Victor Fet is a professional biologist, originally from Ukraine (born in Kryvyi Rih). He has been living for 34 years in the USA, where he teaches biology at Marshall University (West Virginia). He also has another conspicuous identity, that of a poet. Along with studies of nature (Fet is an expert in scorpions), he is interested in human nature, its character and emotions, as is emphasized in his latest poetry collection, Vskipaet lava [The Lava Is Boiling] (Evertype, Scotland, 2022).
Immersion in human psychology is evident in Victor Fet’s verse dramas, written by him long time ago, during his student years in Novosibirsk. There, the reader will recognize the notes of both Shakespearean psychological drama (“Gistriony” [“The Histrions”], 1974) and Brecht’s theater, whose central statement is to awaken the viewer’s thought (“Strasti po Prokrustu” [“Passions According to Procrustes”], 1973).
Both dramas highlight the issues of falseness, total ignorance, and arbitrariness. A street actor Grotius from Victor Fet’s drama “The Histrions,” while addressing the crowned “actor,” the Emperor Nero, warns him:
Mы в жизни все играем чью-то роль,
Немногие в своей родятся роли.
Один—царя, другой—шута играет,
Но жизнь играет равно и шутом,
И императором.
(We all play someone's role in life,
and few of us are born into their roles.
One plays a king, the other plays a jester,
But life plays equally with both a jester
And an emperor.) (p. 107)
Nero, who willingly pretends to be an actor and briefly switches places with Grotius (just for fun), refuses to listen to the street actor’s warnings. The emperor finds Grotius’s judgment to be unacceptably rude (“Everyone can go mad, and the emperor more than anyone.”). As for the people, they never interested the emperor:
Свихнуться всякий может, а император—скорее всех.
Когда я был солдатом, мы знали—сражаемся, чтобы в
Рим не пустить врагов. Нас вёл император, и мы знали,
куда идём. А теперь нас никто не ведёт, и мы ничего не
знаем, только поём хвалебные песни, а император свихнулся…
(Everyone can go mad, and the emperor more than anyone.
When I was a soldier, we knew we were fighting not to let the enemy into Rome.
We were led by the emperor, and we knew where we were going.
But now no one is leading us, and we know nothing, we only sing songs
of praise, and the emperor has gone mad...) (p. 105)
The situation when the people do not know anything and only sing songs of praises not limited to ancient Rome. This was also the case in the Soviet empire when Victor Fet wrote this play in 1973.
This still happens in any empire, including the current Russian one. The comedy of situations turns into a tragedy. The people have no direction and do not know where they are going. But they continue to go although they are facing death.
If the play “The Histrions” is built around the search for entertainment by a bored Nero, “Passions of Procrustes” shows the viewer/reader the consequences to which imperial entertainment leads. Here is the conversation of the minister Tertius with Dionysius, a foreign traveler:
ТЕРЦИЙ
Мы ищем идеальную персону:
Сверхчеловека, бога, мудреца.
ДИОНИСИЙ
Людей уничтожая без конца?
ТЕРЦИЙ
Да, без конца, но это по закону.
(TERTIUS
We’re looking for an ideal person:
A superman, a god, a sage.
DIONYSIUS
While endlessly destroying people?
TERTIUS
Yes, endlessly, but this is according to the law.)
The justification of totalitarianism by law surprises the traveler but is perceived as norm by the resident of a totalitarian state. The latter tends to humanize the crime, covering it up as the search for an ideal person. Such a person could be a sage but in reality, he would be an arrogant fool. He would claim the status of a god (lacking God), and as a result his human qualities atrophy. The theory of the superman (Nietzsche) and its bitter consequences — the destruction of millions — becomes possible. A deluded person goes willingly to Procrustes’ bed— either out of stupidity (passionately wanting to be included in the search for an ideal and to become the next ruler), or out of mindless obedience to orders. And so, in the end, Procrustes celebrates victory:
Я выполнил свой план. Увы, как быстро.
Искать среди оставшихся? Нет смысла,
Oстались подхалимы и глупцы,
И всё. С концами сведены концы.
Остался Идеал—как и хотелось.
Убиты мудрые. Осталась серость.
Из этих выбирать ещё? Чего же?
Пожалуй, этим впору будет ложе.
Я Мысль истребил. Я это смог.
А больше—не могу. Вот мой итог.
(I carried out my plan. This was so quick.
To search among the rest? It makes no sense:
Just toadies and fools remained alive.
That's all, and everything has come together:
That's the ideal, exactly as I wanted.
The wise are killed. Mediocrity remains.
There is not anyone to choose from now:
Perhaps they all will fit into my bed.
I killed Thought. That's what I have accomplished:
I can do nothing more. Here's my result.) (p. 126)
Annihilated thought is the ideal of a ruler because mediocrity will not threaten his power. But will this victory be complete if people have memory? The question is rhetorical. In fact, Victor Fet's collection The Lava Rises (2022) focuses on the image of Lethe, which the native of Kryvyi Rih interprets as a river of memory in the dramatic scenes “Reingold'skie sny” [“The Reingold Dreams”] (2003-2019):
Мне видится издалека
не древний берег мифов — нет;
мой образ — Памяти река,
а не забвения. Не где-то
в подземном мире, а сейчас,
всегда и вечно, через нас
течёт невидимая Лета.
(I can see now distinctly from afar
not the old shore of ancient myths;
my image is of the River
of Memory, not of oblivion.
Not somewhere in the underworld but here and now,
forever and eternally, through us,
invisibly, this Lethe flows.) (p. 96)
The book opens with the section “War,” continues with “From the Prewar Archives,” and ends with “Theater”. The final part is, figuratively speaking, “the bottom of a volcanic crater” — those social moments that determined the events of later times (“pre-war”) and eventually spilled out in the hot avalanche of war.
In the section “From the Prewar Archives,” the poem “U beregov” [“On the Shores”] (2009) deserves mention. It is rooted in the memory of the narrator, as evidenced by the pronouns of the first person (“the source of my river,”“my song sounded”). The source of that river not only has specific geographical coordinates but it also symbolizes the first childhood memories and the earliest poetic (song) and dramatic attempts (“a funny play was performed”). There, near those shores, even before traveling around the world, the little boy was taught:
Нас учили, что для империй
доступ к морю необходим
(We were taught that empires
need access to the sea.) (p. 62)
Later, having grown up, Victor Fet will protect his soul from spiritual immaturity and carelessness:
Но пока они суть постигнут,
мир по-своему переделав,
ты в пустыне не будь застигнут
расширением их пределов.
(But before they understand reality,
they will change the world as they wish,
and you should not be caught in the desert
by the expansion of their boundaries). (p. 62)
What is a desert, if not a space without a river of memory, if not an area of oblivion? Isn't this a symbol of temptation to get carried away by an external expansion of possessions and turn someone’s home into a wasteland, turn it into a ruin? The charred pier at the end of this poem is something more than an indication of a port city mutilated by the empire (it could be Odessa, close to the author since his childhood). These are burnt memories, a cremated soul, the inability to find peace in the homeland, a forced emigration:
Ведь они зачерпнут шеломом
и омоют свои штыки
у развалин, что были домом
возле устья моей реки,
где устраивались пикники,
где играли спектакль потешный
и где песня моя звучала,
где корабль отошёл поспешный
от обугленного причала.
(They will dip their helmets
and wash their bayonets
near to the ruins that were home
near the mouth of my river,
where we made picnics,
where a funny play was performed,
and where my song sounded,
where a ship left hastily
from a charred pier.) (p. 62)
What’s more, the poem "On the Shores" has a counterpart in the first section of the collection The Lava is Boiling. This is a poem called "Na kraiu bezdny" ["On the Edge of an Abyss"] (March 8, 2022). Abyss is a “depth,”, a “precipice,” a “cliff.” This precipice is a riverbank that suddenly becomes a razor edge. And in the meantime, as if in pre-war times, having already seen the ship that hastily left the burnt pier on the natural shore, a soldier has a chance for salvation — not a flight, but language.
The very title of the poem reminds a well-read reader the lines of Leonid Kiselyov:
Я постою у края бездны
И вдруг пойму сломясь в тоске,
Что все на свете — только песня
На украинском языке.
(While standing on the edge of an abyss
I’ll suddenly realize, broken with longing,
That everything in the world is just a song
In Ukrainian.)
The Kyiv poet passed away at a very young age from an incurable disease. For him, being on the edge of an abyss meant being one step closer to physical death. Therefore, so that spiritual death does not occur with its onset, the Russian-language poet Leonid Kiselyov searched for something that outlasts death. It turned out to be a song in Ukrainian.
Victor Fet is a Russian-speaking poet, and in his poems Ukrainian words appear as isolated interspersions. However, as it is already symptomatic in the first poem of the collection The Lava Is Boling the author juxtaposes the empire and Ukraine not only on the level of symbolism (darkness and fog / light; slavery and freedom) but also on the level of language (“about the slave fate… Now there is only one word: VOLYA [Ukr. freedom]”). The word FREEDOM is written in capital letters, to emphasize the importance of this concept for the Ukrainians. Freedom (volya) and language (mova) are what help a Ukrainian to stand alone at the edge of the abyss, not to fall into darkness and fog, not to perish. Freedom and language give Ukraine the strength to fight against the sea of evil and darkness, to defend itself by clutching the sword. That sword is not only a military weapon but also the word, “sharper than a two-edged sword.” The word that creates the world. The Word that creates light (See Genesis 1:3, the first day of creation when God said, “Let there be light!”):
У края бездны Украина,
Где тьма и мгла,
Сжимая меч, стоит, едина,
Средь моря зла.
Мы знаем всё о рабской доле
Сквозь сотни лет,
Сейчас одно есть слово: ВОЛЯ.
Да будет свет.
(At the edge of an abyss, Ukraine
In the darkness and fog,
stands, clasping the sword, united,
In the middle of a sea of evil.
We know everything about the slave fate
Through hundreds of years
Now there is only one word: FREEDOM.
Let there be light.) (p. 3)
Freedom and light in the poetry of Victor Fet become contextual synonyms and the word (God’s, as well as the poet’s) calls them into existence. Remaking the world is not easy for the author. First of all, because Russian is his own language. And he writes about it in the poem “Moi iazyk” [“My Language”] (April 22, 2022). Again, we see the poet over the abyss, but the abyss is not of local scale: it is galactic (“in the abyss at the edge of the universe”):
Язык мой, друг мой неизменный,
сто лет, как хрустнул твой скелет
у бездны на краю вселенной;
в тебе опоры больше нет.
(My language, my constant friend,
a hundred years ago your skeleton crunched
in the abyss at the edge of the universe;
you no longer support me.) (p. 17)
Victor Fet begins to create his world “from scratch. ”What is this world like? Thoroughly educated, based on knowledge and cultural achievements. A thoroughly enlightened person is one who seeks to illuminate the most unpleasant social phenomena and the darkest movements of the human heart to eliminate them, and to “recreate” the world / heart. It is done in the most orderly way with a tendency towards canonized stanzas.
The author calls his poem “My Language” a sonnet. In fact, it is a ‘sonnetino’ written in four-step iambic (and not the five- or six-step iambic of the canonical sonnet). The lost support — the broken “skeleton” of the language manifests itself most strongly in the second quatrain and the first tercet.
С нуля приходится сонет
реконструировать, как генный
забытый код; как крови венной
пассивный ток; как тусклый свет
безгласных рифм. Твоя громада
уходит в топь, как скифский клад
в глубины угро-финских блат
(One must reconstruct a sonnet
from scratch, like a forgotten
genetic code; like a passive current
of blood through the veins; like a dim light
of voiceless rhymes. Your edifice
sinks into a mire, like a Scythian treasure
down the depths of Finno-Ugric swamps.) (p. 17)
In a formal sonnet, each stanza expresses a complete thought, a single line necessarily constituting a figurative-semantic and syntactic whole. Thus, in order to convey more clearly how difficult it is to find a point of support in the language that has always been one’s own, Fet resorts to the concept of reconstruction — long and difficult, sometimes inconclusive (you do not know or remember for sure what you are reconstructing). The inadequacy in the stanzas quoted above is revealed by the inconsistency of syntactic and semantic organization: for example, one sentence covers two and a half lines (“From scratch, a sonnet / to reconstruct, like a genetic / forgotten code”) and is even divided between a quatrain and a tercet (“like a dim light / of voiceless rhymes”). This technique slows down the pace of speech and makes speech more prosaic.
The rhymes in this sonnet are characterized as voiceless, dimly glowing. Dim light is a Scythian treasure, Ukrainian spiritual heritage. It does not shine brightly because it is absorbed by Finno-Ugric swamps. According to Victor Fet, this is not a symbol of the Russian language as such (this language has meaning) but a metaphor of the imperial discourse, which makes the language rancid and poisoned:
туда, в граниты древних плит,
куда твой смысл прогорклый слит
и занесён слоями яда
(there, into the granite of ancient plates,
where your rancid meaning is poured down
and covered by layers of poison) (p. 17)
The poet has a variation on the same theme in the poem “Klassika” [“The Classics”] (p. 25). This poem also seeks to draw a line between the past and the present, in which it is also possible to predict the future. The title appeals to the concept of long-lasting (classic), not subject to time, or something that is scarcely susceptible to changes over the years. Fet brings this statement into the finale of the first third of the fifteen-line poem (“и ей не пасть / под бурями последних дней — “ [“and it won't fall under the storms of the recent [=last] days—"]).
But despite this certainty, the author is filled with a watershed emotion. He is talking about the internal waters, which nourish both the classics (indicated in the poem by the metaphor of the fruit) and the recipient of these classics. In the past, this fruit was sweet and juicy enough (“Есть сладость в классике моей: / она, как спелый плод, с ветвей / упавший, сохраняет сласть / былых эпох” (“There is sweetness in my classics: / it, as a ripe fruit, from branches / fallen, preserves the sweetness / of the past eras”). Later, before a storm (likely, a sandstorm), this fruit has some residual moisture and an inebriating taste (“но смысл засахарился в ней, / перебродил хмельною брагой; / источник у её корней / питал остаточною влагой / всех тех, кто жаждал” [“but its sense became sugary, / it has fermented into heady brew; / the source at its roots / has fed with its residual moisture / all who were thirsty”). Now—at the time of the storm—the fruit does no longer quench thirst, it is poisonous (“но сейчас / она не утоляет нас — / ни той струёю родниковой, / ни той колодезной водой, / что вся отравлена бедой / и не пригодна к жизни новой”) [“but now / it does not quench our thirst — / neither from a streaming spring, / nor from that well, /all poisoned by disaster / unsuitable for a new life”]).
Why did that “now,” unsuitable for the future, become possible? The character of the old poem “Potemkin” (1975) answers this comprehensively and aphoristically:
Отвечу: вы не уяснили,
Что ложь лишь миг бывает в силе,
А миг достаточен всегда,
Чтоб не почувствовать стыда.
(I’ll answer thus: you didn't realize
That any lie rules only for a moment,
And a moment is always short enough
To feel no shame.) (p. 78)
This aphorism works in both directions: there is a moment when you do not feel shame for what you have done. Moment after moment, conscience dies away, and the last days are coming. The latter are apocalyptic in a sense, after which there will be no more ordinary life. Days are full of tragic experience (wars and all the evil they bring) but also revelations: evil is not eternal, lies are not eternal, the empire of evil is doomed to collapse:
Империя кончает самоубийством в живом эфире
на русско-всемирной войне.
Пушкин и Бродский разлетаются мраморной
крошкой,
но не в тире,
а в Мариуполе, Чернигове и Ирпене.
Сгнившие скрепы
разлетаются в щепы,
превышая скорость и света и тьмы.
Догорают страницы учебников.
(The empire commits suicide live on air
in the Russian-World War.
Pushkin and Brodsky scatter into marble shards
not in a shooting range
but in Mariupol, Chernihiv and Irpen.
Rotted braces
shatter into woodchips,
exceeding the speed of both light and darkness.
Textbook pages are burning.) (p. 11)
In the poem “Raspad” [“Decay”], written on April 3, 2022, Victor Fet demonstrates what happens when a lie loses its power. However, he goes even further — choosing right words, he penetrates the essence of things. The poet’s air/broadcast is not ‘direct’ (which would indicate a real-time news format), but ‘live’ (this brings out the polysemy: living air / air full of life). Fet’s war is not a World War but rather a Russian-World War. This attitude reinforces the opposition between Russia (with its dead air and rotten foundations (‘skrepy’) and the rest of the world, where the air is full of life and soul is full of light.
Victor Fet, obviously, closely follows the events of the Russian-Ukrainian war and therefore implicitly he refers to the monument that was shot as if in a shooting range. In fact, exactly this happened to the monument to Taras Shevchenko in Borodyanka, which for the Russian occupiers was a sign of Ukrainian culture and identity. They have been trying to destroy such monuments. By contrast, Victor Fet gives us a mirror image: monuments to Pushkin and Brodsky — symbols of Russian identity and culture — are themselves falling apart into marble shards. The fame of these writers vanishes because it is forever combined in the minds of the Ukrainians with the torture, murder, and other crimes of the Russian occupiers. And not only in Mariupol, Irpen, Chernihiv... That is why the pages of old, pre-war textbooks marked with imperial discourse burn to ashes. The author captures this aphoristically in the coda of the poem “Nachalo maia” [“The Beginning of May”]:
Растаможивается сознание,
гнев выходит за берега.
Consciousness clears customs;
anger overflows the shores. (p. 21)
The quoted poem, written on May 1, 2022, takes the author to the ideology that fueled the May Day holiday in Soviet times. There,
От кровавых знамён Первомая
есть в геенну дорога прямая,
и её верстовые столбы
забивают немые рабы.
Бей сильней, арестантская рота,
асфальтируй сошествие в ад!
Казимир открывает ворота,
с детства въевшийся чёрный квадрат.
(From the bloody banners of the May Day
there is a straight road to hell,
and its milestones
are hammered in by mute slaves.
Hit harder, prisoner company,
pave the descent to hell!
Kazimir opens the gate:
the black square, ingrained since childhood.) (p. 19)
The “Black Square” by Kazimir Malevich seems to have at least four meanings here: (1) a square of a prison cell (indicated by the prisoner company); (2) a well of the abyss (without water, like a road to hell; Fet's poem is called “The Road”); (3) a school blackboard (a black square familiar to everyone from childhood); (4) a human soul filled with darkness within (let us recall the Latin expression for the human soul: tabula rasa / clean slate). By association, the beginning of Vasil Stus's poem springs up in memory:
Весь обшир мій — чотири на чотири.
Куди не глянь — то мур, куток і ріг.
Всю душу з'їв цей шлак лілово-сірий,
це плетиво заламаних доріг.
І дальше смерті — рідна батьківщина.
Колодязь, тин і два вікна сумні,
що тліють у вечірньому вогні.
(My entire width is four by four.
Everywhere you look, there is a wall, a corner, and another corner.
This purple-gray slag consumed my whole soul,
it is a web of broken roads.
Beyond death is my native homeland.
A well, a fence and two sad windows
that smolder in the evening fire.)
In the times of darkness, the slightest glimmer of light is highly valued. Continuing the metaphor of a black square as a school blackboard, the inner voice of Victor Fet’s collection would like to bring at least a little white color to this blackboard: a few words written in chalk. Here, the poet does not express the depressing feeling of a dead word, as in his poems “Smert' illiuzii” [“Death of an Illusion”] and “Net vremeni” [“NoTime”]:
История есть мёртвая вода.
Там, где душа от слова отлетела,
уже не будет лучше никогда.
(History is dead water.
Where the soul departed from the word,
nothing will ever be better.) (p. 14)
Что есть, то есть. Что было, то прошло,
и масса наших слов мертва отныне.
Нет времени на сорок лет в пустыне.
(What is, is. What happened is over,
and the mass of our words is dead from now on.
There is no time for forty years in the desert.) (p. 23)
The word dies for two reasons: either it diverges from action (that is, it loses the ability to create the world), or the person does not feel the soul of a word (therefore, it itself becomes unreal, not fully alive).
До той поры, доколе и пока
все буквы сохраняются в обоймах
в сгоревшей оболочке языка,
мы держим путь сквозь плавни в диких поймах,
в необозримой чаще тростника;
Паскаль сказал—он мыслит, но Паскаль
ошибся. Мы не чувствуем ни слова,
ни даже дуновения живого
в застывшем, замершем, оледенелом,
замёрзшем, пустотелом тростнике,
как будто нас нарисовали мелом
на довоенной грифельной доске.
(Until then, until the time, as long as
all letters are stored in clips
in the burnt shell of language,
we keep our way through marshes in wild floodplains,
in the boundless thickets of reed;
Pascal said that it thinks, but Pascal
was wrong. We do feel no word,
not even a breath of life
in a frozen, snow-cold, icy,
hardened, hollow reed,
as if we were drawn with chalk
on a pre-war blackboard.) (p. 34)
We see that the poem begins with a military metaphor (“all letters are stored in clips”). A clip is a metal frame for several cartridges, with the help of which they are simultaneously inserted into the magazine box of a rifle, pistol, etc. And this is not just a general idea of the word as a weapon but a palpably metaphorical concretization: letters are bullets, and language is a weapon. This language still exists, but its outer shell has burned away. Therefore, the poet (and the speaker) must make efforts, for that language (in this case, Russian) to continue to function fully. The fact that the author turns to the form of tercets actualizes the “memory of the genre” in a knowledgeable reader, recalling the beginning of the Divine Comedy:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
(transl. by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
In fact, Victor Fet’s character also makes his way through the thickets, which are worth scrutinizing. Only this is not a deciduous forest but a dense thicket of reeds. This sense, introduced by the emigrant poet, refers to Blaise Pascal’s statement that “Man is a thinking reed.” Thus, the path through the reeds is a road among countless people. Victor Fet supplies the epithet “wild” (it can also be found in the Divine Comedy) with a meaning: it is not only a primitive and uncultivated space (as in Dante) but also a sign of the lowest stage of human culture. Fet’s character walks without feeling the ground under his feet: it is shifting due to the flood. This flood is not only an element of the poetic landscape but also a metaphorical detail to indicate the loss of the ability to think:
Pascal said that it thinks, but Pascal
was wrong. We do not feel a word,
not even a breath of life
in a frozen, snow-cold, icy,
hardened, hollow reed. (p. 34)
A frozen reed is a person who is in the deepest circle of hell. If we recall the part Hell from Dante's Divine Comedy, we’ll find a “key” to this intertextual dialogue. It is said about one of the characters in Dante's work:
The soul has long been frozen in Cocytus,
And the body on the ground pretends to be alive.
Nevertheless, in the poem “Do toi pory” [“Until Then”] by Victor Fet, the body does not pretend to be alive, because there is no soul in it (the reed is hollow, devoid of substance). But the cane of the ancients (Greeks and Romans) was a means of writing on wax tablets. Therefore, a reed as a person should represent a means of creating and multiplying wisdom and meanings. Instead, it is reduced to a figure of a person drawn in chalk. Short-lived and unreal.
Why is this non-authenticity possible? Probably everyone will answer this question in their own way. But the poet Victor Fet believes that hollowness comes from the inability to notice anyone or anything. You would not notice how
Мы исчезаем каждый час
под слоем грубой штукатурки
на воздвигаемой стене,
где скрыта память о войне,
где все свидетели молчали —
в стране, невидимой извне,
где слова не было в начале.
(We disappear every hour
under a layer of rough plaster
on a wall that is being built,
where the memory of the war is hidden,
where all the witnesses were silent —
in a country invisible from the outside,
where there was no word in the beginning.) (p. 46)
This, let us agree, is the most tragic moment for the logocentric author, even more so than the bitter and dramatic confession from his own poem “Mir izmenilsia” [“The World Has Changed”]:
моя логоцентричная страна
в макулатуру вечную сдана.
(my logocentric country
is forever consigned to wastepaper.) (p. 50)
because the word still appears here (unread, dead — but it is there). On the other hand, in the poem “Pamiat'” [“Memory”], the word is not just missing. It wasn't there to begin with. The absence of the word “in the beginning” means absence of God (see the opening lines of the Gospel of John). The consequence of impiety is the absence of truth (“hidden memory of the war”, “all witnesses were silent”). And then a thick layer of plaster is not only a means to merge with the wall, to disappear (people on a blackboard / wall are drawn with white chalk) but also a mask — like a theatrical one—that hides the face. And the absence of a face is a sign of the loss of humanity, which leads to the demonic possession. For example, one described in the poem “Yevgeniiu Reinu” [“To Yevgeny Rein”]:
О чём лепечете вы, бывшие витии,
Куда вас привела имперская стезя?
России больше нет. Нет прошлого России.
И будущего нет. И быть ему нельзя.
Мицкевич вам писал, две сотни лет назад:
Протрите взгляд и сохраните честь.
Но вы замкнули слух. И вот—дорога в ад
Открыта для страны—палаты номер шесть.
Вы предали её—Ахматову свою,
Вчера ещё могли спасти вы ваши души,
Но вам опять нужна одна шестая суши,
И я бесовские личины узнаю.
(What are you babbling about, former orators,
Where has the imperial path taken you?
Russia is no more. There is no Russian past.
And there is no future. And it cannot come.
Mickiewicz wrote to you two hundred years ago:
Wipe your eyes and save your honor.
But you have blocked your ears. And here the road to hell
Has opened to the country, to Ward Number Six.
You have betrayed her, your Akhmatova,
Yesterday you could still save your souls,
But you again need one-sixth of the land,
And I recognize demonic masks.) (p. 5)
With incredible force, Victor Fet debunks the writers of the imperial Russia who signed the pro-Putin “Letter of the Writers of Russia regarding the special operation of our army in the Donbass and on the territory of Ukraine”, such as Yevgeny Rein:
While I can still hold a pen in my hand,
While you are crowding at the Devil's throne,
I curse you in Russian.
We will preserve it in the ruins of Babylon. (p. 5)
Only as Babylon (which brought down many nations with its words) will become a ruin, it will cause the destruction of others, because it is the nature of the Devil to kill and destroy. The poem “Kartina” [“A Picture”], more precisely, its final stanza, very vividly conveys the consequences of the Devil’s misdeeds:
Разум, умирающий от боли,
не вмещается в картину сна;
снег, покрывший выжженное поле,
освещает красная луна.
(The mind, dying in pain,
does not fit into the picture of dream.
the snow covering a scorched field,
illuminated by a red moon.) (p. 27)
The red moon here is more than an element of the landscape. It is a sign of war. The image of war is conveyed with a single brushstroke: a burnt field, which is a symbol of war, a burnt field of life. Even when time or people hide the effects of war — under white snow or white plaster —they will not disappear. Are the pre-war illusions disappearing, like the character of the poem “Konets maiia” [“The End of May”]? :
Отягощённые веригами
свободы, совести и чести,
мы не укроемся за книгами,
нас тьма накроет с ними вместе.
Гори, сияй, пучина чёрная,
взойди галактикой сверхновою,
где касса звёздная наборная
тускнеет россыпью свинцовою,
где мир расстался с алфавитами,
с их инфантильною наивностью,
со временами позабытыми,
с пространства стройной непрерывностью.
Мне снятся сны антропогенные:
в них, как янтарные инклюзии,
застряли буквы довоенные,
мои январские иллюзии.
(Burdened by the chains
of freedom, conscience, and honor,
we will not hide behind books,
darkness will cover us together with them.
Burn, shine, black abyss,
rise as a supernova galaxy
where the loose moving type of stars
is tarnished with lead,
where the world parted with alphabets,
with their infantile naiveté,
with forgotten times,
with a perfect continuity of space.
I have anthropogenic dreams:
in them, like amber inclusions,
pre-war letters are stuck
like my January illusions.) (p. 42)
After all, the destruction of pre-war illusions is like the destruction of the pre-war idea of paradise. However, paradise will not completely disintegrate as long as a person retains the ability to remember (let me remind you: the Lethe for the poet Victor Fet is a river of memory). Yet memories are also bitter, for they preserve fragments of hell and prevent it from completely disintegrating. This is the finale of the poem “Raspad” [“The Decay”]:
Вспоминается Хлебников,
прятавшийся в Харькове сто лет назад,
в психбольнице, вычисляя свои алфавиты
звёзд, империй и птиц,
сроки полураспада
и рая, и ада.
Разве мы не знали,
что ад не имеет границ?
Но ведь нам обещали
не ад, а рай на земле.
Где и когда закончится
начавшееся в феврале?
(We recall Khlebnikov,
hiding in Kharkov a hundred years ago,
in a mental hospital, calculating his alphabets
of stars, empires and birds,
half-life periods
of heaven and hell.
Didn't we know
that hell has no borders?
But we were promised
not hell, but heaven on earth.) (p. 11)
Only time will answer this question in terms of history. But Victor Fet is an author who does not lose sight of the spiritual dimension. Therefore, he tries not only to find out the reasons for the eruption of volcanic lava but also to leave warning signs to the reader to avoid the return of "diabolic faces".
This is how one can read a poem “from the pre-war archives” called “Sled” [“A Trace”]. Its beginning is about man's tendency to make idols and gods for himself, worshiping them as if they were gods. That idol does not have a face, because it is different in each period, but the “shell” of the idol is unchanged: the imperial toga, the absence of human features and... the plasticity of the material from which it is “made” (which is synonymous with the flexibility of moral “principles,” that is, the complete absence of the latter):
Слепи себе из пластилина
очередного властелина
в зелёной тоге, без лица.
(Make for yourself from playdough
another overlord
in a green toga, without a face.) (p. 63)
But, despite the lack of a face, the reader will easily be able to identify this deity. This is Hotei, an oriental god whose very name appeals to desire, often hypertrophied and unrestrained. In this case, it is the desire for money, which is symbolized by a coin in the sticky hands of the idol, the overlord. Also —inseparable from this “worship of the golden body” — the irrepressible desire for the world power, which is declared in a metaphor of the coin-planet:
Дай в лапки липкие монету,
как потемневшую планету,
где жить придётся до конца
под властью этого слепца
(Put a coin in his sticky paws,
like a darkened planet
where we'll have to live until the end
under the power of this blind creature) (p.63)
И с осторожностью великой
в музейной зале под стеклом
уложат след эпохи дикой,
игравшей в поддавки со злом.
(And with great caution
in a museum hall, under glass
they will place a mark of a wild era,
which played giveaway checkers with evil.) (p. 63)
This “artifact” can be a lesson to average citizens, so that they will not want to create another divine overlord for themselves, will not flirt with evil. After all, if you succumb to the temptation to recreate the past (and not leave it in the museum of history / memory), you can once again open Pandora’s box (figuratively speaking, “break the museum glass”) and then the question will arise again:
Где и когда закончится
начавшееся в феврале?
(Where and when will end
what began in February?) (p. 11)
Nadiya Gavryliuk has a PhD in Literary Theory; she is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Literary Theory and Literary Criticism at the T. G. Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv. She is a literary scholar, poetry scholar, researcher of modern poetry, organizer of scientific conferences and seminars. She has authored 70 literary and critical publications in Ukraine and more than 100 research works, including three books: "A Ukrainian Polymetric Poem" (2009); "Under the Cover of the Sky: the Poetry of Vira Vovk" (2019); "A Golden Flight of Poems: the Poetry of Svitlana Koronenko" (2021). She has authored ten books of poetry in Ukrainian.
