‘We’ll Be a Banana Republic’ – Unless…

Just before my teenage father was taken from Ukraine to work as forced labor in Germany, his father told him not to come back until Ukraine was free. That was September 1942. My father didn’t expect it would take half a century. And along the way, he lost hope that Ukraine would ever be free in his lifetime. When I first arrived in Ukraine, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, it was a mythical land to me. I knew the language, culture, history – and the people somewhat. But reality there was like a weathered billboard – its advertisement faded, peeling and tattered in the wind – suddenly coming to life.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. I was traveling with one of my closest friends, the artist Roman Hrab, also the child of Ukrainians displaced during World War II who eventually settled in the New York area. Roman had been studying and teaching at a university in Pécs, Hungary, at the time. I’d been visiting friends throughout Europe. Roman and I met up in Budapest. Our plan was to take a train to the border and walk across it into that mythical land of Ukraine we’d heard so much about. Once there, we would improvise through the bucolic Carpathians toward Lviv. The final destination in our epic roots pilgrimage would be the capital, Kyiv. But borders, especially the ones in Eastern Europe, were much more impervious at that time. The Berlin Wall had only recently fallen, and the Iron Curtain’s cultural divide was still stark. Other Topics of Interest Ukraine’s Independence Shaping Our Collective Future As Ukraine marks 35 years of independence, its fight against Russian aggression continues – and warnings mount that NATO's slow support could invite a Russian strike on an alliance member by 2029. The Záhony-Chop border crossing had a queue of cars that went on for miles on both sides. We got to within a few hundred meters when border guards told us we couldn’t cross over on foot – which seemed absurd. Before we even had a chance to protest, a friendly local invited us into his car to cross through the controls with him. He was an ethnic Hungarian who lived in Ukraine, just across the border, and spoke to us in Russian or Hungarian, which Roman spoke. When he found out we were American and spoke Ukrainian, he was impressed and invited us to stay with his family overnight. The following day, they took us along with them to a lakeside barbecue, then dropped us off in the evening at a train station that seemed to double as a Roma camp. We took the overnight train straight to Lviv. So much for our Carpathian improv ambitions. Instead, we visited some of my family in the countryside outside Lviv. Poets in Kyiv Around the time of independence, I met Ihor Rymaruk, a well-known Ukrainian poet, while he was visiting New York. He had been invited by the Shevchenko Scientific Society to speak and recite his works. I’d been translating diaspora poets from Ukrainian into English, and through my connection with the New York Group I was introduced to Rymaruk. I told him I was planning a trip to Ukraine during the summer and he suggested I come as a guest translator to bask in Kyiv’s fervent literary revival. When Roman and I got to the capital, we met Rymaruk at the offices of Dnipro Publishers, where he was the director, just down the street from St. Sophia. He immediately introduced us to some of the most active poets of the early 1990s: Mykhailo Hryhoriv, Viktor Kordun, Vasyl Herasymiuk, Volodymyr Tsybulko and others. He set us up with an apartment in the Podil neighborhood, which belonged to a journalist friend of his. He even took me to the Writer’s Union and signed me up. Ihor Rymaruk (Photo: Ukrinform) One of my first surprises in Kyiv was the fact that no one (apart from intellectuals and women selling produce at the market) spoke Ukrainian. Everyone understood me when I asked for something in Ukrainian, but they responded in Russian, as if taking for granted that I understood. Unfortunately, I didn’t, and I had to learn quickly if I was to feel comfortable in the city. At the time, I was reading Dostoevsky’s “Demons” in English translation, and the apartment where we were staying happened to include the original Russian text in its excellent library. So I read the book in English, marking memorable passages, then reread them in Russian, which is close enough to Ukrainian that I could figure out the meaning. Later, Roman and I befriended a group of actors from the Koleso theater on Adriivsky Uzviz, who were performing a Jean Anouilh play, and they would help me with Russian pronunciation and grammar. There were virtually no proper restaurants in the city, apart from inside the major hotels – only a few cafeteria-style eateries or places where you could get butterbrot sandwiches and vodka by the gram: usually 100 grams per glass, but with the poets, it was more often 250. We spent long hours sitting in restaurants or outdoor bars, talking and drinking (I’d recently given up alcohol, so Roman would need to compensate for my awkward abstemiousness). The conversations were often surreal. One of them stood out in memory. We were sitting in a hotel restaurant: me, Roman, Rymaruk, Hryhoriv, and their sidekick Vasyl, who was always the brunt of jokes because he adored Pushkin. “Oh, you and your beloved Pushkin,” they’d quip. Or “Go tell it to Alexander Sergeyevich [Pushkin].” Vasyl also revered William Faulker, and he loved pronouncing the name – heavy on the silent “l” – with extreme solemnity. Vasyl’s boyish devotion to his poet friends was a comical contrast to Hryhoriv’s severe bearing and monumental gray mustache evoking exile and poetic suppression. Born in 1947, Hryhoriv had been active with the so-called Kyiv School of Poets in the late 1960s, and the KGB had forced him out of the University of Kyiv. He eventually left Ukraine for Latvia and returned after independence. He struggled to get the popular notoriety that Rymaruk had – though among the other poets he was highly esteemed by nearly all. Maybe his temperament had something to do with it. At times we’d be walking down a street together and he’d suddenly disappear. “Oh, Mykhailo does that. He likes to just vanish.” Mykhailo Hryhoriv (Photo: public domain) Rymaruk, for his part, was also an odd character with his long straight, almost waxen, hair framing that affable goateed face, and those trademark eyeglasses as thick as the vodka bottle bases that tended to accumulate whenever he and his friends got together. At times he seemed withdrawn to the point of autism. But then he’d regale you with a flourish of insight. At lunch one day, the waitress came to serve us. She spoke Russian, as did everyone else in the city. The poets categorically refused to speak Russian. They ordered in Ukrainian. This particularly haughty waitress rolled her eyes at them and their “peasant tongue.” “You see that reaction?” Rymaruk said. “That’s what we’re facing. De jure independence or not, unless we manage to get rid of that ‘Little Russian’ mentality, Ukraine will be doomed to the status of vassal. We’ll be a banana republic.” At the end of lunch, Roman and I insisted on paying the bill. Rubles were no longer in effect, and Ukraine had no proper currency yet. They used “coupons” that looked like Monopoly money. Everything was ridiculously cheap for anyone with Western currency. You could treat a dozen people in a hotel restaurant for the price of a Big Mac in Times Square. Invariably, Vasyl, whose innate romanticism would be amplified by the alcohol, would wind up weeping. “It’s just so shameful that I’m not able to pay the bill. I have no money.” And the others, who treated him like their ingenuous disciple, would say something like: “Now, now, Vasylko, no need to get all emotional. You’ll never have money. Just stop advertising for Pushkin and we’ll take care of you.” “But I love Pushkin! And I’m ashamed of that too!” “Stick to Faulkner.” “Ah, Faulk-ner! Now there was a genius!” A 50-karbovanets coupon that served as currency in Ukraine from 1992 to 1996, when the hryvnia was introduced. (Image: Wikicommons) In hindsight Over the years – especially since the Maidan Revolution, followed by the Donbas War that broke out in 2014, and now the full-scale fight raging in the East and Kyiv getting pummeled regularly by ballistic missiles and drones – I’ve given a lot of thought to what those poets said about Ukraine back then. Rymaruk died in 2008, hit by a car while walking down a Lviv street. Hryhoriv died in 2016; Kordun in 2005. I have no idea what happened to Vasyl the sidekick. Only Herasymiuk and Tsybulko are left of the ones I’d met in those early days of independence. But they all felt the same way: Independence had fallen into the laps of Ukrainians virtually out of the sky. Only a small portion of the population had actively sought it in the lead-up to the Soviet Union’s collapse. Those poets all felt that independence would still need to be earned. And since they were poets, their starting point was language – which was more than a mere vehicle for communication. For them it was the spiritual foundation of a still inchoate nation. Then and now Before my father died, he managed to return to a free (or at least freer) Ukraine and see his remaining family. The first visit was euphoric. The second was a bittersweet confrontation with reality and how much work it would take for his people to crawl out from under the Soviet legacy. Even for him, who had left as a teenager, Ukraine had become a mythical land. Yet one of the unexpected positive aspects of Soviet Ukraine I encountered in that summer of 1992 was the dearth of advertising. In the capitalist West, we’ve been inundated with advertising for generations – billboards, radio, TV, and now social media, all aggressively trying to cajole and convince us to, as the great American stand-up philosopher George Carlin said, “buy more shit we don’t need with money we don’t have.” In Ukraine, though, there was a limited range of consumer goods to be had then. And the high-end Western imports were only available in special stores for people with foreign currency, dollar shops that could have advertised with the tagline: “Keep your coupons to yourself… We need greenbacks here.” Today Kyiv is chock full of excellent restaurants and cafes. Even in the middle of the war, the food scene is exceptional by any international standard. You can easily find just about anything you can get elsewhere in the West – except maybe Russian caviar, which is now scarce. The advertising today, however, is unmistakably Ukrainian with its martial messaging: “We don’t promise romance. Drones are coming.” Or: “The 3rd Corps is love.” I have mixed feelings about Ukraine becoming overly “Western.” But one aspect of the current reality, at least from the point of view of the poets I’d met who are no longer with us, is edifying: Ukraine is now in the midst of a poetic renaissance. The language is reviving, blossoming after successive efforts over the centuries to suppress it. In Kyiv, on the street, about half the conversations are in Ukrainian, and much of the rest is a sort of Russian-Ukrainian mix called Surzhyk. The youth, above all, are giving the language fresh life – spiced by struggle and passion stoked in a war few would have imagined 35 years ago. Although I believe my poet friends understood long before independence that – given the weight of Pushkin’s legacy and Russia’s inherent Putinesque ambition – there was no other alternative. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.