Smoloskyp publishing house dedicates new headquarters in Kyiv

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Once the bane of Soviet Ukrainian authorities, Smoloskyp has established itself as a leading center for nurturing creative writing and young talent in Ukraine - 50 years after it was established in Paris by a group of Ukrainian expatriate students who wanted to know more about what was going on back in their homeland.

The publishing house that became renowned for publishing smuggled "samvydav" - the works of Soviet Ukrainian underground authors and dissidents - to the West now works openly in Ukraine to foster Ukrainian literature, as well as to honor the legacy of those who fought for human rights and democracy in the country.

The degree to which Smoloskyp has become a fixture on Ukrainian soil was apparent when it held an open house on November 9 to bless its new premises, located in the historic Podil district of Kyiv.

"If we wanted to continue to work in Ukraine and to work with the creative youth, we needed a proper building. From the time we moved to Ukraine we have had problems with keeping a premises," explained founder and director Osyp Zinkewych.

Smoloskyp owns this new building, a structure purchased with Ukrainian American and Ukrainian Canadian donations, mostly from longtime supporters of the organization, and it has all the required licenses and permits to prove it.

Mr. Zinkewych said he was satisfied that he would finally be rid of Kyiv city officials and representatives of a private contractor who had long waited impatiently for Smoloskyp to leave the old structure (which it also had owned, by the way) so that they could begin construction of an apartment complex.

Acquisition of the new building, a historic structure built in 1866 and a fine example of mid-19th century Viennese-influenced architecture, did not come without other sorts of headaches. Mr. Zinkewych explained that it took more time to obtain the 38 permits required to remodel the site than it took to carry out the actual work.

No doubt the man who is the heart and soul of Smoloskyp was pleased with his new premises as he greeted guests on November 9 and led priests from the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church through the building as they blessed its rooms.

Among the guests in attendance were such ex-Soviet political dissidents and current Ukrainian political and literary luminaries as Ivan Dzyuba, Yevhen Sverstiuk and Mykhailo Horyn, all of whose works Smoloskyp helped to surreptitiously move from the Soviet Union via underground channels to the West for publication by its print house.

Among the published works that achieved most renowned were Mr. Dzyuba's "Internationalism or Russification" and the late Vyacheslav Chornovil's "The Chornovil Papers."

Mr. Chornovil's widow, Atena Pashko, a poet who also was published by Smoloskyp, was present at the blessing as well.

The new building, a two-story structure with a courtyard in the rear, will house a museum containing Smoloskyp's historic documents, including the archives of the Ukrainian samvydav, considered the largest such collection in the world.

The building will also contain activity and conference halls for workshops and conferences, including those organized to stimulate creative writing among contemporary Ukrainian youth. Finally it will house the organization's administrative offices and, not least of all, a Ukrainian book store, continuing the Smoloskyp legacy of publicizing the works of Ukrainian writers.

"Many exclusively Ukrainian book stores in Kyiv have disappeared and been replaced with predominantly Russian-language book stores that may perhaps carry a few token Ukrainian-language books," explained Mr. Zinkewych during an interview in the offices of Smoloskyp's old building, which stands on a rutted, dirt road near the outer reaches of Kyiv.

The Smoloskyp director noted that the organization's archives contain more samvydav than the renowned Vernadsky Library in Kyiv or anything one might find in Moscow. The library and museum - which was being developed and organized by Oles Obertas, godson to Nadia Svitlychna, another dissident whose writings were secretly published in the West by Smoloskyp - will contain newspapers from the informal press in Ukraine as well, many of which were published in the Baltic states and received by Smoloskyp from the Suchasnist archives.

Mr. Zinkewych also noted that it would include perhaps the most extensive library of periodicals from the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the U.S., which Smoloskyp had carried to Ukraine. Additionally, the Smoloskyp archives contain materials about the dissident movements of other republics of the Soviet Union as they appeared in the West through other routes. Those materials include publications by Radio Liberty, as well as some in the Japanese language.

Mr. Zinkewych explained that the organization's central tenet shifted as the need to smuggle information and the dissident movement itself dissipated after "perebudova" took root in the late 1980s. Since its move to Kyiv from the Washington area in 1991, Smoloskyp had worked to nurture the creativity of Ukraine's young writers. Today it can claim credit for a new generation of poets and writers, including Serhii Zhadan, Ivan Andrusiak, Maksym Rozumnyi, Rostyslav Melnykiv and Andrii Bondar.

These "youngsters" now in their 30s were part of a "Group of 500," as they had decided to call themselves without any apparent reason, which Mr. Zinkewych began to nurture after he decided that older writers were too set in their ways. One of the first initiatives organized by Smoloskyp was a competition for young writers, which has become an outstanding success.

"The prize was a book you authored, published courtesy of diaspora money," explained Mr. Zinkewych.

The project became an outstanding success. In the last 10 years, 150 young Ukrainian authors have seen their works published.

A second, even more ambitious project began in 1995 when Smoloskyp began to award scholarships to talented student writers who retained a sense of Ukrainian national consciousness or spirit in their works. Since then some 600 students annually had divvied up an annual scholarship budget of between $80,000 and $100,000.

Smoloskyp also now sponsors a unique annual conference for students, in which some 300 young writers are drawn on a competitive basis from a field that annually reaches about 1,000 applicants. The winners are given a four-day, all-expenses paid stay at a sanitarium outside Kyiv, where they spend the time discussing in a formal manner topics of interest to them. Mr. Zinkewych noted that the conference is unique in that the students themselves decide on the agenda, the speakers and the topics, while he and his associates simply monitor the proceedings.

Not surprisingly, given his devotion to them, Mr. Zinkewych's 50 years of social and political activism began as a student, soon after he had come to Paris on a scholarship to study chemistry. There he and a group of fellow Ukrainian student expatriates became engrossed by an upheaval taking place within the Communist Youth League and other events occurring in the aftermath of the death of longtime Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

To get to know more, they would visit a local Communist bookstore against the fervent wishes and outright condemnation of their parents and friends within the close-knit Paris community.

They decided to begin a column in the local Ukrainian-language newspaper, Ukrainske Slovo, under the title "Smoloskyp," dealing with student émigré issues, including a heavy dose on what they thought about affairs in Ukraine.

In 1956 that project expanded and Smoloskyp became a journal for new Ukrainian writings. The slightly more open and tolerant attitude toward literature practiced by the Khrushchev regime allowed for the development of a new generation of Ukrainian writers and intellectuals, known as the "Shestydesiatnyky." Smoloskyp began to obtain and publish their works.

In 1967, now located near Washington D.C., Smoloskyp began a publishing house for the printing of its own publications. First came "From the Generation of Innovation," written by Mr. Zinkewych. The project also continued to publish Ukrainian writers, with the works of poet Lina Kostenko being issued by Smoloskyp Publishing the following year.

It was at this time as well that Smoloskyp entered the Ukrainian underground, looking to publish samvydav materials. Mr. Zinkewych explained that most of the materials he obtained surreptitiously over the years came from contacts with Soviet athletes and merchant marines.

"We had problems with the political parties in the diaspora after we decided to form an Olympic Committee in Exile," explained Mr. Zinkewych.

He noted that there was concern that the Soviet Union would manipulate such a group for its own benefit. But Mr. Zinkewych outfoxed Soviet officials and calmed the fears of those in the Ukrainian diaspora when he turned his organization into a tool for developing contacts with Soviet Ukrainian athletes and journalists to act as couriers when they attended international events.

Eventually Mr. Zinkewych became a member of the International Association of Sports Press, headquartered in Milan, Italy, which gave him personal access to Ukrainian athletes when they traveled abroad for competition.

The Smoloskyp director said that, for the most part, the couriers were successful. However, he recalled one incident during an international athletic event in Munich in the early 1980s, during which he was to make contact with an intermediary who was initially to compete in a running event and then hand over microfilm of a samvydav work immediately afterwards.

Mr. Zinkewych recounted how he watched from the stands in agony as the Ukrainian runner prepared for his event only to have a problem with the microfilm containing the images of the samvydav, which was supposed to be taped inside his shorts. The runner, who was always good for a finish among the leaders, ended up towards the end of the race. He never made it to the press conference after the event.

"We never heard anything of him again," noted Mr. Zinkewych.

A few years later Smoloskyp became more brazen in its methods and began to use people who had easy access to Soviet Ukraine and traveled there frequently.

Many times these were Progressive Communists who had special privileges and were never checked at Soviet borders. Although the couriers included members who willingly took the microfilm, just as often the couriers became unwitting participants in Smoloskyp's work. One of them was Progressive Communist Party Chairman Petro Kravchuk, a Canadian resident who was notorious within the Ukrainian community of Toronto.

Smoloskyp people in Ukraine began a practice of attaching microfilm to his baggage and then retrieving it once the Progressive Communist leader was back in Canada.

"He was one of our best," explained Mr. Zinkewych. "He never knew. When I told him about it in Kyiv after independence he was very angry."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, November 28, 2004, No. 48, Vol. LXXII

| Home Page |