Meeting: “On the side of memory”

Laudation for Oksana Zabuzhko in connection with Stanisław Vincenz prize awarded by the City Council

Life and literature radiate into each other.

Thinking about it, I see Stanisław Vincenz sitting by the radio at his home, in his Hutsul homeland, on that memorable Sunday, September 17, 1939, listening to the announcement that the Soviets had entered Poland to – in their words – "prevent unexpected complications".

I see Oksana Zabuzhko on that memorable Thursday, February 24 this year, early in the morning in Warsaw, awakened by a phone call from home: “It has begun. They're bombing us."

The day before, she flew to our country to promote her latest book in Polish — Planeta Piołun. By a strange confluence of literature and life, the book launch was scheduled to take place the day before February 24th.

The book begins with the depiction of a Thursday afternoon, May 15, 2014 in the Warsaw Old Town, with the image of a sunlit carefree world, at which Oksana Zabuzhko looked as if through a wall of tears. Because in Donbas Russian mercenaries had just started murdering people for owning a Ukrainian flag. The writer walked through Warsaw, numb with a sudden experience of the beginning of the war, with a clear and irrevocable feeling that a new war had come into the world, although the people she passed by did not yet know anything about it. Her inability to convey this gave rise to the book.

Vincenz, having heard about the Soviet invasion, had a vision of being separated from the world by a wall in an indefinable, but certain and permanent state of war. This intuition led to the decision to flee, the next day, through Chornohora – boundless like the steppe, rolling and cast under the clouds – to the safe Transcarpathian side. This is how another book begins, a record of Stanisław Vincenz's odyssey from the Eastern Carpathians to the western arc of the Alps under the paradoxical title Dialogues with the Soviets.

The search for individuals immune to the Soviet engineering of souls links these Vincenzian dialogues with the writing of Oksana Zabuzhko. But there are other affinities as well. Thorough philosophical education, pantheistic perception of the world and its miraculous elements, so to speak. Appreciation for nature as a womb, although instead of protecting their biological home, humans bring it to the point of ecological apocalypse. Listening from the depths of time to the nameless voice of human fate in songs or folk tales. A sense of antiquity, resulting in a shift towards the Carpathian pastoral civilisation or – following Yuri Shevelov – towards the cultural affinity of Ukraine and Romania. I could go on – a penchant for digression, spinning new stories out of incidental details. After all, each of Zabuzhko’s sentences is a small epic, and both are epic writers in the most basic sense. In the word that moves the world, in the word that names, in the word that is memory.

Of some things, only whispered rumours survived, Vincenz said.

In Ukrainian matters, even that could have cost you your life. That is why Ukrainians have learned to be silent. The Soviets spared no effort to sever all the threads of cultural continuity in Ukraine, and yet, where nothing should remain, something strangely persisted. What imperceptible routes did it run, what secret streams did it sail – this something that history cannot record because it is neither a document, nor a narrative, nor a tradition? What is it? — this is what Oksana Zabuzhko is investigating. How come people often unknowingly carry such a message? How come that even when something disappears, it still exists? "Who we are? Whose sons? Of what parents?” – she asked after Shevchenko, since as a teenager she discovered her grandmother's smile and her father's gaze in the reflection of her face in the mirror. And she wondered of how many people she was made – people she did not know and would never know.

Oksana Zabuzhko devotes a lot place in her writing to memory, stubbornness, indestructibility and durability. At the same time, she shows how women undertook the protection of Ukrainian secrets for generations – along with the difficulty of maintaining the very fabric of life. The writer collects the threads of human lives and weaves them into the fabric of a story, weaves a cloak of native history, a pokrova of words, if I may use a comparison to Cossack icons. She is an intermediary, an advocate of Ukrainian Penelopes and Antigones, for years waiting in vain for their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers, unable to mourn them.

In the end, these silent or barely audible women’s "secrets" proved more resilient and enduring than loud male "narratives." With Chernobyl's toxic gulp of freedom, as the writer says, Ukrainian women regained their voice and were the first to dare to protest against the denial of catastrophic reality by the Soviet authorities. From this cry, Ukrainian independence was born and the word returned. Today, the free nation does not have to remain silent. Its story is much bigger that the world ever expected. The paradox is that putting into words humanity's most horrific experience – the reality of modern warfare – seems again to be a woman's task.

Meanwhile, we're celebrating an exceptional writer, Kassandra, who has been writing about the impending war for years. Literature does not so much praise as it warns, says Oksana Zabuzhko, and compares writers to a dosimeter that senses what is yet to be seen. About her own internal sensor, she says that it has been making noise for a long time without stopping.

She warned us not only about Russia. She also warned us against the re-enslavement of minds and the betrayal of humanity. Against the postmodern relativism that relieves one of responsibility and which Russia has learned to imitate in order to imperceptibly carry out its sinister plan.

At the same time, she gives us an impulse to rethink the last thirty years. We did kind of know that Russia is a matryoshka. But when, after breaking down the Soviet layer, a red-cheeked babushka emerged, "Western democracies" greeted her with relief, and it was not proper for us to ask in such respectable company – why are your eyes so big? Why are your teeth so big? We couldn't hear the voice from Ukraine, we couldn't understand it. Only today do we see the corpse of an empire that has not gone down in history. And we realise that a lot has been done over the last thirty years to justify its existence anew in our heads. We agree with you, today empires rule over imagination and memory, and culture becomes their weapon. This is why the disarmament of an imagined empire is as important as a military victory over it. This is why Ukrainians are fighting on both fronts. On the battlefield and on the front of imagination. In case of the latter, we must also be extremely vigilant.

Fortunately, Vincenz's circle included those who were the first to understand that there is no free Poland without a free Ukraine – Giedroyć, Mieroszewski, Osadczuk and others. Sixty years on, this truth seems to be much larger. There is no safe Central Europe without a free Ukraine, a safe European Union, a safe democracy. This war, as you say, seemed to be your internal matter, and it has become a matter of civilisation at large.

But let's put it aside for a moment and let's go back to Stanisław Vincenz, that Polish nobleman, Ukrainian and Jewish enough for elements of his beloved homeland to melt inside him together. Czesław Miłosz saw in him the patron of a specific tribe, which started beneficial ferments in our region. You are very much alike. You have more Poland in you than any country other than your own. You feel the same about our bond, which Vincenz called fraternity, and you called cousin-sisterhood. Stanisław would be happy with such a spiritual federation.

I can see his broad Slavic face, bald head defined with grey hair, a smile and hands spreading before you in a gesture of welcome. Welcoming someone for whom writing means feeling and thinking with others, and books are a way of holding hands. To be close and never let go.

And one more thing. The war took you both away from your homes, away from your libraries, away from the computer. It took you away from your homeland, thrusting you into the world as if into the air. And yet Vincenz was never exiled, Miłosz said. Around him spread the land filled with everything he needed for everyday delight. And what is left for you as a writer except for one suitcase? You answer: "Memory. Language. A supply of untold stories. Not so little at all.” But we will read about it soon in your new book…

Łukasz Galusek