Ilya's Kharkov Travelogue

Host: ilyavinarsky

My Brother's and My Trip to Ukraine, July 1999

2. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:05:20 PM
Two more developments were auspicious. One is that as a night school student at the UW, I have access to the university library, which has a large Slavistica collection, much larger than UC Berkeley's, which I started checking out – the Russian-language books such as Ilf and Petrov I could read together with my wife, and Ukrainian-language books just myself. I also checked out some Russian and Ukrainian linguistics books, including one published in Kiev in the early 1990s containing the so-called "forbidden" works, such as one by a turn-of-the-century Galician linguist who claimed that Ukrainian is closer to Serbian than to Russian. The other development is the Internet (and the fast connection Microsoft employees can enjoy), and its spread to Ukraine, which made things like Kharkov evening TV news and especially right-wing Kiev newspaper "The Day" accessible to the readers all over the world. (Actually, I am proud of pushing for some of the increased support for the Ukrainian and the Belarusian languages in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and Microsoft Office 2000 – however, the regional marketing director says that given the piracy rate in the region, spending resources on strong support for these languages is not economical.) I read every page of every issue of the Ukrainian edition of "The Day" for about three months this winter and spring, and the picture it showed was pretty bleak. Economic crisis, youths not drafted into the army because they are malnourished, people eat nothing but macaroni, consumption of butter decreases year after year, there is an epidemic of tuberculosis. Although all of this is true, the actual picture, as I learned, is a little more complicated, since a very large part of the Ukrainian economy is underground and unaccounted for by such statistics.

3. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:05:46 PM
I searched for a place where I could help, found the homepage of SINTEZ charity (later I wrote my own homepage for them), wrote to them, and gave them a certain amount of money. Unfortunately, they aren't registered in the United States, so my employer didn't match the donation, nor will I be able to deduct it from my taxes.

4. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:06:07 PM
Another happy set of circumstances was that I created a homepage, gave it to AltaVista, and my middle school classmate's girlfriend looked through some old photographs, searched for my name on the Internet, found the homepage, wrote to me, and I wrote to the classmate. He replied in Ukrainian that he doesn't think I could've realized myself so much had I stayed there. He has served in a military construction battalion, worked at a tape player assembly line, then through a "workers' faculty" (which was in its last year; we later joked that "the class stratification became official") was admitted to the Department of Foreign Languages of Kharkiv State University, and now works as a translator between Russian and Ukrainian on the one hand, and English, German, Dutch, Polish, Czech and Slovak on the other. He is a Ukrainian nationalist, and only spoke to me in Ukrainian – I tried to reply to him in this language, too, but usually found myself lacking in vocabulary after 10 seconds, and switched to Russian or English. Other classmates, with whom he's been friends since the 7th grade, also speak Uke in his presence, but when he is gone, switch to Russian, as it is more familiar to a Kharkovite.

5. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:06:21 PM
My brother also decided to go, but kept postponing this, as he wanted to apply to medical school (and I have night school classes – the spring quarter one had a final, which I couldn't miss). He also had an appendectomy operation; he said he was lucky to have been operated in the United States rather than over there. Finally I told him, either we go this June or July, or I go alone. So we went together. In order to go to Ukraine as a tourist, you need a formal invitation, so we procured a bogus one from a friend of my mother's, about a "lycée summer school" inviting my 22-year-old brother as a specialist in the field of teaching biology, and me as a specialist in the field of teaching computer science. He handled the visa process and the tickets; I suspect that if I had handled the tickets, the trip would've been much cheaper. My brother also had all the gifts for the friends of our mother's and our relatives from both sides, some of whom tend our grandparents' graves. We left on July 7th, and came back on the 22nd; a day and a half was spent in Kiev, at a friend of a friend of our mother's, whose husband is the technical director of a small airline. So we stayed just over a week in Kharkov.

6. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:06:34 PM
In Kharkov, we stayed at a friend of my mother's. He is a neurologist with a citywide reputation, and his wife is the head of the laboratory at a tuberculosis clinic, which was literally across the street from their apartment building. So despite the economic crisis, they live quite well by that country's standards, and have a small automobile – and when we were there, a fuel crisis hit the country, and there was no gasoline in the city. The charity I had contacts with works closely with the clinic, and in fact it had an office inside the clinic, which the government inspectors were deathly afraid to enter – this coincidence was quite unexpected, and our hostess said everyone in the clinic was very excited that the man who gave them money was staying with her. The clinic is seriously understaffed and underfunded compared to the Soviet times. Unfortunately, a couple of months ago the charity people wrote to me that their office was robbed, and the computer and the printer were stolen. Our hosts' only son, 25 years old, recently finished medical college. The young man, whose name is the same as mine, used our arrival as an excuse to live at a friend's. He and his friend showed me the characteristic gesture of the nouveau riche Russians (middle and ring fingers as in a fist, thumb, index finger and pinky spread out), and told contemporary jokes. One of his friends asked me if it is hard for a traumatologist to find a job in the United States. He is a counselor in a Jewish day camp, among other things, and told me "shocking" stories about the utter ignorance among Kharkiv Jewish children about things Jewish – for example, some wear crosses because they are "in". He says there is a large religious revival nowadays, touching all faiths and cults, where people find solace during the uncertain times, so churches have big money.

7. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:07:32 PM
Our hosts also have a dog and a cat, which constantly gets pregnant, and they do not have the nerve to spay it. When we were there, the cat had three kittens, which were lovely to play with, but they didn't let us get any sleep at night. They usually give the kittens away to a woman who sells them at a flea market, and pretend not to know what she does to kittens she cannot sell. They also have a large library, including a Marxist history of the United States, which claims that the American Civil War was caused by capitalism's need to expand, and excellent translations of Ray Bradbury, in book form and a magazine cutout, which scan better than the originals. I started reading Dmytro Bahalyy's History of Sloboda Ukraine (1918, republished in 1990), which I later bought at the Kiev book bazaar, and read through The Secret Russian Tales (sexually explicit folk tales published in Switzerland in the mid-19th century, which only saw the light in Russia in the 1990s). Some of the tales still survive as dirty jokes, e.g. "Is your dick long enough to reach your ass?" Our host also gave me an excellent edition of Alan Alexander Milne's Winnie the Pooh books in Boris Zakhoder's retelling, as a gift for my wife's son. I told him various funny things about the kid, and we've talked about literature and life. When I told him about the shelter, he asked whether the people who run it are laundering money; I answered that it doesn't look like it, but even if they do, they are doing far more good than bad, and he agreed. The hostess took my brother for a trip to the countryside; I didn't go.

8. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:08:00 PM
The 1937 Law of the Soviet Passport, promulgated by the Council of People's Commissars, is still substantially in force, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the contemporary social and economic reality. According to this law, my brother and I, being foreigners, had to register with the local police within three days. When we crossed the border, we had to pay the health care insurance duty (I don't think any other country has this insanity), and received a registration slip; the opposite side had an advertisement for a strip bar in Kiev – on an official document! In Kharkov, at first we thought we had to go to the visa office, and I waited for several hours in a stifling hallway filled with scrawny Caucasian- and Central Asian-looking men and women, until my brother came with another friend of our mother's, who went in and through her personal channels found out that in fact, we had to go to the district police department. However, in the district police department, the appropriate room in the passport office was closed; I climbed upon my brother's shoulders and saw through the window above the door that it was empty. The next day, the passport office was closed – "Anya is sick." When I asked the policeman on duty, what we should do, he gave me two internal telephone numbers. At one number, no one picked up the phone, at the other one, I was interrupted and told in mixed Russian-Ukrainian, "I have nothing to do with the passport office." So when we flew back, we told this story to the border policemen at the airport, and they decided to fine one of us, but write the papers as if both of us were fined. This story illustrates, how official business is done in today's Ukraine.

9. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:08:20 PM
There were two women waiting with me near the passport office. One was a 20something, who was born in Ukraine, went to a Ukrainian-language school, gave birth to her child in Ukraine, but when the Soviet Union broke up, she was studying in a nursing school in Minsk. Now she was an apatride. In order to get Ukrainian citizenship, she had to take an AIDS test, and who knows how clean the needles with which they take it are. The other was a 60something, who spoke in Ukrainian about how bad Kuchma is, and how good Stalin was. She said that after the war, America wanted to give the Soviet Union money, but Stalin refused (she probably meant the Marshall Plan). I pointed out that the famine of 1946 could've been prevented (there was a dreadful famine that year). She said that indeed, crops failed that year, but allegedly everyone had something to eat – and now, after 40 years of working, she cannot afford to buy milk or repair her shoes, the American loans are going to Kuchma's cronies (which happens to be plausible), and my grandchildren would still be repaying them – she didn't know I was from America, and it is to my grandchildren that they would be repaid.

10. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:09:41 PM
Kharkov / Kharkiv is the unofficial capital of Eastern Ukraine, just like Lviv / Lvov / Lwów / Lemberg / Leopolis / Singapura is of Western Ukraine, and Eastern Ukraine is more industrialized and more prosperous than Western Ukraine. As the capital, it attracts the people who became rich under the new regime. We saw a Mercedes SUV, a Jeep Cherokee, and other expensive foreign-made cars in downtown Kharkov. There is a gun salon on Sumskaya Street, though it allegedly only sells hunting weapons and the such, they told my brother that the weapons can be easily altered. Our mother's friend's daughter works at a travel bureau; she says that not long before, a man who was officially unemployed bought a U.S. $24,000 tour of Australia. As far as I could see, much of the new industry caters to the tastes of the new rich. For example, there were only three more people on the flight between Kharkov and Kiev, which our mother's aviation friend booked for us; I asked the steward, "How can such a flight pay for itself?", he said, "This is promotional; we mostly fly to Athens, [Greek] Cyprus, Tel Aviv..." The translator classmate said that the estimates are that 60% of the Ukrainian economy is underground. Which seems plausible given what others told us – the sum total of legal taxes can reach 90%, and there are also the bribes which officials demand (which can be understood, considering their salaries), so businesses hide their profits. I was told about a small business owner who said directly to the official, "Give me two years to stand on my feet, and I'll give you a quarter of the profits," but the official's mentality precluded planning for two years ahead. The chairman of the charity told me that Ukrainian law allows businesses to donate up to 4% of their profits to charities, but nobody tells their profits, so they suffer.

11. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:09:53 PM
The old heavy industry works at very low capacity, and pays low wages. Newspaper "The Day" wrote about how a British company, which has already acquired the majority of the aluminum industry in Russia, was trying to get its mitts on an aluminum plant in Nikolaev, using tactics not in Bill Gates's wet dreams. I don't know whether it succeeded; in Russia, it cut down the wages and especially the benefits. My father's cousin, who is a skilled worker, was laid off the electronics factory where he worked six years ago, took to installing radio antennas, and now is an engineer (whatever this means) at a radio station, and gets 200 hryvnias a month. His wife has an engineering diploma, but she works as a part-time watchwoman, and gets 50 hryvnias a month (this is how much things cost). My father gives him some money, and he tends his relatives' graves.

12. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:10:12 PM
The bright side is that despite the horrors told in the newspapers, we didn't see any malnourished people (though my brother pointed at a girl in the subway whose arms were unusually thin – but she could've been sick rather than hungry), and we went to working-class neighborhoods (such as the one where these relatives live) and not just the downtown. However, Kharkov is in a better state economically than Donetsk or Luhansk, or so we were told. Some enterprises are growing, including the Kharkov Biscuit Factory, which was recently ISO 9001 certified (my translator classmate worked as an interpreter there), and the Rohan beer plant, which is the biggest unpasteurized beer producer in Europe, and also makes nonalcoholic beverages such as kvass. There was also some construction going on, though not as much as before; for example, in the house where my brother and I were born (which is a mixed residential/commercial), the old dairy store was being torn down, and a new grocery store built, presumably for the local residents – and this is not a rich neighborhood, by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, everything looked dilapidated, with many buildings, even in the downtown, lacking tiles or moldings and exposing the cement scab underneath – but this could be just the contrast with America.

13. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:10:37 PM
With our father's cousin's pensioner mother, we visited the Jewish cemetery where our relatives from the father's side are buried. The gravestones of our great-grandparents' generation are in both Hebrew and Russian; those of our grandparents' generation are in Russian only. I've since asked an Israeli mathematician, what the Hebrew means, and he says, the same as the Russian (name, patronymic, birth date, death date). She was very eager to feed us cooked beef with potatoes, and we refused just as insistently, telling her we'd eaten already. She says she always buys yesterday's cabbage because it is 20 kopecks cheaper, and only the outer leaf turns black, which is easy to tear off. Near the market where she buys cabbage and the subway station, there was a makeshift shooting range in a tent, where you shoot at toys from a BB gun, or at a soda can if that's too hard. My brother and I made ten shots each.

14. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:12:17 PM
With our mother's second cousin, we visited the non-Jewish cemetery where our maternal grandfather is buried, and renovated the grave. The 60something man went through a radical Baptist phase, and was now a militant Jew. Before the cemetery, he dragged us to a synagogue, which was returned to the believers in the 1990s. The rabbi was an American expatriate who spoke broken Russian. I apologized before him for appearing, saying that I was an atheist and believed that all he wanted was power. The rabbi offered us to pray, and my brother and I refused, saying that it would be hypocritical for non-believers to pray. The relative told us various things about our grandfather. I asked him, Is it true that he had a Russian wife before WWII, but when he came back from the front, she was with another man? He said that the Chief Rabbi of Kharkov and Province says that a Russian wife isn't really a wife, but more akin to woman who rides next to you in a streetcar for 20 minutes, or for 20 years. His own wife is Russian, as is mine. He then gave us our grandfather's papers, which we lost in a subway car.

15. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:13:00 PM
My friend Volodya is that nationalist translator guy. I spent quite some time in his company, and even stayed overnight once. His mother is a technical translator, too, and his father is a retired officer, forgot the rank, who participated in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He is a late child; he also has a brother some 10 years older than he. He still hangs around with the same middle and high school buddies, and lives with his parents. He told me he isn't rich enough to buy his own apartment, and if he married into another family, he would have to tolerate a mother-in-law. He is a servant of the illegal economy, working in the Chamber of Commerce and translating, for example, the technical passports of the imported German and American cars. Recently, he wrote to me, he did a stint for a humanitarian aid mission, distributing medical equipment from mobile field hospitals from East Germany, which were to be used in the event of invasion of Western Europe, to Ukrainian hospitals. The 1980s equipment is much superior to the 1950s and 1960s equipment in use there, where you have to develop X-ray film by hand, like Wilhelm Roentgen did. So he doesn't live very badly, although a 50kg sack of sugar stands in his apartment, as it is cheaper than buying sugar in small quantities.

16. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:13:38 PM
Volodya and his mother have many linguistics books and dictionaries, including a dictionary of a Gypsy dialect and a teach-yourself Yiddish book (I gave Volodya a small Grundig receiver as a gift, and asked for the Yiddish book, but then changed my mind – I should first do the Uriel Weinreich college textbook). For his German, he borrows books from the local Goetheinstitut (there is one in Kharkiv, as well as a branch of Alliance Francaise), and for his Polish, he reads the Polish-language supplement of some Kiev newspaper. Volodya told me much about his life and military service. I told him about my life, my wife and her child, and life in the United States. He was very interested in things like the relations between the blacks and the Jews, the trade unions, the health care system. I didn't know before that a Soviet Army soldier doesn't get a fork; the Kharkov historical museum had an exhibition about the German occupation of Kharkov, which had a German Army soldier mess kit, which included a fork; this means that the Wermacht treated its soldiers better than the 1990s Soviet Army did. Volodya gave me a very precious gift, a collection of coins commemorative of Ukrainian history. Unfortunately, I left it at our hosts', so the coins are waiting until another visit.

17. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:14:16 PM
Besides Volodya, I met another classmate, Borya, who graduated from the Mechanics division of the Mathematics-Mechanics department of Kharkov State University, and who now teaches mathematics and computer science to future accountants. When I said that because they live in a consumerist society, Americans mature slower than Russians, he laughed at me, and told me that the students in his charge are remarkably immature. Two more classmates, who are identical twins, Serezha and Tima, are now working as computer programmers. I was glad to hear that they all got an education and a skilled job, which is quite something for that country. None of them expected to see me in their lifetime, nor did I ever expect to see them. With Volodya and Borya, and Volodya's friend Darya (he calls her by the Ukrainian form of the name, Daryna, although she isn't Ukrainian) we went to the Kharkov book bazaar. A copy of Microsoft Office 2000 sells for 10 hryvnias ($2.50). Although most books there were schlock, I bought selected poetry by Pushkin, a used The Kobza Player by Shevchenko, a used collection of plays by wonderful playwright Eugene Schwartz, a used collection of novellas about WWII by Belarusian existentialist writer Vasyl Bykau, and an excellent Uke-language primer for the kid. I don't remember what, if anything, the other guys bought. We went to Volodya's apartment, and I read out some politically incorrect erotic poetry by Pushkin (Borya bashfully noted that it isn't taught in school), and Volodya read out an excerpt from a Romantic poem by Shevchenko about a hypocritical Russian officer who seduced a Ukrainian peasant girl.

18. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:14:51 PM
As I was the guest of honor, Volodya showed me a 1915 issue of illustrated magazine "Niva" (an equivalent of Life magazine at the time), and a few 1920s and a 1960s issue of illustrated magazine "Ogonyok". It made for absolutely fascinating reading, not as much the articles themselves as the classifieds. One article was about German scientists who allegedly rejuvenated an old ram using testicle extracts – did Bulgakov really have to invent anything for his Heart of a Dog? Volodya also showed a 1908 edition of Shevchenko's poetry, published when Ukrainian spelling had not yet standardized. Borya said that the "Kozlov" of Shevchenko's poem set in the 17th century was Slavicized Crimean Tatar Gezlev, which is now called Yevpatoria. Unfortunately, I left at 2 at night, and a police detachment stopped me. I had no documents on hand, so they searched my pockets, but didn't find anything suspicious, so they let me go.

19. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:21:29 PM
I don't know if any Simon-pure saints have ever walked the earth, but of all the people I've seen in my 27 years, Valery Ivanov comes the closest. He is about 35 years old, a Russian from Novosibirsk. His father served in the Air Force, he told that they used to trade helicopter window antifreeze fluid, which contained alcohol, to the local Siberian aborigines, who could waste an entire pack of reindeer in the course of a drinking binge. Valery has been a gamekeeper (he told me that if you want to make a fire in the taiga, you should cut out a circle of turf, make the fire, and then put the turf back) and a high school biology teacher. I don't know what made him and his wife choose the path of social work, but something must have. He and his wife Irina organized a charity helping out the poorest children, and last year opened a shelter, obtaining a free 10-year lease of an old kindergarten building in a resort town near Kharkov, where the nouveaux riches Ukrainians are now building two- and three-storied dacha behind brick fences. I met Ivanov in the tuberculosis clinic, a volunteer drove us to the shelter, and Valery showed me around the shelter. I told him that besides my own money, I could try raising money at Microsoft (which I did, but it didn't bring any results) and get an American social worker, who specializes in runaway children, to visit them (Donna Dear, who used to visit Salon Magazine Table Talk forum, with whom I corresponded much privately, who is going to Ukraine in January). There are a great many homeless children in Kharkov because it is a railroad hub connecting two countries, Russia and Ukraine.

20. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:21:44 PM
There were 21 children and adolescents in the all-boys shelter, plus the Ivanovs' own two children Seryozha and Olya. Many of the children have horrific life histories; for example, two brothers were fed boiled hay by their mother, and forced to beg at the railroad terminal for two years; the mother drank away the money with men. They live there, eat there (they are, in fact, breeding goslings and rabbits), but go to regular school in the town. Valery runs it all, for example, arranging that a 12-year-old who only had 2 years of formal schooling finishes several grades in the course of a year. The children are remarkably well behaved considering their background, except when my brother played soccer with them, one called another 'chickenshit'. This is probably due as much to their awareness of the precariousness of their life in the shelter as to Valery's strong personality and sense of what is right. In fact, Valery is a friend of a pastor of a local evangelical church, whose members provided volunteer labor in renovating the shelter building for the winter and who preaches to the children. I don't like this connection – usually it is up to the parents to choose a child's religion, and here the parents aren't consulted – though of course Valery cannot be too picky about his friends.

21. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:23:09 PM
Besides the first trip, I went there once more for a multiple children's birthday party, with my brother. Volodya wanted to go too, but there was a miscommunication, so he waited near the TB clinic office instead of the dispensary, and missed us. The volunteer driver was late because his old Opel collided with a BMW(!!!). They put on a good performance, as one can in the photographs on the shelter's homepage. The man in the first slide has been a coal miner among other things; he was organizing a similar shelter in Donetsk. He played the wicked witch who wanted to kidnap and eat the kids whose birthdays were in July, and asked the others to cheer him up so he'd mellow out. Which they did; they also put up a Club of the Cheerful and Resourceful quiz show, and parodies of popular actors such as Verka Serdiuchka (a man who is impersonating a woman train conductor, who drinks portwine and speaks mixed Russian-East Ukrainian). After the show, the children had a dinner, and then did the adults. The cook was a retired volunteer from the town. I quoted Hillary Clinton to the effect that it takes a village to raise a child. People told various stories; Valery told that story about the window antifreeze fluid, and about a brilliant friend of his who married a Siberian aboriginal woman, and was given lavish gifts by her parents, 50000 Soviet rubles if I remember correctly, but divorced her two years later. I asked, Where could they get such money? Valery and Irina replied simultaneously that they have nothing to spend it on.

22. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:30:21 PM
The children were told that I hail from America, and pelted me with questions about Jackie Chan (I said that he studied Chinese opera for 10 years; Irina Ivanov said that you have to practice long and hard to do what he does), and whether "Arnold" rides a tank (I said that this means he has too much extra money). A boy who looked 12 asked me, "Excuse me, are you a Jew by nationality?" I said that I am a Jew, and there is nothing to excuse him for. A man from a company which films weddings and the such filmed the birthday party. I was given 3 copies of the tape, and have since sent two to friends of Valery's in the United States, and one (converted to NTSC format) to Donna Dear. In the car on the way to Kharkov, the cameraman said that it is characteristic that a Russian organized something like this; allegedly, a Ukrainian would never do that.

23. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:31:14 PM
The cultural environment that I saw was in a state of flux, and resembling that described in novel The Golden Calf by Ilf and Petrov, which is set in early Stalinist Russia – the old interleaved with the genuinely new, the old masquerading as new, and with poorly digested Western influences. An example of the third is that in the school where I (and Volodya, and the others) went, the bust of Lenin disappeared, and a mural appeared of a Ukrainian man and woman in folk costumes, and a stanza from the poem by mediocre poet Volodymyr Sosiura, "Love Ukraine" – otherwise, nothing seems to have changed. An example from the fourth is a café in downtown Kharkiv whose owner wanted to write "delis" in English, but wrote, "delice". At the same time, the old statue of Lenin still stands, and in the Kharkiv Polytechnic, a statue of Young-Lenin-as-a-Student-at-Kazan-University (when Borya saw it, he declaimed, "I swear to love my Motherland, as Lenin loved her, and to serve in the military, as Lenin served in it.") And in downtown Kharkiv, there was a small new bookstore called "Serendipity" in a cellar, which had "elitist" books, including Mishima Yukio and Abe Kobo in Russian translation, and nihilist author Vladimir Sorokin. I bought mystic Orientalist historian Lev Gumilyov's From Rus to Russia and a small volume of poems by his father, modernist poet Nikolai Gumilyov. They said a guy from Luhansk recently showed up there, and looked at the collection with wild eyes, as none of this was even remotely available in his hometown.

24. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:31:43 PM
Russian- and Ukrainian-language books was mostly what I went there for, and bought about 20 of them, of various kinds. Apart from the books, I bought 2 Ukrainian-language CDs by groups Piccardiyska Tertsiya (one of the songs is in German, and one is in Spanish, but the rest are in Galician Ukrainian) and Vopli Vidopliassova (which is in Russian and East Ukrainian), and Russian-language CDs by Vladimir Vysotsky, Alexander Galich and Alexander Vertinsky, as well as a big embroidered scarf ("khustochka") for my wife, which my wife's son immediately declared to be his blanket, and a metal erector set (so far, it is me who plays with it, my wife's son preferring Lego models of Star Wars I fighter craft, for example; but he eagerly plays with the models I've assembled). The customs inspector told me that I should've declared the CDs of the popular singers as "exporting information", which he could've confiscated – but he didn't.

25. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:33:51 PM
Buying books in Ukraine has two peculiarities. One is that there is no countrywide distribution system. So if Lviv publishing house Kameniar (the stonecutter, reference to a poem by Ivan Franko) puts out a novel by Yuri Andrukhovych, it isn't sold in any stores in the Donbass. It is likewise with Kharkiv publisher Folio. The second peculiarity is the development of the book bazaar – there is a big one in Kharkov almost daily, and an even bigger one in Kiev (there is also an auto parts bazaar, which the shelter's volunteer driver frequents, and little corner markets everywhere where you can buy everything from a wooden toy flute to farm cheese to socks – and plentiful fried sunflower seeds). Perhaps this has to do with the fact that no private business is being allowed to develop to a size where it could become a Barnes&Ignoble or a Kragen Auto.

26. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:36:37 PM
For the kid, I bought an excellent Ukrainian primer (the first page shows a girl with her mother in folk costumes in a wheatfield, with tall city buildings in the background – the kid says, "Seattle"), Il Burattino (Aleksei Tolstoy's retelling of Pinocchio) and took the gift of Winnie the Pooh (which we read very enthusiastically). His grandmother in Novosibirsk already showers him with children's books, so there wasn't any need for more. In Ukrainian, I bought two novels by Yury Andrukhovych in one book, Recreations and The Moscoviad, in store called "Art" in downtown Kiev, a few short stories by Volodymyr Vinnichenko (a turn-of-the-century socialist author, who later became one of the leaders of the anti-Communist socialist government in Ukraine), a collection of poems by Taras Shevchenko (the Ukrainian serf Shakespeare), and a "forbidden" anti-Russian play The Noblewoman by the brilliant turn-of-the-century poetess Lesia Ukrainka. In Russian, I bought a collection of poems by Alexander Pushkin (the Russian aristo Shakespeare), 1960s manic-depressive poet Gennady Shpalikov, and 1910s modernist poet Nikolai Gumilyov. Also From Rus to Russia by Orientalist mystic Lev Gumilyov, History of Sloboda Ukraine by Dmytro Bahaliy, historian who was the mayor of Kharkov in the early 1900s, novel about the Battle of Stalingrad Life and Fate by Vasily (Iosif) Grossman, plays by the 1940s playwright Eugene Schwartz, and perhaps a few more books. Yeah – and also Foundations of Modern Analysis by the French Bourbakist Jean Dieudonné, and The Theory of Probability by Albert Shiryayev (my boss, who has a Ph.D. in probability theory, says, "It is Russian, therefore it's unreadable.").

27. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:36:46 PM
The Grossman book cost four times less than Abe Kobo's The Woman in the Dunes, which shows how much today's readers care about the Battle of Stalingrad and the novel's equating of Stalin's Communism and Hitler's National Socialism.

28. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:38:08 PM
If you've declared independence, and want to encourage the growth of national culture, you can use a stick and a carrot. The stick (e.g. restrictions on teaching of Russian in schools and on the use of Russian as the official language) has already been applied (e.g. all buildings of Kharkov Polytechnic have two plaques, with the name of the building in Ukrainian and in English – no Russian, even though Kharkov is overwhelmingly Russian-speaking). However, there is no carrot in the sense of subsidizing Ukrainian culture. Although Volodya is a Ukrainian nationalist, he hasn't heard about the authors in the Glas magazine – and why would he, if they aren't available on sale in Kharkov? On the contrary, book publishing is taxed so heavily, some authors, according to newspaper "The Day", switch to Russian in hope of being published in Russia. When I asked at Kiev book bazaar, where I could buy contemporary Ukrainian literature, I was told that I had better chances of buying contemporary Chinese, Japanese and Korean literatures.

29. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:41:05 PM
I alone, and then again with my brother, came to the house where we were born. The house was on Otakar Jaros street; Jaros was a Slovak who distinguished himself during the 1943 liberation of Kharkiv, in which a Czechoslovak battalion took part, and who was the first foreigner Hero of the Soviet Union (Gamal Abdul Nasser was a subsequent one). I remember the apartment house well from a 7-year-old's perspective, so when I saw it as a 26-year-old, everything seemed strangely small. There were flies buzzing on the stairwell. A small boy was walking around almost naked; his grandma asked him whether he had eaten. Older boys were playing cards on a wooden table near the house, sitting on a wooden bench and cussing. In general, a great many children were walking around, probably getting home after school. On a bench near the house, it was written with a red ballpoint pen, "red nigger" – the word is a recent borrowing from English.

30. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:41:16 PM
Not far from the house is a skytrain station, connecting the street with a park. Underneath the skytrain, there is a large wooded park and a university botanical garden. In the park, there is a spring of mineral water with which people fill bottles for free. When I was small, my father took me there many times. A young man with a gas balloon stood there, and for a small fee carbonated the water. Two women brought a horse and a pony, which they let children ride for a fee. Near the house where we were born, there was powdery dried horseshit on the ground, apparently dropped by one of the horses. There were many people visiting the park; on the path from the street, several old women were selling fried sunflower seeds. A spoiled squirrel was begging the visitors for them, sitting on the fence of the botanical garden. A mother was holding a well-dressed fat baby. It was quiet, hot, green, the sun was bright; only the creek flowing from the spring was dirty with litter. There was an advertisement for a Montessori preschool near the mineral water spring. This idyllic picture was strangely inconsistent with the notion of a country in an economic crisis.

31. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:42:21 PM
My brother and I visited the Kharkov historical museum, which has a WWI tank, a WWII tank, which children climb, some WWII-era heavy guns, and a stone Scythian warrior near the entrance (I don't know if it's authentic or a replica). The museum was much smaller than it used to be. He exhibition that day was about the German occupation of Kharkov during WWII. It had many artifacts, including a German incendiary bomb (a girl asked her mother, why there is a propeller on the bomb – I said that probably, it is supposed to explode after a certain number of revolutions), a German soldier's mess kit, the list of books the German occupation authorities required to be removed from the libraries (in 3 separate categories – Jewish authors, Ukrainian authors, Jewish-Ukrainian authors), and some collaborationist propaganda, which used the same trident symbol as modern-day Ukraine. I wonder if a WWII museum in, say, France would be honest enough to exhibit collaborationist propaganda. A recording was being played with Molotov's speech to the nation on June 22nd, 1941, "The enemy shall be defeated. The victory shall be ours." (Stalin did not address the nation because he was having a nervous breakdown.) There were also some war-related documents and diaries. One document was signed by Kalinin; when I said to my brother that Kalinin was the President of the Soviet Union, and his wife was in a labor camp, which shows how much real power he had, the curator corrected me that he was the Prime Minister. When I told the curator that I saw a young man in a Waffen SS T-shirt walking down Lenin Avenue, she complained that there is no moral education in schools nowadays. By the way, nihilist author Vladimir Sorokin, whose 2-volume set was on sale in the "intellectual" bookstore "Serendipity", has a piece about a masochist visiting Dachau in an alternate universe where the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were at peace – so the curator is right, nothing is sacred nowadays.

32. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:42:59 PM
We also visited the WWII museum in Kiev, which I last visited at age 14 with my father. It changed from an all-Soviet perspective to a specifically Ukrainian one. The exhibition was very moving and powerful, telling much about the German invasion, the German occupation, including concentration camps, and the liberation, and had fascinating artifacts, including Zhukov's uniform. It touched on such topics, taboo during Soviet times, as the anti-Communist Ukrainian partisans, the annexation of Bukovyna and Halychyna, and the killing of the Jews. There were also the banners of the vanquished armies, including a Japanese one (when I was there at age 14, a visitor didn't know the USSR had been at war with Japan). At the top, there was a dome with the names of all Heroes of the Soviet Union. Zhukov was on top with four stars. When I was there last time, Brezhnev was on top with five stars. Whatever happened to Brezhnev – did somebody take away his stars? Last time, my father pointed out turbine engineer Shubenko-Shubin, who was a Hero of Socialist Labor; he was still there. I didn't look for Otakar Jaros or Gamal Abdul Nasser.

33. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:43:15 PM
A part of the museum for which you had to have a separate ticket contained many WWII-era and postwar tanks, including a self-made one used during the defense of Odessa, armored cars, self-propelled guns and missile launchers. I was out of film, so unfortunately I didn't photograph them (for which you had to pay a separate fee). There was another exhibition on the Afghanistan War, where my wife's first love blew up on a landmine, but it was closed – we came too late. Compared to the Imperial War Museum in London, which I visited in May 1995, the museum in Kiev was strangely empty (was it because it was a workday?). I asked the ticket lady if it was possible to buy a prospectus, and she started complaining that they had no money, that they were afraid electricity would be switched off for nonpayment. So far for the national pride.

34. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:43:27 PM
In Kiev, we also went to the Cave Monastery – my brother went in with our hostess, and I asked to be let go, and took a stroll / rode the bus and the subway through Kiev. Near the cave monastery, there were leaflets warning that the social security number scheme, which was being introduced by the Ukrainian state, was a creation of the devil. The monastery had a book kiosk with religious literature, including an introduction to the life of a young monk, written in Russian with a heavy Church Slavonic admixture. Newspaper "The Day" wrote about a convent that opened in Lutsk, Western Ukraine; the average age of the nuns was 23 – apparently, they saw no perspective in secular life. A swarthy Caucasian-looking woman was begging. There were also many beggars, including children and an armless man, in the Kiev subway, more than in Kharkiv but incomparably fewer than in San Francisco. Volodya said that when he last visited the monastery, Russian churchmen were selling anti-Semitic pamphlets, but I haven't seen this.

35. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:44:33 PM
The language situation in today's Ukraine is very complicated, and worthy of a Ph.D. dissertation at the very least (even if you don't count minority languages such as Romanian in Bukovina). In short, the entire population, urban and rural, is bilingual in Russian and Ukrainian to some degree. The rural population, with few exceptions (for example, the descendants of 19th-century settlers from Russia proper), speaks Ukrainian as the first language and Russian as the second language. However, the farther east you go, the more contaminated with Russian it is. This is the case with the speech of the shelter's pensioner volunteer cook, for instance. With the city dwellers, the rule of thumb is that in Lviv, Ukrainian is spoken always, in Kiev, often, and in Kharkiv, never – but everyone understands it. All the street signs and subway announcements are in Ukrainian, less frequently in two languages. Both languages are taught in school from the first grade on. There isn't any resistance to it because people consider themselves (and actually are) of the same ethnic stock as the Ukrainian speakers farther west. The only place where this isn't the case is Crimea. Volodya always speaks Ukrainian to everyone, though it is obvious that it is not his native tongue, and he is always understood, which wouldn't be the case in Russia. When he spoke it to a grocery store clerk, she exclaimed in Ukrainian, "Are you from Kiev?" and he answered that he is a local. He then said that five years before, people would ask him, "Are you from Lviv?" and now it was Kiev, and five years hence it would be Poltava. There is also a class gradient – when my brother visited the elementary school he went to, the cleaning woman tried hard to speak Russian to him even though it was clear that her native language is Ukrainian.

36. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:44:51 PM
The Soviet-era stigma of Ukrainian being a second-class language seems to be disappearing; in Kiev, a couple of times I asked a question in Russian and was replied to in Ukrainian – especially when I bought a Ukrainian-language book. For the country's president Kuchma, Ukrainian isn't a native language, though he seems to have received professional coaching in it; the country laughs at his mistakes. At least this is better than the situation with the dictator of Belarus Lukashenko, who doesn't speak Belarusian, and once remarked in public that Belarusian is unsuitable for expressing complicated ideas. In the bookstore "Art" in Kiev, there was a pamphlet by some linguist arguing against the extremes of the language policy.

37. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:45:18 PM
That's all I have for now. Questions? Comments?

38. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 5:50:02 PM
I should probably scan and post some photographs, and will do so tonight. Unfortunately, my web server is locked, so all the photographs I've got have to do with the shelter.

39. pseudoerasmus - 11/21/99 7:00:58 PM
During my one trip to Kiev in 1994, I asked as many people as possible about the language situation. What did they speak at home? What did they grow up speaking? I can't recall a single person who said he spoke Ukrainian exclusively. Most people either said a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian or just Russian. So, must one go to Lviv to meet people who have always spoken an unadulterated Ukrainian as their first and primary language?

42. pseudoerasmus - 11/21/99 7:15:45 PM

43. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 7:36:08 PM
I am not sure if such people exist (apart from a few backwoods grandmas who do not recognize electricity). This young woman, a native of Lviv, said to me that Russian is her "second native language"; and indeed her homepage lists poems by the Ukrainain poetess Larissa Kosach and the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetayeva as her favorite.

here is a good article (in Russian) about the current state of the Ukrainian language.

44. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 8:15:35 PM
Kharkov, fall 1999:

45. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 8:17:56 PM
Freedom Square (former Dzerzhinsky Square), Kharkov State University, a statue of Lenin, a 1920s government building:

46. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 8:22:24 PM
Selling milk before an open-air market:

47. ilyavinarsky - 11/21/99 10:56:03 PM
Taras Shevchenko surrounded by his characters. Shevchenko is a pretty mediocre Romantic poet (with few exceptions, such as this) and painter, but he did more for the cause of Ukrainian nationalism than anybody else.

48. stostosto - 11/22/99 10:10:15 AM
Hello, Ilya. I just discovered this thread, and haven't read much yet. But it looks really great, and I am looking forward to doing so soon. Great initiative!

49. pseudoerasmus - 11/22/99 3:03:22 PM
951. ilyavinarsky - 11/19/99 5:56:59 AM
Of course, my puny little travelogue can in no way compare to pseudoerasmus' magnificence, but let me interpose a tiny bit of it. While on the airplane to Munich, I noticed a 50something man reading Isaac Babel in English translation. I spoke to him, and said that Babel is one of my favorite writers. He told that he is an Israeli, a civil engineer who lives and works in Los Angeles, and he'd just started reading Babel's fiction. He did read Babel's diary composed during the 1920 war between nationalist Poland and Communist Russia, and saw that Babel couldn't quite decide whether he was for or against revolution, and whether he was really a Jew or a Russian. I said, "He was an artist," and the civil engineer agreed.

51. ilyavinarsky - 11/22/99 5:22:44 PM
Kiev Cave Monastery:

52. ilyavinarsky - 11/22/99 5:27:51 PM
Kharkov in December 1995, from Konstantin Gredenskol's homepage:

Movie Theater "Ukraina". I was hoping to see some Russian or Ukrainian movies this summer, but unfortunately, all the movie theaters played was "Alien" with Sigourney Weaver, "Armaggeddon" with Bruce Willis and the such.

53. ilyavinarsky - 11/22/99 5:40:00 PM
A fountain, Sumskaya Street, and Kharkov Opera. This July, there were several five- or six-year-olds splashing in the pool behind the fountain. Beyond the pool, there is a little park with Young Pioneer and Young Communist hero statues, and (a sign of the times) a private kindergarten. This is a chain of kindergartens that has several branches, and my high school history teacher is either its director or its co-owner. When I visited the school in July, there was just one person there. I asked her about the teachers, and when she told me this, I asked, "So he was a Communist, and now he is a capitalist?" "No, you shouldn't speak like that," was the reply.

54. PsychProf - 11/23/99 3:31:47 PM
Fascinating stuff....

55. ilyavinarsky - 11/23/99 5:51:59 PM
More Freedom Square, December 1995. Both Lenin and Karazin (the founder of Kharkov University) are pointing to public restrooms.

56. stostosto - 11/23/99 5:52:36 PM
Ilyavinarsky,

This is a wonderful account, packed with myriad detail and observations, personal and general freely interspersed as it should be in a really good travelogue. I just read it in one fell swoop, and I am fascinated.

At the same time I have the feeling of having just been told a great story but having missed many of the points along the way. No, perhaps rather the other way around: Having been told many many great points, but not really having grasped the story itself.

You seem to have been travelling in at least three Ukrainian realms: The realm of your language and literary friends, a realm of poets, novels, plays, language books, reading out of Pushkin's erotic poetry (is such readings commonplace in Ukraine?), perusing sophisticated book stores for old editions of nihilist books, and Galician-Ukrainian music CDs, and gleefully enjoying reading 1940's Ogonyok magazines. The realm of the poor and sick, as in the TB shelter and Valery's shelter for homeless children. And the realm of history, the official and national one at museums and books, and your personal one as in the visit to your childhood home.

I also noticed your frequent registering of the family background of people you were in contact with. And much more. But let's not spill all the beans right away. There is stuff here for much more conversation.

A bloody tour-de-force, that's what it is. Well done!

57. ilyavinarsky - 11/23/99 5:52:40 PM
After Tiananmen, this is the second biggest square in the world.

58. stostosto - 11/24/99 9:07:27 AM
Ilya

You do not say all that much about the lives of ordinary Ukrainians and the contrast with life before - what is the common term? - independence. (Freedom? Capitalism? Democracy? Hmmm.)

You notice the peculiar lack of a nationwide distribution system for books. But isn't there a difference in the selection of books available? You mention "the so-called "forbidden" works, such as one by a turn-of-the-century Galician linguist who claimed that Ukrainian is closer to Serbian than to Russian" (Message # 2). And you say it's easier to get hands on Chinese, Japanese and Korean literature (Message # 22).

But surely the availability and accessibility of information is generally greater now than in communist days?

My (limited) experience with educated East Europeans, and, not least, Russians is that they frown upon the explosion of popular culture, including pornography, shallow gossip and TV entertainment, and I have even heard the view that the literature situation was better during the good bad old days of dissident literature being circulated in home-fabricated copies.

What is your take?

59. stostosto - 11/24/99 9:10:17 AM
correction/addendum:

And you say it's easier to get hands on Chinese, Japanese and Korean literature than contemporary Ukrainian literature(Message # 22 22).

60. pseudoerasmus - 11/24/99 1:46:47 PM
stostosto: not to preempt Ilya's reply, but Kharkov is one of the more Russified parts of Ukraine where the knowledge of the Ukrainian language is shallow and Ukrainian nationalism quite weak. This probably explains why Uke lit wasn't really available in the city. Did Ilya look for Uke lit in Kiev? I'm sure the situation would be different in Lviv.

61. ilyavinarsky - 11/24/99 4:34:34 PM
I think I said quite a bit about the lives of ordinary people.

64. Candide - 11/24/99 7:55:31 PM
Ilya,

your travelogue is wonderfully evocative and I have decided that indeed my Ukrainian women would interrupt the thread. The only reason that I thought that they might be of interest is that they represent the traumatic catalyst that changed that part of the world and one can sort of see the view on both sides of the fence.

I sense a deliberate refusal now in Ukraine to deal with that recent trauma. I suspect that it is always like that everywhere after any dreadful historical event.

68. Candide - 11/25/99 12:12:34 AM
I have heard that established journalists who wrote in Russian can no longer find work in Ukraine.

One such woman with whom I corresponded is from a Russian family who had been sent to Siberia. She lived in Kiev. She can no longer find employment in Kiev although everyone from there that I have met seems to have heard of her and to respect her.

She can't move to Russia either although that is what she longs to do. She is a sophisticated person and could not live outside a capital city.

This happened about three years ago. Has the situation mellowed for Russian writers in Ukraine do you know?

69. ilyavinarsky - 11/25/99 1:33:12 AM
Let me explain this:

> You mention "the so-called "forbidden" works, such as one by a turn-of-the-century Galician linguist who claimed that Ukrainian is closer to Serbian than to Russian"

The Ukrainian language "obviously" belongs to the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European language family. Usually, Slavic languages are split into three groups: Eastern has Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, Western has Polish, Czech, Slovak and a few semi-extinct languages with fewer than 100,000 speakers each, Southern has Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian. This tripartite division corresponds, more or less, to the historical evolution of the languages (with few exceptions; for example, there was some phonetic change, forgot what, concerning Czech and the Southern Slavic languages, before the Magyar invasion cut the speakers off from each other) and to the degree of mutual intelligibility. However, around the turn of the century an Austrian linguist called Smal-Stocki (sp.?) claimed that Ukrainian has no genetic relationship with Russian, but is in fact closer to Serbo-Croatian [he called it Serbian]. He used some phonetic similarities to prove his case.

70. ilyavinarsky - 11/25/99 1:33:33 AM
However, usually when you want to show that the received view is wrong, you have to somehow explain the evidence that was used in support of the received view. There is a huge amount of evidence in favor of the view that the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages and peoples have common origin - linguistic (all three have extra vowels in some IE roots - compare Russian gOrad [city], Ukrainian gorOd [garden] and English grade from Latin), ethnographic (the great Russian historian Vassily Kliuchevsky noted in his history of Russia that the Northern Russian folk songs tell about legendary heroes at the court of the Kievan Prince) and historical (the evolution of the three languages can be traced through various documents written over many centuries). If I remember correctly, Smal-Stocki considers none of this evidence. He also gives these two proofs: a certain colony of Serbs who settled in Ukraine lost their language within a couple of generations, while a colony of Russian Old Believers [a religious sect] retained it over a couple of centuries, and Ukrainian soldiers who went through Croatia in one of the 18-century wars picked up the language within a few weeks. Well, the Old Believers, like the Amish in the United States, are really into being Old Believers; there is a town in Eastern Belarus founded by the Old Believers fleeing persecution over 300 years ago (when it was not yet a part of Russia), and it still speaks recognizable [Belarusian-influenced] Great Russian. As for mutual intelligibility - I once asked a Bosnian woman (who had studied Russian in a university), what she thought of the Kosovo war, and the only words I understood were ne dobrje (not good), Milosevic and boom-boom-boom.

71. ilyavinarsky - 11/25/99 1:33:40 AM
I read the Smal-Stocki article in a Ukrainian linguistics book published in Kiev in 1993, which the University of Washington library has, and which claimed that the reason Soviet Ukrainistics rejected Smal-Stocki's thesis was not because of his faulty scholarship, but because Soviet/Russian imperialism demanded the interpretation that Russian and Ukrainian are genetically related, whatever the evidence. Which is unfortunate - it is a sad thing to watch nationalism manifesting itself as paranoia and victimology.

72. ilyavinarsky - 11/25/99 1:41:33 AM
Forgot to add - the extra vowel isn't there in either Southern Slavic or Western Slavic languages. Compare Belgorod (a city near Kharkiv on the Russian side of the border) and Beograd (the capital of Serbia), Novgorod (a city in Russia) and Novograd-Volynsky (a city with a Polish name). The names in both pairs mean, respectively, "white city" and "new city".

73. ilyavinarsky - 11/25/99 1:49:28 AM
> I have heard that established journalists who wrote in Russian can no longer find work in Ukraine.

Well, I saw plenty of Russian-language newspapers on sale in both Kharkov and Kiev. Newspaper "The Day" has both a Russian-language and a Ukrainian-language edition (and an English-language digest). So I find it hard to believe that this journalist cannot find work solely because of her ethnicity or language. The latest issue of the digest was written by reporters with both Russian and Ukrainian last names (and some names I couldn't tell).

74. Candide - 11/25/99 1:54:00 AM
So there is no Russian writing published now in Ukraine?

75. ilyavinarsky - 11/25/99 1:58:36 AM
> And you say it's easier to get hands on Chinese, Japanese and Korean literature than contemporary Ukrainian literature

That's what somebody told me at the Kiev book bazaar. Indeed, the only bookstore I saw which had contemporary Ukrainian literature (novels The Moscoviad and Recreations by Yury Andrukhovych in one book, Field Research in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko, translations of Vonnegut [right?] ) was a small store called "Art" in downtown Kiev. It also had art supplies, and on the second floor antiquities, including a turn-of-the-century almanac of Ukrainian culture).

76. ilyavinarsky - 11/25/99 1:59:48 AM
> So there is no Russian writing published now in Ukraine

What makes you thinks so? There is, a great deal.

77. Candide - 11/25/99 2:04:56 AM
Journalism in Russian?

My Ukrainian-Russian friend had been a whistle-blower and suffered from being associated with the event she uncovered. Although not guilty her name reminded people of something they preferred to forget.

Perhaps that is the real explanation for the sudden demise of a serious writing career.

84. pseudoerasmus - 11/25/99 9:14:59 PM
stostosto: are you aware that Ukraine and Krajina (an important scene of the Serb-Croat war in the 1990s) have the same root? krai or kray = the edge, brink

85. Candide - 11/25/99 10:43:28 PM
I've just realised that this is a boys' club. I wanted to introduce the topic of a really respected woman poet, novelist and writer, Lyubov Kovalevskaya, who has been cut out of the system in Ukraine. She wrote a famous article, as editor of the Pripyat newspaper, before the event of Chernobyl warning that it would probably occur because of local shoddy work practices. She lost her job and would have met worse treatment except that she was "saved" by the disaster.

Since then her life has gone to hell. The present Ukrainian society doesn't want to know her. It's as though she is the bringer of bad luck. The International Women's Media Foundation gave her a Courage in Journalism Award in 1991. Even they have now finished with the thrill of association with her. She has developed lung problems since the disaster and she has a spastic child to support.

I felt that nobody here was interested and for some weird reason it was not relevant to this thread. I felt really guilty for my crass intrusion.

Then I read the last few posts and realised that there was another reason.

86. pseudoerasmus - 11/26/99 12:09:25 AM
Yesterday I got a whole bunch of photos that my fiancée took while we were in Kamchatka in early September. Here is a picture of the exciting downtown of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, the liveliest, most happening part of town...

87. Candide - 11/26/99 12:50:23 AM
But the landscape is great.

88. Nostradamus - 11/26/99 12:53:50 AM
Candide

Whistle-blowers suffer the same fate in most similar situations. It's not 'fair', but then, life's a bitch.

89. Nostradamus - 11/26/99 12:54:27 AM
Isn't Kamchatka near Alaska? (Or is that just in Risk?)

90. pseudoerasmus - 11/26/99 1:13:06 AM
Kamchatka? Yes, Petropavlovsk is about three hours from Anchorage. Stay tuned in my thread for Kamchatka. Landscape? No, not bad:





The second photo was taken from a helicopter.

(Sorry, Ilya, you can delete these if you want.)

91. Candide - 11/26/99 2:01:07 AM
Wow!

92. Candide - 11/26/99 2:38:50 AM
Ilya


I have been told that Poles and Ukrainians can understand each other. Is this true?

93. marjoribanks - 11/26/99 11:50:05 AM
Pseuder,

Your photos don't load, even after five minutes.

Ilya,

How about a bit of personal detail? Where did you study in Kharkhov, and how did you start to learn English? Did you travel in the area before you left for the US? What were your impressions then? What did you hear/think of the USA before you migrated here?

95. ilyavinarsky - 11/26/99 11:08:13 PM
> I have been told that Poles and Ukrainians can understand each other. Is this true?

No, it is not true, unless the persons involved have studied the other language, or have been otherwise exposed to it. I once rented some Polish children's animations dubbed in Russian for my wife's kid (the songs are in Polish) and couldn't understand anything in the songs except for a few words such as przyjaźn (friendship; just looked it up). Of course, there are dialects in both languages (just like in English there is rural Lancashire speech, and there is County Monaghan speech, spoken in the movie "The Butcher Boy").

96. ilyavinarsky - 11/26/99 11:08:56 PM
You can look up my biography on my homepage.

98. ilyavinarsky - 11/27/99 12:35:05 AM
You should switch to Central European (Windows) encoding to see the word "przyjaźn" correctly.

101. ilyavinarsky - 11/27/99 2:25:37 AM
Valery Ivanov sent me many new pictures. Some of them are here.

102. Stumbo - 11/27/99 4:12:30 AM
I'd rather slit my wrists than switch to Windows anything. ;-)

But, aside from that minor quibble, it's been a very informative and entertaining subthread. (This, of course, coming from someone who hasn't yet had either the guts or the energy to revisit the Old Country, and who hence should probably not be commenting at all.)

106. ilyavinarsky - 11/27/99 6:48:05 PM
I scanned some pictures in. Unfortunately, one of the three diskettes didn't survive an hour-long walk in the rain, but the other two did fine.

The twins, I, Volodya and Borya.

109. ilyavinarsky - 11/27/99 7:03:19 PM
Movie theater "Ukraina", which has a parabolic hyperboloid (or hyperbolic paraboloid) roof.



My grandparents.

111. ilyavinarsky - 11/27/99 7:30:50 PM
Pushkin. Gogol and Kotsiubynsky (early-20th century Ukrainian writer; the movie "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" is based on his novella) are nearby.



Shevchenko and his characters.

112. ilyavinarsky - 11/27/99 7:41:36 PM
A WWI-era tank. WWII-era guns. Scythian stone warriors.

113. Candide - 11/27/99 7:56:13 PM
I think you answered my question.

114. ilyavinarsky - 11/27/99 8:28:18 PM
What does Gorky's trilogy have that, say, Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier or essays such as "How the Poor Die" doesn't?

115. Candide - 11/27/99 9:05:07 PM
Ilya

I have decided that perhaps you are completely unmusical or you oould have recognised a tremendous compliment. Also visual non-verbal awareness is not just a frill on the surface of a society.

I read Gorky as a foreigner so I picked up endless signs that wouldn't seem significant to you. Their difference was apparent to me. The social relationships were astonishingly different.

You have to be a musical non Slav to appreciate the searing difference of emotional content in the singing of Gorky's friend Chaliapin. Those scratchy old records, especially the unaccompanied folk songs, are heart-breaking to someone who is outside the culture(s). It's an emotional note. Not prosaic. I haven't romanticised the Russian culture (here I'm assuming that since Kiev is one of the oldest cities associated with that culture that for ease of discussion Ukraine is included).

The arts always have in their calligraphy, a special non-verbal set of information about any culture. It isn't just the words of Bessie Smith that makes her so much part of her world, it's the way she sings them.

Makarova's body language coould come from no other place.

I think I was asking whether practical desperation had driven that great sub-conscious tune out of most of the people? You will understand that you have shown us a terrific portrait of good-hearted people engaged in essential social work. It was a glum set of images although it was very well told. I realise that the situation is an extreme one.

117. pseudoerasmus - 11/27/99 10:11:13 PM
I find Candide insufferable.

118. Candide - 11/27/99 10:16:22 PM
Gosh!

119. Candide - 11/27/99 10:20:05 PM
Ilya knows why I felt I could talk to him like that.

I thought the way he answered me before in the context gave me licence to say what I had.

You are clever pseudorasmus.

120. pseudoerasmus - 11/27/99 10:38:00 PM
Oh, Candide, I apologise for my blurting that out. I will henceforth studiously avoid the slightest interaction with you. You will not hear a peep from me.

121. Candide - 11/27/99 11:14:45 PM
I'm sure that Pseudoerasmus's last post will be deleted from the thread.

122. ilyavinarsky - 11/28/99 12:33:37 AM
You are correct that I am completely unmusical.

123. Candide - 11/28/99 2:26:52 AM
Ilya

I'm sorry. Our wires got crossed. I was just showing you a mirror image.

There are worse crimes than being unmusical. It's just that it was important to love music in order to understand what I was saying. Music and painting.

124. pseudoerasmus - 11/28/99 4:08:20 AM
Candide: Please don't leave the Mote. I even apologised. You will never hear from me again unless you speak to me first. Isn't that okay?

125. Candide - 11/28/99 5:04:46 PM

Pseudoerasmus:

You surely don't imagine that the following is an apology (and I don't want an apology)? If anyone reading it thinks so do disabuse yourselves immediately.

"20. pseudoerasmus - 11/28/99 3:38:00 AM
Oh, Candide, I apologise for my blurting that out. I will henceforth
studiously avoid the slightest interaction with you. You will not hear a peep from me."

But if I had wanted an apology I might have accepted this one:


"Yours truly can only remember being
frightened to death by the sight of a swarm of queer-looking dirty
beggars in pyjamas chanting something resembling his name. But
now you can imagine where my insufferable behaviour in the Mote
comes from."

A gleam of humanity. Now try imagining that perhaps some other people may have been subjected to character-damaging conditioning. Spotlights and flowers are as effective as name-chanting you know.

I don't want any sort of apology.

126. stostosto - 11/28/99 5:48:09 PM
Candide
It's funny how you can find Ilya's reportings "have shown us a terrific portrait of good-hearted people engaged in essential social work. It was a glum set of images although it was very well told".

My tally is that at least 70% of it was composed of his and his friends' profound interest in literature, poetry, playwrights, history, and linguistics.

You have an impressing way with words. I wish I were as eloquent. But stuff like "Does the spirit that so moved the West still exist?" seems taken out of some 1950s Ladies' magazine.

And the "I have decided that perhaps you are completely unmusical or you could have recognised a tremendous compliment" line.

My goodness. I fully understand Ilya's refusal to bite.

127. ilyavinarsky - 11/28/99 6:22:52 PM
Candide probably meant the new set of pictures from Valery Ivanov. Unfortunately, our web server is down, so you can't see them now (but probably will be able to tomorrow).

128. Candide - 11/28/99 7:01:37 PM
stostosto

""Does the spirit that so moved the West still exist?"
seems taken out of some 1950s Ladies' magazine."

Your reading obviously covers a wider range of material than mine.

I'm sorry if you received that impression. Obviously my ability to express my self is below par.

No I was just trying to see whether in his travels Ilya had encountered any of the massive non-literary cultural activity that once blew open the collective imagination of the Western world in the early 20th century. The emigré community carried on a rather fossilised version of things. A whole new visual and musical world entirely fractured the western traditions.

I realise that traditional forms atrophied under official patronage, although great live-wires like the Georgian conductor Gerghiev (sp?) have appeared.

I realise that Ilya is very aware of contemporary writing and his knowledge of linguistics is something that I find awe-inspiring.

If I was snappish it was in reply to a snap of his. I was not making his living culture into wallpaper for a genteel salon. I was talking blood.

I'm a New Zealander whose imagination was awakened by the very things I described in my offensive posts above. I later took part in international professional theatre so I was writing from my own experience.

I am (was) interested in discussing whether the political control exercised over the last 80 odd years had driven the wild creative spirit underground or obliterated it.

129. Candide - 11/28/99 7:21:06 PM
Correction. the last 70 odd years = not 80.

130. ilyavinarsky - 11/28/99 7:22:19 PM
I am afraid I don't know or care much about non-literary cultural activity. There are art museums open, and Kharkov has a Russian drama theater, a Ukrainian drama theater, a musical comedy theater and an opera, but I visited none of them. Actually, a friend of my mother's I met, Aleksei Muratov, wrote the only new play the Ukrainian drama theater has staged since Ukrainian independence, about a turn-of-the-century blind Ukrainian man who became a classic of Chinese literature. He gave the manuscript to my brother; some day I'll ask him to photocopy it.

My knowledge of linguistics is very limited; in particular, I don't know any foreign languages besides English.

131. ilyavinarsky - 11/28/99 7:25:31 PM
Ukrainian drama theater:



Russian drama theater up close; a "Children's School of Aesthetic Upbriging" is advertised:

132. Candide - 11/28/99 7:42:19 PM
That's interesting Ilya.

I wish you had seen some drama in that theatre. I realise that such things are wildly expensive and therefore not worth the risk.

Perhaps you have realised that English speakers (perhaps it's better in the USA) are not routinely taught a thorough background to their own language. The thing that impresses me in your discussions is your ability to analyse and relate different languages.

You see I don't think that the 'posh' top level manifestations of the arts are where they come from, but I do think that anybody from any background can find a personal way into them and can grow through contact their inheritance.

I have been told by Russian writers that writers used to be guaranteed publication. They are in shock now that the western system is selecting and rejecting them. As you know, western writers are going through a similar experience as publishing narrows. It's something we have in common.

I do also think that the rock industry has obliterated a great deal of everybody's national memory. And that will be an added barrier in eastern Europe. Although something individual and good can always grow from local rock performers.

I have been impressed by Serbian film makers. They are right off the planet.

133. ilyavinarsky - 11/28/99 7:53:48 PM
> such things are wildly expensive

Not to a Microsoft Researcher, perhaps. I think the season had ended, though.

> I have been told by Russian writers that writers used to be guaranteed publication

The ones who used to be guaranteed publication aren't writers; they are "writers".

> I do also think that the rock industry has obliterated a great deal of everybody's national memory.

It surely didn't for the Serbs, the Croats and the Bosniaks.

134. Candide - 11/28/99 7:57:35 PM
I guess you're right.

135. Candide - 11/28/99 7:59:47 PM
Ilya ps.

By "writers" do I understand you to be employing a touch of irony?

Were they the party faithful?

136. ilyavinarsky - 11/28/99 8:12:23 PM
> I wish I were as eloquent.

I am reminded of the passage in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five where Captain Eliot Rosewater is convalescing in a mental hospital, reading Kilgore Trout's science fiction books and saying that Trout's writing was awful, but his ideas were excellent.

137. Candide - 11/28/99 8:25:51 PM
As eloquent as the "writers" or me asked the ultra-sensitive neurotic?

Vonnegut's a favourite of mine.

138. ilyavinarsky - 11/28/99 8:35:51 PM
Candide, we all love you.

139. Candide - 11/28/99 8:53:17 PM
Hmmmm!

140. Candide - 11/28/99 9:22:45 PM
Ilya I have just re-read your whole piece and I do understand that my 'rave' was - unintentionally - an intrusion. I regret that but it's too late for regrets.

I also perceived on the second reading that you detail a great deal of promising zaniness so there is hope for the things my rave was on about.

Is it too late to say that your travelogue is a terrific bit of observation and the writing is mercifully without eloquence. It's evocative.

I apologise for being a dork.

141. ilyavinarsky - 12/3/99 1:35:16 PM
Let me post a few more photos before RIPing this subthread:

The house where I was born:



Mosaic at the skytrain station:



The skytrain station: