Rudenko: Protest

T.S. Eliot may have grouched that April was the cruelest month, but under the sustained stimulation of the American Poetry Center, mad-as-a-hatter March, our official Poetry Month, is roaring in like a literary lion quite ready to lie down with any lamb who will sit still long enough to listen. Holy Cornucopiousness! Almost 200 poets in more than 175 events in at least 30 cities across the Keystone State.

But the most attractive event to my politicized muse is clearly the just-emigrated Ukrainian dissident poet. Mykola Rudenko. Reading his vita will send chills to your marrow. Hero of the Siege of Leningrad, numero uno in the Ukrainian Writers Union, about ten years ago this now 67-year-old Communist activist started getting niggling doubts about Marxism and an awakened curiosity about, of all things, Christianity.

And when the U.S.S.R. signed the Helsinki Accords (which guaranteed the rights of cultural identity and freedom of expression), Rudenko thought it would be a good idea to form a watchdog group in the Ukraine, to monitor Soviet compliance with their own official rhetoric. Brave, but bad move, Mykola. They put him in the Gulag for ten years.

He arrived in America on January 27th, after he had been adopted by U.S. Representative Lawrence Coughlin (R., Montgomery County).

This is a touchy point with the 50 million Ukrainians who cherish their identity and depend upon their poets in good times and bad to keep their special values in focus. Russian Jews are allowed to emigrate to their "homeland" Israel (although four out of five actually come to the United States); but the Russians maintain the fiction that Ukrainians are in their homeland--hence they can't get out.

Catch this poem by Rudenko:

The Prison Poem

And that is all: Recant and they'll forgive,
And gladly reinstate your right to live.
Just write a few words, perhaps a phrase or two,
And everything, at once, shall be returned to you,
The trees and flowers bathing in the dew,
The playing children beckoning to you,
And fish in placid lakes, and birds above--
All evidence of their concern, benevolence.
Except that now you are not you--but, hence
Depressed by sickness, pallid and still ill,
You are a soul-less twig left without a will.

Now--on you must refit your old attire,
Rekindle, in some haven, a new fire,
But though you tread old ways again,
Your soul you never will regain.
All this, because of some extorted words,
Which you in stupefaction blurted out!

And now you are no more,
Now darkness falls
The soul is bound with prison walls.

Translated by Wolodymyr Semenyna for the Toronto newspaper Ukrainian Echo.

You can welcome Rudenko to America by attending the Eighth Anniversary Banquet of the Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center, where he will be the honored speaker ($100 per plate, Saturday, March 12, 700 Cedar Road, Phila. Cocktails 6 p.m., banquet, 7 p.m.) Children will welcome him for free, noon the same day.

From Welcomat: After Dark March 9, 1988
Hazard-at-Large