Vasyl Symonenko at 90: A Personal Tribute.
There are poets who captivate with their magical grasp of thoughts, impressions, feelings and the ability to convey them in an appropriate choice of words and structure. And there are those among them who immediately penetrate one’s own inner self and one’s own receptivity. And you can immediately identify with their insights and messages.
For me, the son of Ukrainian refugees who was born in the UK in the 1950s and educated there in the 1960-70s, this was the case with Vasyl Symonenko, who was born 90 years ago on this day.
I had the privilege of growing up in a tolerant and meritocratic Britain in the 1960s. As a student in the 1970s I was exposed to the best of what was happening in the intellectual, cultural and musical scene of the Western world.
The changing zeitgeist had a profound impact: decolonization, the student and anti-war protests, the new, often iconoclastic writing, cinema, music and the humor of the time that helped shape my generation. We read the works of Albert Camus and Hermann Hesse, listened to the songs and music of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Moody Blues, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, laughed at Monty Python, watched great movies, and so on.
I eagerly absorbed all this, but as the son of Ukrainian parents who brought me up in a patriotic household and community I wanted to connect with the land and culture of the nation they wanted me to identify with. However, the Iron Curtain blocked us “anti-Soviet nationalists” from having normal contact with the land subjugated by Russia that they had been forced to flee from.
Learning from within the Ukrainian community about Ukraine’s past and its heroes – from its rosy narrative – was not sufficient for a teenager whose mind had been opened by British schooling, and I was anxious to know more about what contemporary Ukraine under Soviet rule actually represented.
And that’s when in the late 1960s, in my late teens, I discovered the powerful, evocative, modern and very intelligible poems of Symonenko and his colleagues – the patriotically minded representatives of Ukraine’s new generation known as the “Sixtiers.”
They were the new voice of a nation that had managed to survive terrible times – wars, persecution and repression, mass murder though an artificial famine, constant censorship, intensive Russification and being cut off from the outside world and the large Ukrainian diaspora. And yet, they sounded so normal and European to me, so in tune with what was happening in the free world.
The Sixtiers rejected Soviet regimentation and dealt with existential themes related to the human condition, freedom – creative, individual and of their people as a whole, love, loneliness, and solidarity, but also what the Ukrainian people has experienced and aspired to. Not in any narrow nationalistic sense, but in the spirit of decolonization, and righting the wrongs done to it.
These courageous young intellectuals appeared on the scene just as the Cold War was intensifying. It was in 1961 that the Berlin Wall was erected by the Soviets and in 1962 that the world was to hold its breath during the Cuban missile crisis.
Symonenko was born in 1935 in the central region of Poltava to a poor rural family. But he was smart, curious and ambitious. In 1957 he He graduated from university in Kyiv and became a journalist in Cherkasy, a city to the west of his native village.
He was handsome, soft-spoken (recordings of him reading his poems have survived), sensitive yet bold, patriotic and pro-Western, and fond of American literature. A talented young writer and journalist, he wrote not only poetry on themes ranging from love to politics, but also prose and plays, including children’s stories and humorous pieces.
In the Ukrainian capital he met what was to become a small but vibrant group of young writers, poets and literary critics. They included the poets Lina Kostenko, Ivan Drach, Mykola Vinhranovsky, the literary critics Ivan Svitlychny, Ivan Dziuba and Yevhen Sverstyuk, artist Alla Horska and theatre director Les Tanyuk, to name but a few.
Like their counterparts in the West, they had liberal, anti-totalitarian views. Yet they were keen not only to broaden the limits of individual self-expression, but also, in the stifling conditions of the Soviet empire, to affirm Ukrainian cultural values and national identity.
For this purpose, Symonenko and his colleagues founded the Club of Creative Youth in Kyiv. They took the lead in pressing the Soviet authorities for information about the countless victims of the Stalin era, the remains of which were being found at that time in unmarked mass burial sites outside of Kyiv, and to protect cultural and religious monuments.
The artistic and political nonconformism of the Sixtiers inevitably got them into trouble. Symonenko, was brutally beaten up by “unknown assailants” and died at the age of 28 in December 1963. Was he effectively removed from the scene by the Soviet repressive system, or did he die of kidney cancer, as some versions have it? It is still not clear.
Symonenko’s bold outspoken poetry and that of his colleagues began circulating in the underground as samvydav (self-published typescripts). The following year, the Club of Creative Youth was shut down.
By then the Sixtiers in Kyiv had forged links with their counterparts in Lviv in the west of the country, and other Ukrainian cities. Their patriotic assertiveness resisting Soviet regimentation, gradually took the form of political dissent, and in 1965 the KGB cracked down and arrested over two dozen young patriots.
Protests and further arrests were to follow. Symonenko’s early death spared him this fate, but it is not difficult to imagine what would have happened to him had he lived longer.
In the late 1960s Symonenko’s poems were smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West. That’s how I found out about him and discovered, through his works and those of his fellow Sixtiers, what the young post-Stalinist cultural generation in Ukraine was up to and what they stood for.
This was something I could identify with and support, and it led me to become actively involved in the defense of Ukrainian prisoners of conscience and the cause of freedom in general.
In the last 10 years, another very talented Ukrainian poet and dissident, Vasyl Stus, who died in 1995 as a political prisoner in the Soviet Gulag, has become the most famous literary dissident and symbol of his time.
Without wishing to diminish Stus’s contribution in any way, the role and impetus that Symonenko had previously given to the nascent Ukrainian patriotic movement should not be overlooked and deserves to be properly acknowledged.
Even during his lifetime, Symonenko was compared to a modern Taras Shevchenko, who had been the Ukrainian national poet and defender of Ukrainian freedom in the mid-19th century.
As if amplifying Shevchenko’s words almost a century later, it was Symonenko who defiantly proclaimed in 1962: “My people are alive, my people will survive, no one will eliminate my people.”
Today, his confident assertion is all the more pertinent.
I gaze into your eyes…
I gaze into your eyesBlue and anxious, as if at dawn.Emanating red lightning boltsFrom revolutions, mutinies and revolts.
Ukraine! You are a wonder for me!And let the years fly by,I will, proud and beautiful mother,Forever marvel at what you exemplify.
For you, I, sow pearls into souls,For you I reflect and create.Be silent America and Russia,When with you I want to relate.
Stand aside, sly enemies!Friends, wait for me outside!I have a sacred son’s rightWith my mother to confide.
I don’t find enough time for you,The days are far too short.Not all devils have fled to heaven yet,The world is still with them fraught.
You see: I fight with them constantly.Do you hear the battle’s constant noise?How will I cope without friends,Without their support, retain my poise?
Ukraine! For you I pray,My constant source of torment.Overhead a fierce battle thunders,Over your life, what you represent.
Let the red clouds darken the sky,Let the insults fly — in my manner,I’ll shed a drop of my bloodOn your sacred banner.
Translate by Bohdan Nahaylo January 5, 2025.
Source: Bohdan Nahaylo