that of other East
European countries. Literature can hardly survive without the mirror of
an external public response, whatever it may be. Until recently in Eastern
Europe, it was the state that held up the mirror to literature. The crite–
ria of literary values were forged within the tense counterposition of lit–
erature against the state. Not only social values but the very artistic
qualities of a literary work were, to a considerable extent, verified by the
hostility it provoked from the authorities. Perhaps there is a grain of
truth in the Ukrainian myth that the devil possesses good taste. Now,
with the mirror gone, Ukrainian literature is face to face with the bare
wall of aloofness separating it from the larger world of literature. Until
now, the relationship of Ukrainian literature to the major literature of
the rest of the world, including that of Poland and Russia, has been
characterized according to the witty formula of the Yiddish author Jacob
Gladstein, who, when asked what the difference was between major and
minor literature, replied, "I have to read
T.
S. Eliot, but he doesn't have
to read me."
So-called minor literatures then, must try all the harder to have their
voices heard. They must acquire additional cultural codes in order to
communicate with their more fortunate Western counterparts. It is
probably because of this extended amplitude of voice that Ukrainian lit–
erature has survived, amassing vigor and vitality. Despite all the obstacles
it has faced, it has made possible the rise of the innovative "new wave"
generation, greatly inspired by the tectonic fracture of history - and the
Yeatsian "terrible beauty" born under it. Nevertheless, the yearning for
