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Hetman Ivan Mazepa (ca. 1640-1709). The program began a little after noon, so that the farmers could wash up after their morning chores. Peter I ordered Baturyn to be leveled to the ground in 1708, as soon as he heard that Mazepa turned against him. The entire population of the town, some 20,000 women, children, and older men (the younger ones went to the army) was tortured and slaughtered, their crucified bodies thrown into the river to flow to the Dnieper as a deterrent to others not to join Mazepa’s ill-fated attempt at independence. No new settlements were permitted within the twenty-mile radius of old Baturyn. The new Baturyn, built at mid eighteenth century was a small village with no hint of its tragic past. Many of the peasants had heard of Lidice, the Czech village that the German Nazis razed to the ground in retaliation for the killing of Reinhard Hey- drich, the notorious Nazi ’’Hangman of Europe.” The vil lagers wanted to know why they had been kept in the dark about the tragedy of their own town. These people had been robbed of their historical memory, and in try ing to recapture it, they felt shame and remorse at their ignorance. The past, not history, lives in the serene forest of Bykovnia, a stone’s throw from Kiev. Mainly pine forest, with luxurious fern underfoot that Lina Kostenko, a poet of the 1960s, likened to birds ready to fly, in pre- Chernobyl days the prime site for mushroom picking, it had been — from 1934 through 1936 — the site of exe cutions and shallow burials. Today, people tie hand- lettered signs of names of those they know had been killed, and those whose fate, after their arrest, is not known. The homeliness of the signs reminds me of the memorial quilts exhibited for the victims of AIDS. Today, each village, each town, especially in the Carpathian mountains where the struggle against Stalin was armed through the first years of the 1950s, is erecting memor ial burial mounds for the known and unknown dead, as if those lumps of land had some transcendent power to preserve the memory of the dead. The burial mounds that moved me most were those hidden from view on the edge of the southern steppe that is kept as a pre serve. Four huge mounds, each topped with a massive fertility goddess, remain from prehistoric times, mute reminders of an indigenous population of pre-Christian period. The wildlife preserve with zebras and gnus is near the territory to which Catherine the Great, or the Second, as she is known in these parts, exiled the last free cossacks, permitting them to settle, provided they didn’t dig wells but rather trekked the forty miles to the river for water. Descendants of these families, having since trekked through the Siberia into which the Soviets had exiled their parents and grandparents for having been effective farmers, drove me through the Black Sea coast, pointing out rare grasses and reminding me of the contributions to the area made by Greeks, Armen ians, Bavarians, Koreans. At the same time they con ’’HALLIE ЖИТТЯ”, ЛИПЕНЬ-СЕРПЕНЬ 1994 veyed a sense of pride that the land was theirs, and that they grew the best crops on it. If only, they echoed the others I met, they were left in peace to till their soil, do their work, educate their children, to build a better life for themselves in the land that had been theirs a long time ago. They built bonfires on the beach to grill the fish they caught, and assembled audiences in the cities to hear me lecture. In my travels through the countryside, visiting the few remaining palaces and formal gardens of the Polish magnates who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centur ies had lorded over the fertile plains, stopping at the grave of one of the founders of the Jewish Hasidim, pausing at this or that site of a battle long forgotten or perhaps not even known, I was continually struck by the tranquility of the land. Among the few philosophers it produced in the seventeenth century was Hryhoriy Sko voroda, a Socratic itinerant teacher who fled from the structured Latin schools to wander in the lush Poltava countryside teaching a message of simplicity, individual rectitude, and charity. Today, in Skovoroda’s hometown, the reason to get up early on Sunday is to shop at the weekly bazaar, where pork prices are cheaper (the pork often comes live) and shoddy Chinese shoes may be purchased at exorbitantly high prices, if one is lucky. Descendants of Skovoroda’s countrymen want a better life. They want to major in business, or to go into busi ness, they want a market without necessarily under standing what the market economy really is. They hunger for food, and thirst for a just and better life, but they also yearn for beauty and spirituality. From the crassest fortune tellers, to extrasensory artists, healers, preachers, to a back-to-nature movement that seeks to reconcile the shod foot with the bare ground, they flock, each at their own pace and at their own level to the source that goes beyond the materialism they had been told marked the edge of existence. Ukraine has ma naged not only to avoid bloodshed on its territory, it has made steps toward enabling the grass-roots creation of a civil society composed of many diverse parts. No indi vidual possesses only one exclusive identity; rather their identities flow freely into many spheres and from one sphere to another depending on the function and inter ests of the time. Ukrainians have not articulated this, but neither do we, unless we especially think about it. One vivid picture remains with me. One spring day, on my way to a meeting at the Academy, I pass the square where Lenin’s statue used to loom, with the Stal inist Hotel Moscow as a background. Today various commercial banks rent the podium for their billboards; in the shade, would-be capitalists iron out their deals. I am musing on the irony of the symbolism when from below — Independence Square (nee the Square of the October Revolution) — comes the clear, clean trumpet sound of “America the Beautiful.” The melody brings smiles to the midday crowd. “Humanities", no. 3, p. 30—34, May/June 1994. Published by: National Endowment for the Humanities. 23
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