ISLAND OF INDEPENDENCE (Viktor Mohylny)
(Vasyl Ovsiienko. The Light of People: Memoirs and Essays. In 2 vols. Vol. 2 / Compiled by the author; Art and design by B.Ye. Zakharov. – 2nd ed., rev. – Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2005. – pp. 99-101)
At the beginning of the 20th century, Lesya Ukrainka wrote to Franko that there were only a few Ukrainian intellectual families in Kyiv. In the early 1960s, after decades of anti-Ukrainian pogroms, a conscious Ukrainian felt even more grievously humiliated and alien in Kyiv. Certainly, there were not many conscious Ukrainian families—these islands of independence. One of them was the Mohylny family—Viktor and his wife Aureliya (a Hungarian from Uzhhorod who became a Ukrainian patriot). This was the topic of conversation among Viktor Mohylny’s friends at his creative evening at the Museum of the Sixtiers on November 21, 1999.
A Ukrainian spirit reigned in the Mohylnys’ home in Chokolivka. The walls were covered with Ukrainian words and autographs, furnished with Ukrainian books and crafts. An informal literary circle operated here, where Ukrainian strength accumulated, where a cohort that created a critical mass of Ukrainian identity grew. It manifested itself in the Sixtier movement, then in the human rights movement and the struggle for independence at the turn of the 1980s and 90s. In such families, a few Ukrainian children grew up, for whom it was oh so difficult to remain Ukrainian in a totally Russified and morally aggressive environment. This is how their son, the poet Attyla Mohylny, and their daughter, Dzvinka, and grandson, Bohdan, grew up.
Viktor Mohylny was born on April 29, 1937, in a Ukrainian colony on the Volga, in Stavropol, now in the Samara Oblast. He did not receive a higher education because, during an exam at the university, being a guileless person, he interpreted Shevchenko’s Kateryna as an image of Ukraine dishonored by a Muscovite. As a proscribed individual, he did not manage to publish a single book of poetry. Only in the 1980s, when his grandson was born, did his children’s books “Ravlyk-muravlyk” (“Snail-Ant”) and “Hoyda raz, hoyda dva” (“Swing once, swing twice”) appear under the pseudonym Vit Vitko, and in 1999, the samvydav collection “Csokolivka, csokolj meg! abo Nadkushene yabluko” (“Chokolivka, Kiss Me! or The Bitten Apple”) under the bizarre pseudonym Vykhtir Orklyn. His poetic language is refined, his metaphors are expressive and paradoxical, and his poems are outwardly apolitical but such that they clarify the worldview of a Ukrainian.
And this worker from the “Leninska Kuznya” plant (where he worked for 25 years) became proscribed because he participated in the “Brama” literary studio for worker poets at the Club of Creative Youth. On May 22, 1967, Viktor Mohylny was one of the four seized by KGB agents near the monument to T. Shevchenko. Mykola Plakhotniuk then called on people to go and free them. Towards midnight, about 600 admirers of Shevchenko marched to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and succeeded in securing the release of the detainees. It was there that Ukrainians first chanted “Hanba!” (“Shame!”) in unison. This word later became the pickaxe that chipped away at the colonial regime. And at that time, the only tourist present—a German—ran around asking: “Was ist ‘hanba’?” (“What is ‘shame’?”).
One had to be of the brave sort to visit a former Petliurite and political prisoner with a 20-year “record,” Borys Antonenko-Davydovych. Along with Oles Shevchenko and Hryts Tymenko (Hryts disappeared without a trace when he started producing Ivan Dziuba's work “Internationalism or Russification?”). In 1968, B. Antonenko-Davydovych published an article in “Literaturna Ukraina” titled “The Letter That is Missed” (about the letter Ґ). The author cited V. Mohylny's article in the same newspaper from October 1, 1965, “A Problem with Consonants.” The deputy editor, Margarita Malynovska, having published the provocative article on her own initiative, announced a discussion on the advisability of returning the forbidden letter to our alphabet. Editor Ivan Zub was immediately recalled from his vacation. In the next issue, Doctor of Philology Vitaliy Rusanivskyi, nicknamed “Rusodid” for his support of Ivan Bilodid's Russifying “theory of bilingualism,” proclaimed: “There is nothing to miss.” The discussion was terminated.
In Chernihiv lived the only survivor of the “SVU case”—the linguist Vsevolod Hantsov, who was well-known in the 1920s. Mohylny wrote him a letter asking for clarification on some philological questions. This was at a time when everyone avoided him out of fear. The scholar replied with a thorough letter—and this was a moral support for him as well.
Viktor Mohylny once again “shone” brightly in the case of Oles Shevchenko, Vitaliy Shevchenko, and Stepan Khmara. During a search on March 31, 1980, Oles’s poem “Zhyttepys (Liakano mene...)” (“Biography (They tried to scare me...)”) was confiscated. The issue was to accuse the author of disseminating this “slanderous, anti-Soviet document.” Oles then told the investigator that he had... stolen the poem: the owner was not at home, and his wife was doing laundry. He liked the poem lying on the table, so he hid it in his pocket. At the evening event, Vitaliy Shevchenko noted that at their trial in Lviv, Mohylny persistently demanded that they clarify to him which specific lines of the poem were “slanderous” and in what way. The judge addressed him in Russian, and Mohylny, as if not understanding, would say: “Pardon me?” He did this several times, eventually forcing the judge to speak Ukrainian.
On that same March 31, during a search of Mohylny’s own home, 34 documents were seized—samvydav, the “Declaration” and “Memorandum No. 1” of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, books, notebooks, diaries, manuscripts, and a typewriter. On February 21, 1981, according to O. Pshennykov, head of the SBU State Archive, “for nationalist statements and the creation of poems with ideologically harmful content, V.M. Mohylny was prophylactically warned by the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR through a conversation at the KGB premises with the issuance of an official warning. This was rescinded in 1989, of which V.M. Mohylny and the prosecutor were informed.” On December 25, 1990, the materials of his case were destroyed due to the expiration of their retention period.
Today, Viktor Mohylny, together with Vyacheslav Anholenkom, publishes the “Ukrainian Philatelic Bulletin,” as he is one of the foremost researchers of Ukrainian postage and a person known throughout the world.
It is worth our while to know that independence did not fall to us from the sky. It was built upon the shoulders of specific people who endured the pressure of occupation and, in the most difficult times of our denationalization, were living carriers of the Ukrainian spirit.
Visti tyzhnia. – 1999. – December 22.
Posted on the KHPG website on February 26, 2008.
