A Russian Story (3 page)

Similar circles of sensible lads and trendy girls, trendy lads and sensible girls, formed and broke up again in the multimillion city of Kyiv, not only at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and not only involving the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian ideas. But this was where he ended up, and they took him in. Ukrainian became a language of communication for him, practically for the first time ever, rather than the language of the classroom, of theatrical performances or of poetry, and that was brilliant. Perhaps this was in tune with the spirit of the times, as it was then that people started talking out loud about how under the Soviet Union Ukraine was wilting, weakening, deteriorating and becoming less and less relevant to the Ukrainians themselves. By no means was it ‘flourishing and radiant’ as well-paid Soviet Ukrainian poets ingratiatingly chanted. These very same poets were already beginning to compose sentimental verse on the theme of change in society. Personally, he had no particular agenda in adopting new ideas; in the Ukrainian world he truly began to feel a kind of inner harmony and a will to live which he had never experienced before.

He had started writing poetry a long time ago, though he didn’t consider himself a poet. The first verses he ever wrote were in Russian. Ukrainian rhyming verse was easier to compose, more melodious, and made more sense. Sometimes he can still spontaneously recall some of the lines he jotted down on the back of a notepad containing his addresses and phone numbers. He could sing any song without getting out of tune, although he wasn’t endowed with a powerful voice. But singing in unison, when his friends’ voices powerfully augmented his own — that was an incredible feeling. To this day he can hear in his head the sound of those songs from over twenty years ago.

His new friends not only spoke Ukrainian quite naturally, but they spoke with a cheerful irony on the topic of their own Ukrainianness. Strictly speaking, none of them was a native speaker of Ukrainian; all of them had at the appropriate stage in their lives begun their mumblings in Russian. It was a different matter with Ukrainian, which had become the language of their re-birth, a more fascinating language, more existential, the secret language of a select community. True, there were very few such people in the Ukrainian capital, even during the short-lived wave of patriotic fervour of those years. But their members were not outcasts or pariahs. On the contrary, they were a kind of nobility, though their biological origins were of no concern to them. They were at ease when speaking about their Russian or Jewish grandfathers and grandmothers and about their parents, bourgeois Kyivan conformists or Soviet careerists. He had first noticed Lada when she openly spoke about her father, head of the department of scientific communism, previously responsible for Soviet ideology at a fairly high level. We have the parents God gave us, and they are the only ones we will have. So we have to form our own way of life.

Now he fully understands that his friends from those years also had their own no-go areas which they did not want to speak about; indeed they were unable to do so, even with their closest friends. But in those same years they revealed to him aspects of life which had been inaccessible to him in Soviet days. They did not speak only about national issues; that would have been boring. But they spoke about everything in Ukrainian, and at the time he felt that in Russian he would have been unable to discover the new meanings which were coming to light.

He began to pay attention every time he heard Ukrainian being spoken in the Russian-speaking hubbub of Kyiv’s noisy streets, trolleybuses and coffee houses. He always listened in, to discover what kind of person was speaking. First there was a comical mixture of Ukrainian and Russian; the intonation is Ukrainian, but the vocabulary… In their social circles they indiscriminately parrot this hybrid speech coming from the mouths of the uneducated and the semi-literate. But these country girls, on the other hand, are speaking Ukrainian surprisingly well. This means they are from a locality where the Ukrainian-Russian hybrid has not yet become established. For them Ukrainian is truly their native tongue. But they are unaware how good their Ukrainian is; soon they will learn city speech, possibly even losing their rural accent. And here is a Galician with his characteristic vocabulary and intonation patterns. He too is speaking his native tongue. And this person he is talking with — generally a Russian speaker, as you can immediately tell — attempts to demonstrate that he is able to switch to Ukrainian quite readily, if necessary. But he keeps hesitating and making funny mistakes. And here is someone else — a kind of a Soviet establishment figure — who begins speaking Ukrainian in a loud, booming voice, with execrable accuracy, though certain elusive characteristics of his speech tell you this is the moribund language of Soviet Ukraine. Professor Nebuvaiko used to talk like this, by the way. And when Ukrainian is spoken without rural or Galician intonation patterns, with no clumsy Kyivan expressions or inane Soviet sentimentality, this is an indication that somewhere close by one of his own people is talking.

Later on, his associations with Ukrainian circles became less romantic; they were more pragmatic and they were firmer. His Ukrainian friends began to propose venues where he could give a talk or they found him an opportunity to publish an article, and he was successful in this. He learned to speak at round-table discussions and on the radio. And he also acquired skills in communicating with Russian chauvinists of varying levels of bigotry.

“You are absolutely right,” he replied to a moronic Russophile on the first floor of the Art Shop on the Khreshchatik, who was objecting to the excessive Ukrainianness unique to Kyiv. “They don’t let people read Dostoevsky! They play their patriotic Ukrainian
Red Viburnum
^*
just when you are reading about Rogozhin’s gift of ear-rings to Nastasia Filippovna in
The Idiot
 — do you often re-read that? See what I mean? No-one re-reads Dostoevsky’s
The Idiot
, but the damn nationalists know Nechuy-Levytsky’s
Kaidash Family
^**
off by heart!”

The Russophile, who intended to have a conversation on the topic of the artificiality of Ukrainianness, which had no future, felt he had been fooled, since the Ukrainian nationalist turned out to be untypical. So the principled Russophile, denied the pleasure of conversing with an ideological opponent, gave up browsing his favourite bookshelves and fled.

“How did you manage that?” exclaimed Lada enthusiastically.

“Well, how can I put it? He himself can’t distinguish between old mother Larina and the old usurer woman,
^*
but he stands up for Mother Russia!”

And so, having been involved for several years in modern and post-modern nationalist circles, he had learned to hold his own on the opposite side too, in discussions with radical patriots; goodness knows where they had come from in such numbers to occupy the Ukrainian cultural space.

“Do you want a Ukraine where flocks of cranes are flying, a Ukraine of pure morning dew? A Ukraine of biologically chaste girls and young women in traditional headwear? Do you want a patriarchal, pre-modern setup in the centre of Europe?”

“This is the only way to preserve Ukrainian uniqueness. Go to the villages! Only there can you hear the true mother tongue! Have you ever visited a simple Ukrainian village, drunk water from the well or tasted home-made bread?”

“I haven’t, but I have seen them queuing in the villages to buy bread that has been delivered from elsewhere, he said, making out that the impressions of others were his own. And I know how young people from the villages are dying to move to the towns and how they want to speak Russian, so that nobody can tell they are from the country.”

“Well, the village girls are still the best! And we don’t want your clever-clogs, these all-too-experienced feminists in black tights, in our native Ukraine. We will boycott them!”

“You don’t say! But in the offices of a certain respected newspaper I did see you offering chocolates to a lady wearing either black tights or very tight jeans.”

“Young man!” The grand patriot’s tone shifted from the advisory to the condescending. “What are you saying? Our conversation may be overheard by my wife! You are reducing a public debate to the level of personalities; one could even say you are stooping to gossip.”

“In other words, you will boycott ladies in black tights only on a public level, but not on a personal one?”

“Don’t twist my words!” said the patriot, resorting to a feeble expression someone outwitted in debate might use. “And bear in mind that you are not talking to just anyone here, but to a reputable person who has done a good deal for Ukraine!”

But notice that he doesn’t ever speak Ukrainian with narrow-minded Kyivans! Some of his friends speak Ukrainian with everyone, making people struggle to find the Ukrainian words. Obviously, that is the best strategy in the case of an individualistic language policy. But in his case it did not work and he based it on his own ideology; he does not cast pearls before swine, but resolutely switches to Russian with them, even if they come up with some feeble Ukrainian linguistic formations. Ukrainian, in particular the variety spoken by his community, is the language of the intellectual aristocracy, beyond the reach of the
hoi polloi
, even if they do consider themselves patriots. Let them start speaking proper Ukrainian, not the language of Kyiv, and then he will reply to them in Ukrainian!

This is why he did not adopt his ‘native tongue’ when addressing those who knew him as a polite Kyiv boy who speaks Ukrainian only in class at school, because of course, as the son of a family of teachers, he was enrolled in a Ukrainian-English school, where there are traditionally fewer children from problem families. His Ukrainian language and literature teacher from the fourth to the eleventh class was a friend of his mother’s, Neonila Mykytivna Bovdur. She was a typical Soviet Ukrainian teacher, dry and unimaginative; her devotion to Party and government could be seen in her eyes. She drilled her pupils strictly, making them copy out several pages from Ivan Franko’s novel
Boryslav Laughs
for every Russianism they uttered verbally, and for each one in an essay or précis they had to wash the floor in the Ukrainian language classroom. And she did this not in order to educate Ukrainians in a Russified community but as a rebuff to Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists; this is how Soviet Ukrainian schoolchildren speak if you instruct them accordingly! With her, his mother adopted a comical form of Ukrainian, making insufferable errors, to which Neonila Mykytivna reacted with surprising condescension. Eugene’s mother was an enthusiastic teacher of Russian language and literature. But his mother is a chapter to herself.

Oh dear! — These politicised squabbles in families, groups of friends and acquaintances! So many people fell out, and so badly that they no longer wished to see one another in the wake of such primitive altercations. And yet so many people were keen to continue these aggressive dialogues, proclaiming their vision of the future and the past of Ukraine and Russia to their obstinate interlocutors. This was the kind of endless dialogue their parents had been involved in.

“Yes, I am all for the independence of Ukraine,” called out his mother. “I am opposed to Stalin! I am against the prison camps! I am against Solovki prison camp! But I am FOR Russian literature! How can you be against it? No other nation has anything like it. How can you compare Pushkin with Nechuy-Levytsky? Girls naturally much prefer Eugene Onegin to the Ukrainian classic Mykola Dzherya!”
^*

“Although it’s much better if a girl meets an honest, hardworking fellow like Mykola Dzherya, rather than that Onegin of yours,” replied father, a woodwork teacher at mother’s school.

“We are not talking about that now,” said mother, evading this turn the discussion was taking. “Yudushka Golovlyov — I hope to goodness you wouldn’t ever come across someone like him! But what a personality! What a monster! I still can’t stop shaking when I re-read how he poured vodkas for Anninka.”

“What about
Viy
, then! How can you say that isn’t a monster?”

“Well, that’s Gogol. He’s yours and ours too.”

“What do you mean, ‘yours’? Are you giving up considering yourself a Ukrainian, because of Yudushka Golovlyov?”

“I am a Ukrainian who likes Russian literature! The whole world likes Russian literature, of course.”

“You’re exaggerating! They aren’t particularly fond of it even in Russia these days.” My father started telling my mother for the
n
th time about an article he had read several years ago, claiming that Moscow school-children can’t distinguish Andrei Bolkonsky from Eugene Onegin.

“All the more reason why we ought not to forget the Russian classics! We will know them better than they do! Despite all the foreign literature syllabuses! That’s all we need — to replace Turgenev with Salinger!”

“Well, they were quite right to replace him! I’ve got a Turgenev girl at home — that’s enough for me!” Father embraced mother, dragging her onto the sofa, and she burst out laughing, saying that she and father had their friendly arguments. His parents were boring. He didn’t even feel like arguing with them. And his mother kept shouting emotionally, as she usually did, jabbing her finger at her son.

“It’s me! I was the one who got you into a Ukrainian school! Neonila Mykytivna and I made a true Ukrainian of you. Much good it has done us! You won’t ever say thank you for it!”

He had disliked his own name since childhood. In every group he had belonged to as a child there had always been at least one girl called Zhenia, with whom he had been confused, for some reason, despite the fact that his surname — unlike typical Ukrainian ones — was unambiguously masculine in its grammatical form. Over the years he had repeatedly explained that his surname Samarsky was derived not from the Russian place-name Samara on the Volga, but from the name of a minor Ukrainian river, a tributary of the Dnipro. On the other hand, the Ukrainian form of Eugene’s Christian name Yevheniy given him by his mother, who named him after the hero of Russian classical literature Yevgeniy Onegin, could be shortened to Yevhen to make it more masculine. That was another trump card favouring his Ukrainian conversion.