LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (12/11/05)

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Dmytro Pavlychko was no hero

Dear Editor:

"Renowned writer Dmytro Pavlychko visits the UNA and its newspapers" is the headline in The Weekly (November 13) along with photos and a report about the "renowned writer."

Unfortunately, this inspirational writer was among those who wasted their talents back in the 1960s and 1970s specializing in smearing the Ukrainian diaspora in the West, labeling them as "bourgeois nationalists," "traitors to the fatherland," "bloody Banderites," "Nazi collaborators," etc. Doesn't anybody at the UNA recall this besmirching of us as well as their servile attitude toward the Communist authorities?

It is true that times have changed. The purpose of this letter is not to judge those who in effect were collaborators (willing or unwilling) of the Soviet regime. Perhaps they all underwent true conversions ...

But we should be able to draw a clear line of separation between the types of Pavlychko, Oliynyk, Medvedchuk and others of their ilk who served (some were forced into this role) the Russian slave-masters and true heroes of the types of Chornovil, Soroka, Karavanskyj, Moroz, Lukianenko, Stus, Krasivskyj, Shukhevych, OUN-UPA fighters and many other political prisoners (whom we in the West vigorously defended) who underwent persecution, jail terms and even gave up ther lives for the freedom of Ukraine.

The poet Yuriy Klen (Oswald Burghardt) perhaps summarizes best this contrast in characters in an excerpt from his 1943 collection "The Accursed Years" (translated by Andrusyshen and Kirkconnell):

Let us then pray for those who have been taken,
Who sail in peril on stormy main;
Likewise for those, the suffering and the shaken,
Who in the darkness seek a path in vain;
Those buried in the snow, who will not waken,
Who n'er will find their homeward path again.
On them, O Lord, from Heaven where You stand,
Extend in mercy your sustaining hand!
And let us pray for all whose lives are naught,
Who cannot see again the light of day;
Those whom I cannot compass with my thought,
And those whose very homes were swept away;
Whom ruthless hands have into dungeons brought
So that their joys are withered in dismay.
Ah, with a touch of hands as light as snow,
Relieve them, Lord, of suffering and woe!
And let us pray for those who for the fray
Can neither energy nor strength invoke;
For all whom bitter misery turns gray
And breaks at last beneath the heavy yoke;
Who drink the cup of sorrow day by day,
Compelled to bless the life on which they choke;
Those singers who, for rationed bread and tea,
Must sing of hell as heaven's facsimile.

Leo Iwaskiw
Philadelphia

Pejorative meaning of "nationalists"

Dear Editor:

Many political terms are perceived differently in different political, historical and cultural settings.

Accordingly, since The Ukrainian Weekly is widely read in North America, it seems it would be more appropriate and accurate in stories like Zenon Zawada's "UPA veterans, leftists clash ..." (October 23) to use the designations "UPA veterans," "freedom fighters" or "insurgents" rather than "nationalists." The latter has largely a pejorative connotation in the West and is often employed in scapegoating Ukrainians. In fact, "nationalists" is too simplistic to characterize those who served in the UPA.

R.B. Worobec
Mount Vernon, Va.

Bahriany article was inaccurate

Dear Editor:

Regarding the October 30 article "Personages in Literature: Ivan Bahriany, "Tribune of the Republic" I would like to refer the authors, Eugene Melnitchenko and Helena Lysyj Melnitchenko, to the entry on Bahriany in five volumes of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine published by the University of Toronto Press to check in their inaccuracies.

One I can readily correct myself. My mother, Halyna Pisetska, corresponded with Borys Antonenko Davydovych in the 1970s in Kyiv, where she also met him on a subsequent visit there. Therefore, on that score at least he could not have died in Siberia as stated in the above mentioned article.

Oksana Pisetska Struk
Toronto

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