Itinerant band of intellectuals holds a roundtable in Toronto (04/28/96)

Itinerant band of intellectuals holds a roundtable in Toronto

by Andrij Wynnyckyj
Toronto Press Bureau

TORONTO - In February and March, Osyp Zinkewych, the activist best known for establishing the Smoloskyp publishing house, traveled around selected cities of the Eastern Seaboard with nine "Ukrainian nationally conscious youth" or "Ukrainian creative youth," as they were billed.

On March 9, four members of this itinerant band of young intelligentsia held a panel at the Ukrainian National Federation's hall in downtown Toronto. The rest did a brisk business at the back of the auditorium, selling the latest line of Smoloskyp publications to a diaspora audience of about 200 people.

Mr. Zinkewych spoke last, but his imprint was on the proceedings as if he was the only one to say a word. "We dreamed of Ukrainian independence," he said, and now he had brought the fruit of the dream to the diaspora.

Mr. Zinkewych spoke of Smoloskyp's initial unsuccessful forays into Ukraine after transferring its headquarters from the Baltimore area to Kyiv. "We tried working with the middle and older generations, but we are from different worlds; as if from Mars," he said.

The veteran publisher recounted how members of the Ukrainian Writers' Union assured him there was nobody of interest among the younger generation. Then he recalled having met Serhiy Zhadan on the steps of Kyiv's Museum of Literature.

"I asked him who he was," Mr. Zinkewych said. "A poet," came the reply. With an acute sense of his audience, he added, "I smiled then, just like you did now."

Mr. Zinkewych showered accolades on those young students "who in 1990 faced down a regime, at a time when nobody knew how things would end up - whether it would be China or Czecho-Slovakia."

The first, most charismatic and articulate speaker was Oles Doniy. Mr. Doniy has had a lot of practice in this area, given that he emerged on the scene in 1990 as a spokesman of the hunger-striking students who courageously and effectively set up camp in what came to be known as Independence Square, and has since made his mark in municipal politics.

Mr. Doniy also spoke of the ills that beset Ukraine - the external threat from Russia, the internal political dissension and the calcified institutional structures that hamper its progress. "Power is still in the hands of the old nomenklatura," he intoned, begging (but not answering) the question - what did the opposition, in a putatively democratic society, intend to do about it?

Mr. Doniy hinted at the vacuum of ideas in the "democratic" camp when he recounted that leaders of Rukh and other parties came to the youth recently, encouraging them to stage another series of hunger strikes in order to force the government's hand on the constitution and other matters.

The young politician inveighed against the painful fact that many Ukrainians are beguiled by the supposedly greener grass growing in Russia. "People look to Russia with envy - the conditions there are better, reform faster," Mr. Doniy said.

Now Russia is saddled with an intolerant, harshly authoritarian, nostalgically (and clumsily) militaristic regime, whose major cities are ridden with crime and unrestrained gangland violence, and whose countryside is awash in the aftermath of countless environmental disasters. At the very least, the fact that it can inspire envy suggests that Ukraine's politicians, no matter how young, desperately need lessons in public relations.

Mr. Doniy assailed a pamphlet distributed by a politician in Odessa, in which the candidate for a local post alleged that Ukraine had become "a colony of Galicia, which now dictates policy and has produced antagonism to Russia."

Coming as it does from the reputed joke and gag capital of the former Soviet Union, the quote deserves to be enshrined among the best historically ironic howlers of the year, but neither Mr. Doniy nor the audience of that afternoon were laughing.

The most interesting segment of the Kyiv-based deputy's presentation was his breakdown of generational thinking in Ukraine. According to Mr. Doniy, the elderly are mostly looking to Russia out of habit or nostalgia, the middle aged are wallowing in disillusionment and paralysis, while the young are firmly convinced of the benefits of independence and the passing of the old order.

As if to temper this suspiciously rosy picture of the younger generation, Mr. Doniy opined that youth are avoiding politics (with some obvious exceptions), but going into business, journalism and the arts.

Mr. Doniy ended on an optimistic and patriotic note, and yet the tone was strangely Soviet in its veiled impatient condescension. "Don't worry," he said, "Ukraine will take its place among European nations. Everything will fall into place."

In his response to a question, Mr. Doniy dismissed the apparent disinterest in Ukrainian youth among their North American counterparts (given the low number in attendance that day), saying that it was "up to them."

The next speaker, Maksym Rozumny, was introduced as a philosopher. After an interesting introduction - "Ukraine as a place and as an idea has become quite complicated and even contradictory" - Mr. Rozumny proved to be more politician than philosopher.

"We all have to liberate ourselves from stereotypes; particularly those which arose during the perestroika period," he said.

In response to a question about the ethics of the 1990s generation in Ukraine, ostensibly the subject of his masters thesis, Mr. Rozumny responded tersely: "The youth of today acts, it doesn't talk a lot. We aren't moralizers, we do concrete things, we don't teach." It was a strange answer, dissonant with his earlier remarks, in which he avowed that his generation was becoming dissociated and disinterested in the society it lived in.

Next to the podium was the energetic and personable Andriy Kokotiukha, in charge of the Smoloskyp publishing effort under the oversight of Mr. Zinkewych, and whose detective potboiler, "Shliubni Ihryshcha Zhab" (Wedding Games of Frogs, 1996), he was offering hot off the press.

Perhaps the clearest exponent of what Mr. Rozumny referred to as people who "act but don't talk a lot," Mr. Kokotiukha tried to be hard-bitten ("I don't like poetry much"), but came off cute.

Mr. Kokotiukha offered his opinion of his own work's antecedents in American crime novels and, sounding like a 1920s throwback, said that this was the kind of thing that would "teach the masses to read in Ukrainian."

"We don't have a middle-class literature, a middle-brow literature," the young publishing lion said, formulating his program. "The Russian language is taking over; Ukrainian authors write in Russian, publish in Russia." Lest we forget, except for the aforementioned brief hothouse period in the 1920s, 'twas ever thus.

Nevertheless, Mr. Kokotiukha's effort is quite impressive. The table at back was graced with a modest but interesting array that ranged from Mr. Doniy's patriotic coffee-table book "The Student Revolution on Granite," to Mr. Rozumny's works, a selection of fiction, and a few collections by the last speaker of the panel, the poet Serhiy Zhadan.

Mr. Zhadan fits the part. Laconic and wry, he smirked through Mr. Doniy's introduction and then simply reeled off selections of his works in a staccato delivery.

As if mirroring the uncertain state of the language, Mr. Zhadan avoided the cliché of Ukrainian euphony by adopting a choppy style. Superficially, it is reminiscent of the New York Group's Yuriy Tarnawsky, but his verse lacks the latter's powerful surrealistic imagery and richness of perception.

In Mr. Zhadan's case, it is simply a quartering and disruption of a relatively truistic (if not clichéd) aesthetic. Interesting moments such as "Baby mov koni/rzhaly do sontsia" (Like horses, the women/brayed at the sun) were not followed by any image or message with moral depth or by linguistic invention.

Then again, he's young, right? He is one among a seemingly growing number who are thinking and writing in Ukrainian. And that was the point of the afternoon, and of the North American tour organized by Mr. Zinkewych's dedicated team.

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