Antonovych Prizes are awarded to Andrukhovych and Szporluk (09/09/01)

Antonovych Prizes are awarded to Andrukhovych and Szporluk

by Zenon Zawada
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

KYIV - Yuri Andrukhovych doesn't know if how he can remain a writer in Ukraine when police attack those who speak the same language he writes in.

"What's a writer to do in a country that everyone flees?" Mr. Andrukhovych said.

Ukraine's premiere young writer recently spoke about Ukrainian society and the challenges of being a Ukrainian writer before 150 people at Kyiv's Expocenter, after receiving the prestigious Antonovych award.

For 20 years, Omelan and Tetiana Antonovych, a prominent Ukrainian-American couple, have honored Ukrainians for their contributions to culture and society, including a $5,000 award. This year's recipients included Mr. Andrukhovych, and Dr. Roman Szporluk, director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

Prior recipients include Soviet political prisoner Vasyl Stus and Robert Conquest, the author of "Harvest of Sorrow."

In his acceptance speech on June 21, Mr. Andrukhovych referred to the chaos at the Kyiv event commemorating Taras Shevchenko's birthday in March, when President Leonid Kuchma placed a wreath at the poet's statue amid heavy protest.

Riots soon erupted, and Kyiv police targeted Ukrainian speakers, suspecting them of being nationalists and slamming their heads to the ground, Mr. Antonovych said.

Questions regarding patriotism

Some Ukrainian intellectuals have accused Mr. Andrukhovych of being anti-patriotic, said Prof. Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, who presented the award. In fact, she said, Mr. Andrukhovych is patriotic because he is able to identify Ukraine's problems and critically examine them.

Mr. Andrukhovych, a native of the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, said he faces a decision of whether to leave his native country or go abroad, because a writer has to constantly grow his experience.

Essential questions unresolved

He spent eight months at Pennsylvania State as a Fulbright scholar and worried about returning to a country that had become foreign to him. But instead, he saw a country that hasn't changed, and hasn't resolved essential questions.

Referring to Ukraine as "our strange part of the world," Mr. Andrukhovych said unanswered questions as to Ukraine's identity at least give hope to Ukraine's youth.

Ukraine's priorities should be free speech and independence, particularly from Russian influence.

While Mr. Andrukhovych spoke about contemporary Ukraine, Dr. Szporluk spoke about its history, comparing Ukraine's current nation-building process with what Germany and Italy underwent in the mid-19th century.

End of an era

According to Dr. Szporluk, the nation's independence a decade ago marked the end of an era in Ukrainian history beginning in 1848, when intellectuals began identifying Halychyna and Transcarpathia as part of Ukraine.

In 1991, a new era of Ukrainian history began, and the main question the country currently must resolve is whether it wants to unite with Russia or remain independent.

In answering such a question, Ukrainians must consider whether they want to defend a border that includes neighbors like Chechnya, Afghanistan and China.

Dr. Szporluk criticized intellectuals who claimed that Ukrainian independence occurred spontaneously, or randomly. In fact, he said, Ukrainian independence was the result of a struggle that lasted for most of the 20th century.

Last year, Hoover Institution Press published a collection of essays that Dr. Szporluk had wrriten over the past 30 years titled, "Russia, Ukraine and the Breakup of the Soviet Union."

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