A winner of a prestigious literary prize declines the award in protest over Ukraine's controversial education minister.
Ukrainian writer Vasyl Shkliar could have marked the March 9 anniversary of Taras Shevchenko’s 1814 birth with a $32,000 prize and honorable celebrations on Chernecha Hill in Kaniv, where the great poet was buried in 1861.
Instead, the 59-year-old author stayed at home, watched the ceremony on TV, wrote a synopsis for his future film, put flowers at Shevchenko’s monument in Kyiv and drank coffee.
Shkliar was nominated for the Shevchenko prize for his novel Black Raven, or Zalyshenets, a story about the fighting between Ukrainian nationalists and the Bolsheviks in the 1920s.
But the author refused to accept the nation’s biggest award in culture and art, which was established in 1962, until “Ukrainophobe” Dmytro Tabachnyk, the minister of education and science, youth and sport, loses his job.
“There were a lot of protests against Tabachnyk in society,” Shkliar said. “People came out against him in Crimea and Donbas, not to mention western Ukraine. But it turned out that nothing can help. People gave up. Some intellectual stagnation and indifference occurs that we can nothing do anymore.”
“I ask you to consider my request in a decree on the Shevchenko prize winners’ award to postpone the awarding of my Shevchenko prize until Ukrainophobe Tabachnyk isn’t in power in Ukraine”
– Vasyl Shkliar wrote in the letter to President Viktor Yanukovych.
Shkliar decided to take a stand. After the Shevchenko committee voted for Shkliar’s nomination, he wrote to President Viktor Yanukovych after suffering anxiety and sleepless nights.
“Now my sleep is sound, which means that my conscious is clear,” he said. “I … ask you to consider my request in a decree on the Shevchenko prize winners’ award to postpone the awarding of my Shevchenko prize until Ukrainophobe Tabachnyk isn’t in power in Ukraine,” Shkliar wrote in the letter.
Yanukovych did not include Shkliar’s name in the list of winners in his decree of March 4. When asked why Shkliar is not on the list, Tabachnyk said he had not even opened the book tagged for the nation’s main literary prize.
“I never said a single word about his novel, as I did not read it,” Tabachnyk said, according to LigaBusinessInform.
Yanukovych did not comment on his decision and didn’t attend the award ceremony because he was still recovering from knee surgery. Russian-speaking Prime Minister Mykola Azarov took the president’s place and tried his best to read in Ukrainian the verses by the Great Kobzar, as Shevchenko is known, in Kaniv.
“The ceremony made a sad impression on me,” Shkliar said. “No smiles, no big celebrations. I felt a kind of confusion.”
One of the Shevchenko prizes worth Hr 250,000 ($32,000) this year went to literature critics Roman Horak and Mykola-Yaroslav Hnativ for the 10-volume work “Ivan Franko.” Another award was given to Taras Shevchenko National Opera directors Mykola Dyadyura and Anatoliy
Solovyanenko, opera singers Serhiy Magera and Oksana Kramareva for the opera Norma. One more prize was given to Lidiya Zabiliasta, singer of Kyiv Operetta Theater.
After the ceremony, Hanna Herman, deputy chief of the presidential administration, said Shkliar still has a chance to receive an award “when the time comes.”
Popular Ukrainian writer Yuriy Andrukhovych, meanwhile, proposed an alternative people’s prize for the author by collecting the same sum from ordinary people.
Shkliar agreed to accept money if any comes his way to turn his novel into a movie. He registered a special fund called Kholodnoyarska Republic where money for the movie can be sent.
For the same purpose, a special account was opened by Yaroslaviv Val publishing house, which published Shkliar’s novel at the end of 2009.
The book tells a little-known page of Ukrainian history – the fight between the Ukrainian National Republic and Bolsheviks in 1917-20 in central Ukraine’s Kholodniy Yar.
“The Ukrainian national fight was always shown as a phenomenon of western Ukraine only. But, in fact, it started in central Ukraine and east and then continued in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in western Ukraine,” said Shkliar, born in central Ukraine, where the historical episodes took place.
“This is the book of my life in which I won’t change a single word.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Faryna can be reached at [email protected].
