Leonid Plyushch, the Ukrainian intellectual, mathematician, philosopher, dissident and defender of human rights, passed away on the morning of June 4.
Friends who attended the funeral informed me that the burial took place on Saturday, June 6, in Bessèges, the town where the family had been living for the past 17 years, some 20 kilometers from Alès, in south-central France. Father Oleksandr Kozakevych of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in Orléans presided over the burial service attended by some 30 people. In addition to family, French neighbors who had been helping Tatyana, Mr. Plyushch’s wife, during his illness, were present. By a remarkable coincidence, the family doctor was someone who, as a student, had militated for the release of Leonid. In addition to the priest, four other Ukrainians were present: The writer Oksana Zabuzhko flew in from Kyiv to pay her last respects to her friend and soul mate. Anna Osnowycz came from Toulouse, France, and Maria Malanchuk and Danylo Sztul from Paris.
Ms. Zabuzhko considered Plyushch a giant among Ukrainian thinkers of the modern period. He was more than a “dissident” and “human rights activist,” as media portrays him. Plyushch was “a free intellectual in the best tradition of European liberalism,” Ms. Zabuzhko said in an interview with Deutsche Welle on June 15. He was the author of revolutionary books about Taras Shevchenko and Mykola Khvyliovyi, and was the first intellectual to denounce Russian fascism during the Soviet period. A philosopher in the antique sense of the word, he was a friend of Michel Foucault, who described Plyushch as “an intellectual that stepped outside the bounds of the traditional philosophy, a truly universal thinker.”
Plyushch’s life story has been widely told in the numerous obituaries and articles in the French, English, Russian and Ukrainian press, and described in his book “History’s Carnival.” I will, therefore, not replicate these narratives here. Instead, I will focus on Leonid Plyushch, the person, as I knew him during the 15 years when I lived in Europe.
I met Plyushch soon after I arrived in Paris in autumn of 1979 to take up a diplomatic post at the International Energy Agency, an affiliate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (IEA/OECD). I had the privilege of socializing with the Plyushches until I left Paris in 1991. Leonid – Lyonia as we affably called him – was part of a circle of friends that included Parisian-based Ukrainian professionals, intellectuals and artists. The group included Canadian and American ex-patriots, such as Oksana and Danylo Struk, Daria and Jurij Darewych, Daria and Vasyl Markus, Roman Serbyn, Ivan Myhul and Oleh Oleksyn.
Among his closest friends, however, was the artist Volodymyr Makarenko, who arrived in Paris in 1981. Lyonia and “Makar” developed a special friendship. Hounded by the repressive regime in Soviet Ukraine, both had been oppressed, albeit in different ways. To create freely, Makar was forced to abandon his native Dnipropetrovsk for Tallinn, Estonia. Lyonia’s fate was much harsher. For his criticism of the Soviet totalitarian regime, Plyushch was incarcerated in a “psykhushka,” a psychiatric prison for severely psychotic patients. There he was given high doses of antipsychotic drugs, an experience that left an indelible mark on him but did not break his spirit.
* * *
On Sundays in the afternoons it was customary for us to meet at Café Bonaparte on the Place St. Germain-des-Pres, a short walk from the Ukrainian Catholic Church of St. Volodymyr. When Lyonia showed up, he would invariably be the center of attention. He would drink multiple espressos, smoke his “samokrutki” (rolled tobacco cigarettes) and expound on his latest idea or discovery.
In addition to being an erudite intellect and a deep thinker, Lyonia was a courageous man – generous, tolerant and large in spirit. A modest man of simple tastes bordering on the ascetic, he eschewed material things, especially when he was surrounded by fawning affluent “diasporans” who boasted about their wealth and lifestyles. Although Lyonia was fond of a good cognac or armagnac, he was not a gourmand. What mattered to him most was what was in the head and hearts of the people he met – their thoughts, viewpoints and resolve to stand up for principles and truth.
Lyonia, I vividly remember, was fond of repeating Dostoyevsky’s aphorism “beauty will save the world.” On one occasion we got into a lengthy discussion and I tried to pin him down on what he meant by “beauty.” I argued that truth is as important, if not more important, than beauty. In the end we agreed that both are important and both “truth and beauty will save the world.”
I recall one other episode where Lyonia passionately stood up for truth and principle. In the summer of 1986, I enrolled in a summer seminar near Lambrecht in West Germany, to polish my Russian conversational skills. Soviet émigrés, former dissidents and human rights activists, taught the six-week immersion course. Plyushch was a member of this tightly knit group.
In the lectures I attended on Russian literature and history, I sensed a patronizing and, at times, a condescending attitude towards Ukraine and Ukrainians. I found that strange. After all, the staff supposedly consisted of tolerant and open-minded individuals, defenders of human rights and dignity of man. “Look, even Gogol wrote in Russian,” one of the instructors pointed out when we read passages from “Taras Bulba.” They seemed to regard Ukrainian as a substandard dialect of Russian, good for singing, but not suited for high culture.
Lyonia waited for the right moment to comment. Speaking calmly, first he reprimanded his colleagues for not knowing anything about Ukraine, its real history and culture. Next, he criticized their patronizing attitude toward Ukrainians and for viewing Ukraine’s history through the prism of Moscow. “How can you say anything about Ukrainian literature if you’ve never read it? Over the centuries, Russia has turned Ukraine into a colony, making 50 million Ukrainians their slaves. Despite years in the West, your views of Ukraine have not evolved since you left the Soviet Union: let them have their songs and their embroideries, this will keep them happy, but leave high culture to Russians.”
There was utter silence, but Lyonia continued. “The moment we Ukrainians start to talk about our culture, our language, our history and, most importantly, our independence, you call us nationalists, fascists, or ‘Banderovtsy,’ yet never a word about Russian nationalism, Russian imperialism. I see that nothing has changed, and that’s a double standard I will not accept.”
* * *
Besides being a profound and principled thinker, there was a more down-to-earth side to Plyushch that most obituaries hardly mentioned. Lyonia loved good company, stimulating conversation and humor. On more than one occasion, our circle of friends would gather to sing, drink and tell stories. Such evenings would last late into the night, occasionally until 4 in the morning when the supply of wine, anecdotes and jokes began to dwindle into pauses and finally silence.
Lyonia also had a strong attachment to nature. On weekends, he and Tanya would go mushroom picking in forests surrounding Paris. His favorite was the oak forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, northwest of Paris. Curiously, although he enjoyed this hobby, he did not eat mushrooms. His passion for mushroom picking continued even after he moved to south-central France, where he also became fond of growing roses.
In addition to literature and philosophy, Plyushch had a strong interest in a number of esoteric subjects such as kabbalah, mysticism and structuralism in literature. His interest in mysticism was exemplified by his passion for collecting pysanky, the richly decorated Ukrainian Easter eggs. He was fascinated by their symbolism that dated to pagan times.
With his passing, Ukrainians have lost a world-class thinker, a profoundly original writer and literary critic, and an insightful observer of human nature. Most of all, he deserves to be remembered for his incalculable contribution to Ukraine and its long quest for independence.
Jaroslaw Martyniuk is a retired sociologist living in Washington. From 1979 to 1991 he lived in Paris, where he worked as an energy economist for the International Energy Agency, an affiliate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (IEA/OECD), and later as a researcher for Radio Liberty. At present he is writing his memoir, “Monte Rosa.”