Варто частинно щось процитувати заради відважного україноума - саме з Забужко, яка міряється з недолугими псевдоевропейцями:
Dear Arnon, remember: war in my dear Ukraine is Europe’s defining momentResponding to Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg's letter about democracy in Europe and how fragile it is, Ukrainian author Oksana Zabuzhko expresses nostalgia for the era of political naivety and belief in the end of history. She argues that the continent is still divided, and that the current war in Ukraine reveals the flaws in European memory and cultural memorialisation.
Published on 1 June 2023 at 16:50
...Let me return to geography and borders. In her most recent column in The Atlantic (“
Incompetence and Torture in Occupied Ukraine”), Anne Applebaum makes an important observation: the Russian occupiers found it unexpected and utterly incomprehensible that in Ukraine the mayors of cities and heads of rural communities are, in fact, elected by their peers and not appointed “from above”, and they remain accountable to their electorate even when they lose communication with Kyiv, meaning (in Russian terms), their “bosses”. (Unfortunately, when Russians don’t understand something, they destroy it, so these individuals constitute, under occupation, the top risk group – the greatest percentage of arrests, deaths, and disappearances is registered among them).
I read Anne Applebaum’s text as a requiem for Fukuyama’s writings from the 1990s: it makes it very clear democracy cannot be exported like potatoes. I was reminded that the Magdeburg right lasted for almost 600 years in Ukraine: it began being used in the thirteenth century, during the Galicia-Volhynia dynasty, and was liquidated by the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century along with the autonomous Cossack Hetmanate’s other institutions.
More : Svetlana Alexievich: ‘We are confronted with Russian fascism’...
The border of Europe now lies – and not metaphorically at all – here, along the old eastern reach of the Magdeburg right: every Eastern-Ukrainian city (town, village) that faces the enemy is a fortress on the frontier. And the future of Europe depends directly on whether they will stand their ground or fall.
I don’t know if this is “more than mere geography” because I don’t know what “mere geography” is. I just repeat the names of the cities to myself from time to time, as one repeats the names of beloved people – to enjoy the sound of them, the physical materiality of them, the reliable elasticity and softness of their consonants, the hollows of the vowels: Hostomel. Chernihiv. Nizhyn. I’m weak with gratitude every time.
It would make me very happy if you remembered these names as well.
With kindest regards,
Oksana Zabuzhko1) “The time is out of joint! O cursed spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right!” Hamlet, Act I, scene V
This letter is one of the “Letters on Democracy”, a project of the 4th Forum on European Culture taking place in June 2023 in Amsterdam. Organised by De Balie, the Forum focuses on the meaning and future of democracy in Europe, bringing together artists, activists and intellectuals to explore democracy as a cultural rather than a political expression.
For the Letters on Democracy, five writers envision the future of Europe in a chain of five letters initiated by Arnon Grunberg. The writers – Arnon Grunberg, Drago Jančar, Lana Bastašić, Oksana Zabuzhko and Kamel Daoud – come together during the Forum, in a conversation about the Europe that lies ahead of us and the role of the writer in it.
