Іван Світличний

Activity: Culture
Date of Birth: September 20, 1929
Date of Death: October 25, 1992
Navigator: Postwar USSR

Ukrainian literary scholar, linguist, literary critic, poet, translator, and activist of the Ukrainian resistance movement of the 1960s–1970s, known as the Sixtiers movement, who was subjected to repression. Laureate of the Taras Shevchenko State Prize of Ukraine (1994) and the Vasyl Stus Prize (1989).

“…Ivan Oleksiiovych, my dear friend, I return to you, to the past, less and less often. More and more rarely, unfortunately. Back there, where life was more transparent, clearer, sweeter. To the camp. I was always fortunate with Teachers. While still a high school student, I met Olha Mykolaivna Korchak-Chepurkivska, visited her home, and listened to her stories about the past. Gentle, patient Olha Mykolaivna never spoke about herself or about her far from easy life. As I now understand, she was one of the fragments of the former European-educated Ukrainian intelligentsia, not entirely mutilated and exterminated by the Soviet regime. Later, she introduced me to the then legendary man and writer Viktor Platonovych Nekrasov. Spending almost every day in his home and talking with him, I received from him so much that was important that I still dare to consider myself one of his students. And then, in the camps, there was Ivan Oleksiiovych Svitlychnyi. My Teacher for all my years. A Ukrainian writer, a European-educated intellectual. Wise, warm, sincere. He never spoke words about patriotism. Yet he loved this land, Ukraine, bitterly and indivisibly. He loved soberly, without illusions or pathos. Such was this ‘bourgeois Ukrainian nationalist’ who taught me everything I know how to do today. Above all, to see and hear the truth. And to distinguish it from falsehood. I returned from Siberia to my native city still during the bleak Soviet years, knowing that every day there could become the day of a new arrest, yet at that time I felt like a victor. A doomed, lonely victor. Svitlychnyi made me such — a lonely and doomed European. My teacher.
Time covers details with patina. Somewhere in the KGB archives, thousands of pages of reports by camp informers and supervisors are preserved; somewhere in private archives abroad lie hundreds of pages of the long-published and forgotten ‘Diaries from Camp VS 389/35.’ But I do not need details, figures, or dates. A loving heart does not need particulars; it remembers what is essential, what matters most. Respect and love do not arise instantly. That is why they outlive memory itself. A twenty-six-year-old man was entering a new life. Without concerts at the philharmonic, night bonfires in Koktebel, charming girls, or quiet evenings in the reading hall of the academic library. Without former illusions and preferences. Life turned out to be drier, more frightening, more unequivocal. There was fear, and there was bitterness.
The camp greeted me with the shock of immersion into history. Beside me were peasant sons from Western Ukraine and the Baltic states serving their twenty-five-year prison terms. Here, too, old men who had once served in the German police were once again adapting to life, now actively ‘taking the path of correction’… We all ate the same rotten cabbage and marched in the same formation.
…On a black piece of leatherette was a neat inscription in drafting letters: ‘Svitlychnyi,’ a tag on his chest. The face remained in my memory later. A man who then seemed to me rather elderly (he was around fifty) carefully observed his new life, walked slowly, spoke at length with Antoniuk, Horbal, partisan ‘twenty-five-yearers,’ and Jews imprisoned for attempting to hijack a plane to reach Israel. Not with me. Yes, that is how it was, Ivan Oleksiiovych: the restless boy seeking simple and unrealistic solutions was understandable to you and therefore uninteresting. Your first serious conversation with me — or rather your attentive listening to my emotional monologue — took place after Valerii Marchenko was transferred to our camp. By chance, it turned out that I knew some of his Kyiv friends.
In the camp, Svitlychnyi was a leader. Caution, wisdom, practical common sense, and vast life experience somehow imperceptibly made him a man to whom everyone listened — everyone whose behavior in the camp was determined by a moral position. Yes, precisely a moral position of resistance to evil and lies. In reality, everything was simple and clear: the truth in the existential duel between the individual and the totalitarian state was obvious, and that truth was what the boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale dared to say aloud. The king was naked! This truth united all of us, regardless of national culture, native language, personal experience, or age difference. Ivan Svitlychnyi loved and understood people, and therefore people trusted him.
Courage, personal heroism elevated to fanaticism, a concrete goal — these are necessary for revolutionaries. We were not revolutionaries. We neither wished nor knew how to be them. Hundreds of thousands, millions of people in the USSR knew the same things we knew. But they remained silent. We, strange loners, dared to speak and write. That was our entire guilt. Engineers, schoolteachers, peasants, scholars, factory workers came to the Gulag, as a rule, without political ambitions. And here, in the camp, we did not live by ‘politics’ alone… Svitlychnyi lived through poetry. He translated from French, wrote his own works, edited those of others. He managed to read several Ukrainian and Russian literary journals and would immediately tell us: ‘You must read this. Wonderful poems.’ Or: ‘Interesting poems.’ Ivan loved life. He loved it deeply. Prison, camp, transports — all of this was life for him: unusual, harsh, dangerous, but still his own life, where even on the grayest and gloomiest day there is always a reason for joy and humor. What is joy? Merely a reaction, a response. The distorted life of a Soviet zek was nevertheless filled with joys and happiness. We were happy with one another, with our conversations on every topic imaginable, with our books. Only one thing had no place in this strange life: plans for the future. How could one not rejoice or laugh when the madness of the unreal Soviet reality, with its eternal fear and lies, remained beyond the tall fences, while here beside you lived such different people who had become dear to you through their astonishing openness and integrity? And every day you rejoiced that you were among them, that like them you could tell a KGB officer the obvious truth to his face; that in one corner of the barrack you could discuss French literary modernism, and in another the philosophical problems of biophysics, and there among the double bunks the history of ancient Greece. And your own history, the history of your Kafkaesque country, was right there beside you in the faces and destinies of Stepan Mamchur and Jonas Matuzevičius, Vasyl Pidhorodetskyi and Ivars Grabans.
During difficult and gloomy hours, Ivan radiated confidence. We were drawn to him, as doomed as we ourselves were, with some subconscious hope… In the cold and hostile world, one wanted again and again to touch his intellect, his balance, and even his pessimism. The warm pessimism of a wise philosopher. Once, while walking with me through the residential zone and discussing some new documents, Ivan suddenly stopped and said emotionally, looking straight into my face: ‘Slava, do not lose the opportunity to write. Write in every free moment. You must write. Understand, you do not know how much time you have left. None of us knows what awaits tomorrow. None of us knows when a stroke will strike, when memory will fail, when the mind will fail. Then it will be too late. Especially here, in the zone, where you cannot plan your future life. What if tomorrow brings a transfer or a new sentence?..’
It was a school beneath the plane trees. A wise teacher and students striving for knowledge. From the knowledge of conspiracy to the knowledge of poetics. And the knowledge of how to combine all this — in one head, in one day, in one moment… We were happy. Yes, it is true. We were all happy in our sincere friendship, our genuine lives, happy in our poems and articles. Even in our hunger strikes. All of us. Or almost all. And if one were to liken the harsh life of Camp VS 389/35 to a spiritual academy, then Ivan Svitlychnyi was the rector of that academy.
And then came the final transfer. Into exile. Ivan prepared in advance, painfully sorting through accumulated journals and books. Hundreds of kilograms of journals and books. He understood that in the USSR one does not go on a prison transport with such baggage. At last he informed us: ‘That’s it, I’ve left the minimum. The essentials.’ As always, Ivan was taken away suddenly. Three men came and said: ‘Svitlychnyi, gather all your things and report to the checkpoint.’ A transfer! Ivan went with them to the storage room to collect his carefully filtered minimum… These were cardboard boxes, wooden suitcases. Dozens of them. Bewildered guards summoned a horse and cart into the camp zone. They loaded everything up. We, mute witnesses, stood at a distance. And despite the piercing pain of Ivan being taken away from us, we could not help smiling: the camp had never seen a prison transfer with a horse before! …Much later there was Kyiv. Kyiv with me and Ivan. But about that I will not write. I cannot.

Author: Semen Gluzman