So Bitter! Honchar's Masterpiece

Transfiguration Cathedral, Pryluky, Ukraine

Why are the Ukrainians fighting so hard against the Russians? Why do they fear being under Russian control so much? I'll answer with two words:

Oles Honchar.

Read Honchar's masterpiece, The Cathedral, and you might understand. Honchar wrote about Ukrainian life in the USSR and, with his sharp, journalistic eye for details, he was the perfect person for that task.

There's an atmosphere hanging over this novel -- like the haze over a factory -- of what life is like in a society in which the state controls everything. Any American with an evangelical bent who doesn't believe the U.S. should be involved in Ukraine's defense against Russia should check this book out. Here you have a portrait of what life is like in a world in which a proud people have had everything, including God, taken away from them.

What’s left behind?

In many ways, that’s the organizing idea behind this novel. Loss and absence—it’s everywhere. Set in the fictitious town of Zachiplianka in the Dnipropetrovsk region (which the Butcher of the Kremlin is ruthlessly shelling now), the town is dominated by an empty reminder of what’s been lost: an old cathedral now being used for grain storage.

The novel’s main character, Mykola Bahlay, is a poor poet in love with a peasant girl named Yelka who made some poor choices (involving a married guy) in another village and had to leave. Yelka’s got a lot on her mind—along with Bahlay, she’s being pursued by the engineer Volodmyr Loboda who, like any good Soviet, thinks the cathedral should be torn down and replaced with a building that’s more useful.

This novel is so many things — comedic, moving, bitter. The 1989 translation by Yuri Tkach and Leonid Rudnytzky still holds up now—the language feels fresh, timely, and probably faithful to the original.

Novel’s don’t need to be painted in a single color. That’s what Honchar teaches us. He uses a big palette to capture this town’s many moods, and here's something from the side with all the reds:

The cathedral is silent. In its presence Bahlay always feels a strange sadness, and even something alarming. The cathedral has something elemental about it, a primordial greatness, like the steppes or the Dnipro, or the black industrial bastions swaddled in eternal smoke. The cathedral's silent music -- the music of those cupolas rising harmoniously into the sky -- it really does exist. You can hear it, though others seem deaf to its sounds. Zachiplianka is not spiteful, yet it seems unable to forget what this cathedral, once the largest and most magnificent in the eparchy, stood for. Many minds were stupefied here by the fumes of the vigil candles, by the dissimulated sermons and the narcotic aroma of frankincense in the priest's swinging censers. Potbellied priests grew even fatter here, and the church wardens with bowl haircuts and oiled heads, jingled mountains of copper coins on plates, pilfered and made fortunes selling candles. With a single stroke, swindling contractors bought remission for their sins, while beggars died in the porticoes. And the unfortunate cripples who dragged themselves here from everywhere to be healed, awaiting a miracle, remained cripples. Candles burned, icons adorned by embroideries shone, and the choir filled the cathedral with paradisical sounds, singing heavenly, blessed songs to the people, who after the service were again cast out into the real, cruel world of extortion and want, the world of Belgian factory owners and sullen-faced "native" supervisors, into the world of wages and strikes, drinking bouts and bloody fights. But all this has passed, melting away with the smoke of frankincense, and there remains for the student only this perfected architectural creation, this symphony of art. Will they really demolish it?

Can you feel the anger and bitterness here? Or the contradictions? As much as the poor poet thinks scornfully about religion and how the holy church has failed them all, he still can’t help wanting to hold on to his heritage. He still values it. He still can’t help asking, plaintively, “will they really demolish it?”

It’s that grasp of the contradictions and ironies of being human that Honchar’s a master of—and a reason why this book still matters, why it should outlast all those books with the bright and shiny covers at your local Barnes and Noble. It still speaks to all of us—not just the Ukrainians—of the need to find meaning and hold onto it despite the efforts of others to take it away.

#freeukraine #putinisawarcriminal

Fermor's Long Walk in a Lost World

Back in 1934, Patrick Leigh Fermor did something that most of us dream about doing and never do. He took a long walk across Europe with the goal of reaching Constantinople. 

Scene from World War II (from left): Georgios Tyrakis, William Stanley Moss, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Emmanouil Paterakis, and Antonios Papaleonidas. Fermor is seen here less than ten years after his epic walk. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons).

He never made it the way he’d planned, but the journey produced two extraordinary books—A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. The minute they appeared they became insta-classics. 

He never quite reached Galicia either, but he did walk through parts of the forests of the Carpathian range, which stretch throughout the region and that are visible from my dad's village. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if he’d reached Galicia—maybe he would’ve met my dad, who was a boy of nine or ten when Fermor was on his trek. 

Still, as a part of my collection of Ukrainian books, and as part of this series of blog posts about why Ukrainian literature means so much to me, Fermor’s two titles capture a sense of wonder and awe that no other region of the world has.

(Sure I know that's hyperbole, but wtf do I care? That’s how I feel about the damn place.)

When I first read Fermor back in the late ‘90s, it put me back in touch with my dad again (who'd died a few years before) in a special way. I thought of our own trip to Galicia, of the month we spent there and venturing out into the Carpathians, of the forests so thick and primeval and the air so pungent it made you slightly lose your mind. 

Fermor makes a few occasional references to the Ruthenes (another name for the Ukes), the Hutsuls, and the awkward identity of the Uniates (that branch of Byzantine Christianity recognized by Rome that my dad was a member of). So that's a good enough reason to keep them with my other Ukrainian books.

We experienced plenty of moments like the following one that show you the peace and simplicity all Slavs share--at least until the Butcher of the Kremlin started lobbing bombs into these places like a coward:

An hour’s climb ended on the edge of a slanting field where a string of reapers were getting in the late upland harvest: biblical, white-clad countrymen and women in wide hats of plaited straw, some with babies slung across their backs like papooses; when they got in the way, they hung them in the shade, snugly laced into their wooden troughs. Baskets, water jars, sickles and rakes were heaped up, half-a-dozen ponies were grazing and conical bee-hives were set in rows along the edge of the enfolding trees. As they moved forward and reaped and gathered and gleaned, an old woman’s high quaver sang the lead of a never-ending sequence of verses to a grave and rather haunting tune; the others joined in each second line… I had heard it on the climb to the little plateau; it still floated up diminuendo long after the harvesters themselves had dropped out of sight….  

Beautiful, right? We encountered similar scenes, more than 60 years later, on the outskirts of Striy and Kalush. And I'll never forget coming on Vasyl, the husband of our cousin, sitting out in a meadow by his house, watching his sheep graze. It was so friggen bucolic and beautiful everywhere that I never wanted to leave.

One more thing: Fermor didn’t start composing these two books about his travels until he was in his sixties. He must have had one helluva memory (and lots of detailed notebooks). 

There’s a lesson about writing in that fact that I want to share—since this blog is supposed to be dedicated to writerly insights. That lesson boils down to one simple question: What’s your hurry?  

Instead of hurrying to get a book done so you can add “author” to your LinkedIn profile, why not take longer and get it right? If you do, it might be remembered longer than some rush-into-print publishing service book that's going to cost you a bundle and fade away in a week.

Fermor's books took a long time to make — and like the singing he heard that day in the Carpathian uplands, they won’t soon be forgotten.  

#freeukraine #Putinisawarcriminal