Ukraine’s cultural mission

Ukraine was forced to sustain the burden of an autocratic regime, which greatly differed from its spirit and traditions, and at the same time received a paradoxical mission from history: to incorporate into the West its powerful neighbor and master.

Many people in Ukraine remember your brilliant presentation at the 1983 International Congress of Slavists. You were nearly the only one who spoke Ukrainian, which was then perceived as a challenge to the regime. After all, no one at that time could even imagine that Ukraine would one day be an independent country. From the distance of a quarter of a century, how do you see the changes that have taken place since that time? Could you summarize the achieved results and the existing risks, achievements, and failures?

“The presentation you mentioned took place at the International Congress of Slavists in Kyiv in September 1983. This was a major scholarly event, just like every congress organized by the International Congress of Slavists. There were nearly 4,000 participants from all over the world. So it was not about the academic importance of the congress. (The presentations were published in an edition comprising multiple volumes.) It was also about the political and expressly “national” significance of this event for Kyiv, a city that hosted a gathering of this kind for the first time.

“It was for these reasons that I, as the head of the Italian delegation and one of the most active participants in Western delegations, put all my efforts into achieving a positive result of this meeting. In doing so I tried to overcome the dictate of Soviet leadership, which suggested that the assembly adopt an anti-nuclear appeal at the final session. It had an implicit anti-American character, and the delegation from Western Germany protested threatening to leave the congress if the appeal was not revoked.

“Academician Stepanov, a person of good will, and I worked an entire night to find an acceptable compromise that would help avoid a scandal and enable use to solemnly round off this grandiose meeting. Perhaps this was the reason the organizational committee asked me to speak at the closing meeting and thank the hosts on behalf of all Western delegations. Then, the request was modified—I was asked to speak on behalf of all visitors, except for Soviet participants.

“On September 13 I had to deliver the closing speech, which I prepared The Day before. During the night I translated the first part into Russian, and the second part—into Ukrainian, using the assistance of Ihor Dzeverin.”

“I remember that, as a Roman citizen, I began my speech by passing greetings from Rome, the capital of the West, to Kyiv, the capital of the Slavic East. This rhetoric device, in which I believed and still believe, express a wish that Kyiv’s Golden Gate, which was still closed at the time, would open to let us, Westerners, in and you, Ukrainians, out to the West. However, the audience was stunned the most that I switched to Ukrainian in the second part of my speech. No one expected this—neither the congress organizers, nor its participants. The thunderous ovation that accompanied every phrase I uttered showed that at the moment this was experienced as a catharsis, a moral compensation for prolonged silence. They felt that, in this way, the dignity of the people that been denied free use of their language was restored.

“Why did I do this? Certainly because of sympathy toward the Ukrainian people, which I felt from the very beginning. However, an even more important factor was that I cannot stand violence on the part of authorities. For this reason I often stood up in defense of oppressed minorities—ethnic, linguistic, and religious.

“Now the situation has changed in Ukraine, like in other parts of the world: nations have gained freedom. However, this is not the freedom envisioned back then. They believed it would be the kind of freedom that would liberate people from foreign dominance and from the social injustice and pathologies bred in the people’s psyche over the years of bondage.

“This is, in fact, the topic that was discussed in Rome the other day at a conference in memory of the Croatian intellectual Vlado Gotovac, who, near the end of his life, asked whether it was worthwhile to fight for freedom without asking yourself precisely what freedom was the goal. Freedom from foreign domination can be gained overnight, whereas social freedom inside society and individual ethical freedom take time to achieve, requiring a whole-life commitment from many generations. If people in Ukraine understand and accept the concept that in this cause everything has to begin from the start, this means you are on the right track that will, with time, lead you to the appropriate results.”

When you mentioned Kyiv Mohyla Academy as a center of Western culture in Ukraine in the 17th century in your speech, the academy was, in fact, a building of a Soviet marine college. Now it is one of the most modern Ukrainian universities. So, does this mean that the “deep structures” of Ukrainian culture are living and operating? If so, what prevents Ukraine from taking a qualitative leap and transforming the cutting-edge institutions in a natural system that would cover all of Ukraine? In your opinion, is the “Ukrainian complex” a hindrance to authentic all-around development, or is it still a resource?

“I very much believe in the importance of Kyiv Mohyla Academy in the 17th century and the role it can play now in Ukraine’s cultural life. This academy was more than a center of Western culture: it transplanted onto Ukrainian soil the cultural and scholarly concepts of the West, fusing them into an integral whole through the use of local cultural resources.

“Even though it is not always evident, these resources are always decisive in this synthesis. In the Mohyla cultural paradigm the dominant role belongs to Orthodoxy in its Ruthenian or Cossack version. In a word, it is about Orthodox Cossack culture. In reality what happened in Ukraine was the same thing that took place in literature with using two foreign languages, Latin and Polish, to express Ukrainian thoughts: these texts are Ukrainian, rather than Latin or Polish, despite the fact that were not written in Ukrainian.

“Students in these Latin-Polish schools absorbed not only the formal doctrine but also the life-giving spirit: the cult of the beautiful in art, the skills of using the rules of rhetoric and poetics, as well as knowledge of Greek and Latin antiquity and ancient and new history, elements of exact sciences, and a critical approach to the issues of faith and civic life. This is how the “bipolar” nature of Ukraine as “small Europe” is born, or revived, after the Ancient Rus’ period ended and Ukraine found itself on the crossroads between Byzantium and the German West.

“However, culture is the foundation of national life inasmuch as the nation possesses this culture. Ukrainians need to believe in their bipolar nature that gravitates toward synthesis.

“Ukraine was born of the legacy of Hellenized Sarmatia, Slavicized Varangians, Byzantine Rus’, Ruthenia that lived in a political and cultural symbiosis with Latinized Poland and Lithuania, and, finally, two national revivals: the 17th century struggle against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the fight against tsarist and later Soviet Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“However, this consciousness should be locked up within a cult of the elites. Rather, it should be drawn as close to the masses as possible and transformed into national identity along the way. The experience of ancient Kyiv Mohyla Academy is a magnificent example of the path to be followed: this university refers us to the personalities, school, and cultural period that played a colossal role in the entire Slavic Central-European region (and beyond it), stimulating humanistic revival, which we inaptly call ‘Europeanization’ due to the confusion between ‘Europe’ and ‘the West.’ ”

You have always insisted on the European character of Ukrainian culture and on its fundamental role for spreading European ideas on the Eastern Slavic territory and for westernizing Russia. Do you think Ukraine will maintain and develop this role? What has to be done so that the European framework of Ukrainian culture would remain the moving force for its evolution in the future? Do you believe that Ukraine will manage to realize this cultural model in the political sphere by integrating into the EU as a full-fledged member?

“Europe has been viewed in opposition to Asia since times of Greco-Persian Wars until the present time through state establishments, which were different in the power subject—in the first case people were the carrier of the power, while in the second—the tyrant. In this respect, even I, despite my strong objection to the idea of the West’s domination in Europe and the identification of Europe with the West, often speak about ‘two Europes.’ In the 18th and 19th centuries scholars viewed authoritarian Russia and democratic Poland as the emblems of the ‘two Europes.’ On the other hand, you have also often written about an opposition between Russia as monolithic and imperial and Ukraine as multiform and parliamentary.

“Unfortunately, since the tsars’ time until today in Russia they have kept another dichotomous vision of Europe, which had to serve the triumph of imperial autocracy, rather than democracy.

“Ukraine was forced to sustain the burden of an autocratic regime, which greatly differed from its spirit and traditions, and at the same time received a paradoxical mission from history: to incorporate into the West its powerful neighbor and master.

“I cannot afford to lecture anyone but can only draw people’s attention to the importance of this historic task, which Ukraine has again faced in a special way. I also want to draw your attention to the need to look at Russia in a different way—not only through the eyes of conflicts. It has to be done to lead Russia in a friendly way past economic and political barriers, even though it might be difficult for Putin’s Russia and not so easy but necessary for its Western partners, toward meeting the intellectual and cultural Europe.”