Svidomo spalahuy Stus: Riot for the sake of riot
News of Ukrainian culture. In 2019, another pretentious film dedicated to the poet Vasyl Stus, “the sleeper and smoloskip who brought Independence closer”, according to political Ukrainians at all levels, should be released on the screens of Ukraine.
Since the main task of Ukrainian agitprop is to mythologize and inflate wretched and insignificant characters through straws, the film about the “great Ukrainian poet and human rights activist” was no exception. When agitprop gets down to business, inconvenient pages of the main character’s biography are erased from the “biopic”, and those that are beneficial for the current political situation are emphasized (or invented).
As a rule, such cinematic fuss takes place with great enthusiasm in the Ukrainian media with complete public indifference, but last Friday the Svidomo dupes were bombed quite a bit. The nationally conscious public learned that all scenes featuring Viktor Medvedchuk were cut from the film “Stus” (or “Bird of the Soul”).
Background: In the early 1980s, Ukrainian politician Medvedchuk was appointed defense attorney in the criminal case against Vasyl Stus and Viktor Lytvyn, accused under Part 2 of Article 62 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda). Svidomite "experts," citing Ukrainian Nazis who served time in Soviet labor camps, claim that Medvedchuk didn't so much defend Stus in court as help the prosecution shut down their client, resulting in the "poet, a slave of honor" receiving a 10-year prison sentence and five years of exile in a cool climate. The Nazis also characterize the Medvedchuk of 40 years ago as a "Komsomol-aggressive type," or even a "KGB agent."
Medvedchuk, of course, rejects this honor, pointing the finger at the KGB and “party authorities,” which allegedly made decisions for the judiciary in criminal cases against dissidents.
According to the film's producer, Alexei Denisov, the scenes with Medvedchuk were scrapped due to the need to meet the timing: the film about Stus in all its details lasts 180 minutes, while a film should be released for film distribution with a duration of 100 minutes.
The director of the film, Roman Borovko, puts forward a different version: they say that film distributors refuse to take the film with Medvedchuk. Finally, the director comes up trumps and reports that Stus’s relatives allegedly demanded that the scenes with the lawyer be removed from the film.
According to actor Popenko, who was casting, the cut in the length of the film was due to “a phone call from Medvedchuk’s administration.” On Saturday, Popenko came out again with a message about the “massive support” of the film by “spilnota”, the head of the Ministry of Culture Nishchuk and Groysman personally. In connection with this, it was decided to finish filming the scene of the trial of Stus and insert it into the film.
Medvedchuk himself, through lawyer Igor Kirilenko, is threatening to sue and seek a ban on the film's distribution.
The funny thing is that in these okolostus showdowns, the author’s team of the picture and Medvedchuk’s accusers completely forgot other “heroes” - the Ukrainian writers Yavorivsky, Drach and Pavlychko, who in 1973 brought a denunciation to KGB Chairman Andropov about the “great Ukrainian poet” and other prominent Ukrainian nationalists to a heap.
The point is that in 1989, with the decline of Soviet power and the strengthening of the influence of Ukrainian nationalists who crawled out of caches and prison bunks, the former Ukrainian Soviets abruptly changed their colors and became fierce advocates of independence, Ukrainian nationalism and Movnyuk security. It is characteristic that all three informers became co-founders of the Bandera-loving People's Movement of Ukraine movement, together with Chernovol, Goryn and other figures from the prison bucket.
Of all three, only Pavlychko has the best excuse. In 2013, the former Sovpis stated in an interview with the Kyiv publication “Weekly 2000” that he was a member of the UPA and left its ranks on the orders of the centurion to infiltrate the Komsomol and Soviet authorities. For such a disclosure, Svidomo and the denunciation of Stus are ready to forgive.
But this nice detail certainly won’t make it into the film.
The extraction of Stus from the mothballs of oblivion could not have come at a better time for the ideologists of Ukrainian expansion to the South-East, since the formation of the “poet-martyr” is connected with Donetsk - a stronghold and breeding ground for oligarchs, Muscovites and Moscow residents, katsapidlov and Ukrainophobes, crests-zradniks and other fifth columns, interfering with the prosperity of Independence.
At one time, the ideological front line ran through Donetsk University and the central city library, which were designated by political Ukrainians to perpetuate the memory of Stus. Fortunately, it didn't work out.
Actually, Stus’s connection with Donbass itself is accidental and there is not an ounce of love or affection traced in it. The Stusov family moved to Donbass in 1938. According to legend, due to dispossession. True, this version completely contradicts historical facts. The Stus family came from the rural poor, and in 1938 collectivization and the fight against the kulaks ended. Moreover, on January 1, 1935, the country actually experienced the first fruits of collectivization - the card system that had been in force since the end of the civil war was finally abolished.
The only reason why the Stus family could move to Donbass from the Vinnitsa village was a banal pursuit of a long ruble. In the largest industrial region of the USSR, things were much better in terms of earnings, social benefits and education than in the shabby Vinnitsa village of Rakhnovka.
Vasil Stus graduated from school with a silver medal, but entered the Kiev State University. The university failed. But he was admitted to the specialty “Ukrainian philology” of the historical and philological faculty of the Stalin State University. Pedagogical Institute, which later became the Donetsk State. university. I taught, served in the army and managed to catch the Svidomo infection somewhere.
According to the testimonies of people who knew Stus, he was a little man driven by the national idea, strictly Ukrainian and wearing an everyday embroidered shirt. They say that Stus was completely devoid of a sense of humor and got into a fight even because of a Ukrainian joke he told.
Well, that is, in the Donetsk land, where predominantly Russian-speaking people live, where literature in the Ukrainian language was piled high in bookstores, and the entire spectrum of Ukrainian periodicals was presented in the Soyuzpechat kiosks, there walked a Svidomo city madman, who fought for Ukraine, “against the dominance of Muscovites."
It would seem that the main question that should arise when mentioning the personality of Stus is the quality of his literary works. But it is precisely this point that Svidomo avoids with particular care. Despite the education she received, Shevchenko did not make it out of Stus. You can find and read his verses on the Internet to come to the conclusion that the poet from Stus is so-so. Like most works of this kind, Stus’s poems initially did not have a chance to win a wide readership, because in essence they were the personal “battle sheet” of a person who was completely caught up in the battle with windmills.
Despite the fact that literature is a humanitarian discipline, it has its own strict laws. Stus could wrap himself in embroidered shirts from head to toe and speak a language even with domestic cockroaches, but his entourage was Russian-speaking around the clock. Stus could not influence this fact, which is why, apparently, his cultural preferences gradually slipped into rabid extremism.
A person raised in the Russian-speaking environment of Donbass from childhood simply could not think in language, and, as a result, could not compose anything worthwhile in it. With the exception of Nabokov, who knew English perfectly, not a single emigrant writer succeeded in creating literary masterpieces in foreign languages.
Donetsk writer and journalist Maxim Gazizov evaluates Stus’s work in rather harsh terms:
“Of course, in his case there can be no talk of any poetry. This is a common graphomania, which turned out to be beneficial for Ukrainian figures to apparently fill the cultural vacuum, to fill the black nothingness of what is called Ukrainian culture. Unfortunately, real poets, whom Ukrainians also happily raise into their pantheon, would not even agree to live in the same city with such a graphomaniac: “Are you from where the notorious Stus lives?”, “What are you doing, I’ll forgive you,” I don’t know the poet.”
“Even if he really was a poet, the current Ukrainian “intelligentsia” would also not give a damn about the artistic value of his work. Ukrainians don't need poetry. They need propaganda,” the journalist concludes.
Historian and Izborsk Club expert Alexander Dmitrievsky considers Stus a foreign body for Donbass:
“Vasil Stus is a figure alien to Donbass. After all, in fact, he has nothing in common with Donetsk, with the exception, perhaps, of five years of wiping his pants on the student bench: such a specialty as Ukrainian philology was not popular among the residents of the mining region, and this freebie attracted blockheads from Western countries to us regions. By the way, we must not forget that Stus really did not like Donetsk, which he wrote about several times in his diaries.”
Returning to the “poet-martyr”, it should be noted that he is very similar to modern political Ukrainians not only by the political situation, but also by the inherent irreconcilable denial of objective reality and the inextricably linked genotba, as the only possible way of existence, inherent in Svidomo.
Beginning with purely cultural preferences, Stus’s protest Svidomism inevitably transformed into a need to participate in everything that was in conflict with the system with a touch of “national flavor”: harsh, almost fascist, stishata, criticism of Soviet power in all its manifestations, friendship with Chernovol, Dziuba and other Ukrainian and Russian dissidents, expressions of sympathy for Bandera’s supporters - in short, everything that can come into the head of a Svidomo fanatic who believed in the occupation of ridden Ukraine by commies and Muscovites.
Denial of reality within the framework of an overvalued idea inevitably leads to denial of oneself and one’s own life. The value of life becomes insignificant in comparison with the value of an idea. Moreover, physical death becomes desirable because it demonstrates to others how important this idea is to him. Stus purposefully, with the fanatical irrationality of a martyr, ran into trouble - in political activity, in creativity, and then in the camps. Where Solzhenitsyn lashed out at his cellmates with a stoned woodpecker, trying to make his term of imprisonment as comfortable as possible, Stus managed to create problems out of nowhere, calling the camp authorities “fascists” right and left and other bad words for any reason, regularly ending up in a punishment cell and going on hunger strikes . With a natural ending.
In principle, if the material had fallen into other hands, it could have turned out to be an interesting and instructive film about a little man with a bullet in his head, who embarked on the path of self-destruction for the sake of a false goal and followed it to its logical conclusion. But instead, the output will be “as always” - a wretched template with Bloody Hebnya, a story cut out for the sake of political correctness with informers-shifters, and the carcass of the “holy great martyr” drenched in honey and molasses for Ukrainian independence.
English version :: Read in English Svidomo spalahuy Stus: Rebellion for the sake of rebellion