Ihor Pavlyuk: The Beginning of Our Country

By Naomi Foyle

Acumen 100 – May 2021 (https://www.acumen-poetry.co.uk/issues/)

In his native Ukraine, Ihor Pavlyuk is considered one of the leading poets of his generation: sonorous, Romantic, formally indebted to folk traditions, over the fraught decades his work has sung to Ukrainians of their distinctive culture and the nurturing embrace of their arable landscape. But though steeped in a love of his native country, his work explicitly rejects the lure of an narrow nationalism ‒ at a time when Russia, in its annexation of Crimea, has gravely wounded Ukrainian integrity, and continues to pose a serious geopolitical threat, Pavlyuk’s stated vision of a ‘spiritual Ukraine’ offers a profound alternative to the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and elsewhere. In its inclusive reach and lyric concision, his poetry has achieved a global appeal: he is widely translated, beloved also in Russia and his many international supporters include two Nobel laureates, Derek Walcott and Mo Yan. While he remains under-appreciated in the English-speaking world, two different collections of Selected Poems, Arthania (Dorrence Publications, 2020), translated by Yurii Lazirko and Hilary Sheers and introduced by Mo Yan, and the English PEN Award winning A Flight Over the Black Sea (Waterloo Press, 2014), translated by Steve Komarnyckyj, offer readers on both sides of the Atlantic lucid renditions of a great range of poems from Ihor Pavlyuk’s substantial and highly significant oeuvre.

       Rooted in the fertile steppes of Ukraine, along with Moldova the poorest country in Europe, yet also a global breadbasket fought over by powerful neighbours, Pavlyuk’s poetry belongs to the European literary traditions of surrealism, the meditative lyric, and the pastoral, yet in its deep reverence for the land and rural traditions, also claims kinship with the painful wisdom of Indigenous cultures. I make the comparison with profound respect and caution: throughout the world, First Nations peoples are long exploited, nearly exterminated communities, and though it is essential to pay heed to them, there is no easy succour to be found in doing so. In a recent communication concerning Covid-19, US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, a member of the Mvskoke Nation, speaks of being far from ‘hope’ or ‘acceptance’; of being, instead, anguished, wrested awake each night by a ‘torment’ of questions. ‘Surely,’ though, Harjo asks herself, ‘my questioning will lead me to poetry’¹. A too-ready identification with this struggle risks perpetuating a violent history of cultural appropriation; poetry, nevertheless, with its complex root-ball of oral and written traditions, is also a universal meeting place. Pavlyuk’s work reminds us that Europe too has Earth-based cultures and mythopoetics ‒ and on-going colonial conflicts.

       Thus the title of Arthania invokes an ancient land of the Early Slavs, Artha, first described in a lost book by the Persian polymath Abu Zayd al-Balkhi (c. 920), but which no subsequent historian has been able to geographically place.² In the book, as throughout his writings, Pavlyuk pays tribute to his maternal grandparents’ village, Polissya in the Volyn region of Western Ukraine, where he was raised after his mother died ten days after giving birth to him on January 1^st 1967. Creatively, his upbringing has proved an inexhaustible fountain. Volyn, associated with the ‘Prague School’ of Ukrainian poetry, is, as Dmytro Drozdovskyi explains in his critical introduction to A Flight Over the Black Sea, ‘a special, magical world where the forms of pagan identity were preserved as the atmosphere of the region was not smashed during the Soviet period’.³ Pavlyuk’s boyhood memories feed a rich cosmological vision of a human universe in which women and elders are respected, and the natural world sends signs to those who listen, watch and wait: a clattering stork, a viburnum growing ‘on a mass grave’, ‘a precise and windblown snowflake’ falling ‘upon the lips I loved to kiss.’⁴ These are also the poems, though, of a man who was sentenced to a period of hard labour in the Taiga for leaving his military engineering studies in St Petersburg in order to pursue a career as a poet. Only freed when the Soviet Union fell, now a Doctor of Social Communications, and long married to journalism professor Lyudmyla Pavlyuk, Ihor Pavlyuk is no naïf when it comes to understanding or resisting political violence.

       Where Artha was said to be insular, the inhabitants killing all foreigners who attempted to enter⁵, Pavlyuk’s work honours an ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse modern state, one that is culturally grounded in Judeo-Christianity, Islam and paganism. In the face of divisive incursions from Ukraine’s imperialist neighbour, Pavlyuk seeks, in his public role as a writer, to promote national strength through unity, education and scientific and economic development. He teaches media studies, sits on the editorial boards of scientific and literary journals, and as a national literary figure speaks and participates in international peace conferences.⁶ The world of his poems is a lonelier yet no less wise and generous space: the lyric subject who moves and grows through Pavlyuk’s oeuvre is a Christ-like shaman whose power is derived from solitude, humility, and language itself, thus posing a fundamental challenge to any expansionist quest for endless ‘progress’ and material acquisition.

       For his writerly concern with an enigmatic mythic past and ‘the constant parameters of a human being’s mind, such as tolerance, love, emotionality, sexuality, empathy . . .’,⁷ and for his dual role as poet and scholar of mass communications, Drozdovskyi considers Pavlyuk a metamodernist, his work ‘an example of these cultural and cognitive transformations of the contemporary global mind that again needs truth and true emotionality to be able to understand itself as a new being/identity.’⁸ Coined in 2010 by Dutch cultural theorists Timothy Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker,⁹ the term metamodernism has both aesthetic and political applications.  Luke Turner theorised in his 2011 Metamodernist Manifesto that the movement (or condition) represents a hopeful response to emergent global technological networks.¹⁰ Philosophically, it spins back into play notions of truth, authenticity and individual agency, urging passionate, eclectic and interpersonal resistance to the demoralising power of governments, corporations and the mass media. Incorporating yet also rejecting postmodernist scepticism, it is ‘meta’ both in terms of aiming ‘beyond’ modernism, and in self-reflecting on its own inability to fully escape political circumstances. Spurring humanity ‘to act as if’ our spacio-temporal limitations can be transcended,¹⁰ Turner’s Manifesto concludes:

We propose a pragmatic romanticism unhindered by ideological anchorage. Thus, metamodernism shall be defined as the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons. We must go forth and oscillate!¹¹

For Drozdovskyi, Ihor Pavlyuk’s return to nature and childhood is not nostalgic, but key to his poetry’s ‘comparative mode’, an oscillation between past and present enacted because ‘We need this (mythologised) humanity of the past to prevent us creating anti-human monsters for the future . . .’.¹² Revolutionary as they may be in relation to postmodernism, Pavlyuk’s poems also, though, explore the perennial truth ‒ one which lockdown can impart, if we let it ‒ that the sacred is immanent, eternally within and around us. ‘I make the gods human / I deify the grass’, an early poem concludes¹³. And his concerns over the decades, as traced in Arthania, and expressed in stanzas constructed as carefully as the ‘house’ structure his grandparents used to lay wood for a fire,¹⁴ partake deeply of traditional poetic themes: love, the land, suffering, redemption through suffering, and above all, mortality.

In Pavlyuk’s subtly shifting imagery, emotional states may expand, mutate, and dissolve, but history is always whispering through the trees. As a young poet he honours the ‘orchestral’ beauty of ‘grey hairs’ and recognises already the impossibility of returning ‘home’¹⁵. Thirty years later, consciously or not, he speaks back to his younger self: where once childhood days were vivid as ‘poppies growing in a field of stubble’, now all the speaker can hope for is a glimpse of a ‘roadside flower’ seen through ‘a window frosted and opaque’.¹⁶ In ‘Revelation’, in another resonant image for this time of the ‘coronation’ virus, the older poet has learned to expect, as reward for survival, only fresh suffering: ‘When the crown of thorns is lifted off ‒ / A greater pain than that first crowning’¹⁷.

 In its acute understanding of suffering, and deep awareness of the eternal return of human violence, Pavlyuk’s work speaks both to, and far beyond, conflicts in his native land.

A Flight Over The Black Sea reaches erotic epiphanies in the embrace of sea and steppe, but while mp3 players and blue jeans make only fleeting appearances throughout his oeuvre, the enduring imagery of nature and the body are more than sufficient to write the political present:

From the moment someone writes with foreign blood

they begin to write with their own

I find no bloodlessness in history,

With the thorny word, stringent as salt.¹⁸ 

Given Ukraine’s harsh geopolitical realities, there is more than a hint of defiant, uncanny prophecy in the last lines of ‘By the Sea’, which at first seems a poem of shamanic angst in the face of death, but concludes with an ambiguous image of a place where the speaker belongs:

You were so wanton, loving anguish,

The recesses of night.

The end of the tunnel is the end of a gun barrel,

The edge of the sea, the beginning of our country.¹⁹

While one level an immensely threatening and pessimistic image, ‘the end of a gun barrel’ might also signal a yearning for an end to war: although imbued with a love one might call patriotic ‒ since 2014 Pavlyuk has twice volunteered for military service, though his health has thus far prevented him taking up a role on the front ‒ these poems are never guilty of a reductive or aggressive nationalism. In these poems, ‘our country’ is an intimate space, open to all readers, a domain defined by love. Pavlyuk’s intimate but inclusive vision of Ukraine incorporates the Roma people²⁰, Spanish pop songs and the Qur’an²¹, and speakers who are as wary of self-deception as of as any predatory ‘other’:

Remembering bright, kind and somewhat inebriated Uncle Vasyl

Gathering nuts in Polissya.

I want to write a song that is like the world

Of all who came or who will come.

Then sleep in grass, as in a wolf skin,

While my genes dance, awaiting resurrection.²² 

This image of the sleeping poet in wolf’s clothing offers an honest assessment of the nature not just of the writer, or the speaker, but all human beings. As Mo Yan reflects: ‘I know that a nebulous terrain exists in the hearts and minds of every person, a terrain that cannot be adequately characterised in simple terms of right and wrong or good and bad. I see this ambiguity in Ihor Pavlyuk’s works and I am happy in the knowledge that there is a very good poet in Ukraine.’²³ Elsewhere Ihor Pavlyuk claims the right to tread moral boundaries as ‘a lone wolf’ slinking ‒ or one might say, oscillating ‒ between ‘a manger of hay . . . [and] the tsar of flowers’.²⁴ If Europe, and global society, are to heal their own abysmal rifts, such sensitive prowling between intimate truths and common ground will be required of us more and more in the years ahead. For those who wish to avoid polarities and extremes, Ihor Pavlyuk, the poet with the sun in his heart, the moon in his eyes, and the metamodernist critics at his side, is a guide to place our faith in.

With thanks to Ihor Pavlyuk for his conversation.

NOTES

¹Harjo, Joy. ‘A Message from the Poet Laureate’. <www.joyharjo.com/resources-for-poetry-relief>. Accessed

       15 May 2020.

²‘Arthania’. Wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthania>. Accessed 3 Aug 2020.  

³Drozdovskyi, Dmytro. ‘The Fecundity of Spring and Fire: Ihor Pavlyuk’s Metamodernism’. Critical introduction
       to A Flight Over the Black Sea: Selected Poems by Ihor Pavlyuk, translated by Steve Komarnyckyj.
       (Hove: Waterloo Press, 2014).  p xv.

⁴Pavlyuk, Ihor. Untitled/’Don’t be surprised, my friend’, ‘On a Mass Grave’, Untitled/’A precise and windblown
       snowflake fell’, in Arthania. Translated by Yurii Lazirko. Revised and edited by Hilary Sheers
       (Pittsburgh: Dorrance Publishing, 2020).

⁵‘Arthania’. Op.Cit.

⁶‘Two Day International Peace Conference kicks off’. Dawn. 2015. https://www.dawn.com/news/1075857/two-day-intl-peace-conference-kicks-off. Accessed 3 Aug 2020

⁷Drozdovskyi, Dmytro. Op. Cit. p xiii.

⁸Drozdovskyi, Dmytro. Op. Cit. p x.

⁹Vermeulen, Timothy & Robin van den Akker. ‘Notes on metamodernism’. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture,

       Volume 2, 2010.

¹⁰Turner, Luke. ‘Metamodernist Manifesto’. 2011. http://www.metamodernism.org/. Accessed 3 Aug 2020.

¹¹Ibid.

¹²Drozdovskyi, Dmytro. Op. Cit. p xiii

¹³Pavlyuk, Ihor. Op. Cit. Untitled/‘Solitary like the Earth’.

¹⁴Ihor Pavlyuk, quoted in Ihor Pavlyuk: “Between Bug and God” (Ігор Павлюк: "Між Бугом і Богом").Video.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s0-5iL_YCw&t=475s

¹⁵Pavlyuk, Ihor. Op. Cit. ‘Goodness’,‘Home’.

¹⁶Ibid. ‘My Days’, ‘A Toxic Snow’.

¹⁷Ibid. ‘Revelation’.

¹⁸Pavlyuk, Ihor. ‘From the Moment’, in A Flight Over the Black Sea: Selected Poems. Translated by Steve
       Komarnyckyj. (Hove: Waterloo Press, 2014).

¹⁹Ibid.‘By the Sea’.

²⁰Pavlyuk, Ihor. ‘Gypsies’ in Arthania. Op. Cit.

²¹Pavlyuk, Ihor. ‘Polissya’, in A Flight Over the Black Sea. Op.Cit.

²²Ibid. ‘The World is Not an Apple’.

²³Yan, Mo. Quoted from A Flight Over the Black Sea. Ibid.

²⁴‘The Right to Be a Lone Wolf’ in Arthania. Op. Cit.

WORKS CITED

Pavlyuk, Ihor. A Flight Over the Black Sea: Selected Poems. Translated and Introduced by
        Steve Komarnyckyj. Hove: Waterloo Press, 2014.

Pavlyuk, Ihor. Arthania: Selected Poems. Translated by Yurii Lazirko. Revised and Edited by

       Hilary Sheers. Pittsburgh: Dorrance Publishing Co, 2020.