You're reading: Police question writer for controversial poem

Critics say poem calls for violent overthrow.

If there is one poem that should have had the disclaimer that any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental, it’s this one.

The poem “Kill the Pederast” is giving its author, Yuriy Vynnychuk, a lot of trouble after he was questioned by police amid obvious similarities between the words and aspects of President Viktor Yanukovych’s biography.

Vynnychuk, a controversial writer from Lviv, was asked for a written explanation by police on Jan. 23 in response to a complaint by a political scientist who was present at a reading.

The poem, which originally appeared in early autumn, has a number of allusions to a bandit boss who stole hats in the past, has been hit with an egg and is now leading everyone to the abyss:

“A bandit he was and a bandit he is / But now he’s top of his class / It’s millions rather than hats that he steals / Kill the pederast.”

Some of the descriptive elements in the poem are reminiscent of Yanukovych’s biography. He was convicted of crimes twice in his youth, although the record was later erased.

He was hit with an egg during an election campaign in 2004 – an incident that still haunts him in jokes and cartoons because he fell theatrically to the pavement after being struck, as if the victim of a serious assault. And he’s frequently accused of corruption and misleading the nation, charges that he and his supporters deny.

The word pederast caused controversy last year when soccer fans chanted “Thank you, inhabitants of Donbas / For the pederast president.” Yanukovych is from the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Attempts to sell T-shirts with the phrase on were blocked by police.

Vynnychuk’s poem doesn’t mention the president by name, was never published anywhere but the Internet and went virtually unnoticed until Nov. 12, when he recited it at an Erotic Poetry Night in Kyiv.

One of the people in the audience, political scientist Volodymyr Bondarenko, complained to police that Vynnychuk recited a pornographic poem that called for the government to be overthrown. He passed it to Leonid Grach, a Communist Party member of parliament, who forwarded it to the prosecutor’s office, asking for an investigation.

Bondarenko says that although he’s not a prude, he was shocked by what he heard. “It’s not only about ‘kill the pederast,’ in which Vynnychuk calls for the most extreme act of violence, but other poems too,” he said.

In his initial comments to news portal Gazeta.ua, Bondarenko said that his main concern was the call to “overthrow the current government in an illegal manner.”
Bondarenko has a history of stirring up similar scandals.

Several years ago, he publicly accused Anastasia Gryshai, a Ukrainian porn actress known as Wiska, of distributing pornography. She left Ukraine for the Czech Republic in 2010, for which Bondarenko proudly claims credit.

Vynnychuk, 59, has also caused a number of controversies in his time. In the 1980s, through his literary writing, he challenged the Soviet notion that there is no sex in the Soviet Union.

Later, he and his alter ego Yusio Observator were sued about 20 times for defamation and other reasons in the 1990s, when he worked in Post Postup, a Lviv-based newspaper.

But now the 59-year-old writer is facing a new type of ordeal – accusations of pornography, calls to overthrow the government and corruption of minors.

Vynnychuk said that in his written explanation to the police he written that “there was no pornography in my work and that I wasn’t implying anything political.”
“But really, how can a work of art be judged as pornography?” he asked.

Viktor Nikazakov, a Kyiv lawyer, said it can’t. “’Kill the Pederast,’ as fiction, cannot be judged as an actual call for murder and can’t be grounds to start a criminal investigation against its author,” he said.

Iryna Magdysh, the editor of Ji magazine in Lviv that specializes in social and philosophical issues, said on her Facebook page that police raids of a writer’s home push the nation back to Josef Stalin’s 1937. “Tomorrow they can come to any of us,” she concluded.

Mariana Hayovska, a spokeswoman for Lviv prosecutor’s office, which is handling the case, said police investigators were simply following the legal procedure when they came to question Vynnychuk. “Policemen were conducting a regular procedure asking for an explanation about the complaint,” she said. “In theory, this complaint can become grounds for starting a criminal case.”

After an initial collection of information in Lviv, the complaint will most likely be sent back to Kyiv for further investigation because that’s where the reading took place, she said.

Vynnychuk said he’s worried about one of the accusations. In their report, Bondarenko and Grach mentioned that Vynnychuk brought a minor to the Erotic Poetry Night where he had read his poem. It was a 15-year-old writer called Marta Bryzhak.

“So they are accusing me of corruption of minors. They wanted me to write an explanation about that too. They told me to write that I had a young wife and had no need to go for minors, but I didn’t, because the whole accusation was totally absurd,” he said. “Bryzhak is a talented and independent author. I have nothing to do with her works.”

Editor’s Note: The following is an English-language translation of the poem ‘Kill the Pederast’ by Yuriy Vynnychuk.

BY YURIY VYNNYCHUK

The time has arrived when each one of us
Is facing a serious choice
The power’s been grabbed by bandits and cheats
Hoodwinkers and swine herds.

The nation is down and knocked off its feet
The night lords are drinking its blood
While the kingpin of theirs, hit by an egg
Is leading us all to abyss.

A bandit he was and a bandit he is
But now he’s top of his class
It’s millions rather than hats that he steals
Kill the pederast.

For selling Ukraine to its terrible foes
Betraying the bards like Taras
For liking Tabachnyk and Moscow priests
Kill the pederast.

Tabachnyks are ruling this vampire ball
Like a star in the night do they rise
We’re slaves once again, little Russians at home
Kill the pederast.

Ukraine will remember its hero miner
A simple guy from Donbas
Who’ll take a steel hack into his mighty hands
And kill the pederast.

No aim that we have is more holy than this,
There is no other way out
Come to your God and beg to forgive
And then kill the pederast.

When we’re all served to Kremlin as food
Which is licking its chops eying us
It will be too late, rise now and kill
Kill the pederast.

Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].

 

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