Ivan Hel's book “Facets of Culture,” published in London in 1984 under the pseudonym Stepan Hoverlia, has a fascinating story. Created in a solitary confinement cell of a Mordovian concentration camp, it found its way to the free world and was published, despite the wardens’ roadblocks. At the same time, the Ukrainian section of the “Voice of America” broadcast the book's contents to Ukraine. One could not hope for a better fate for a piece of samizdat in those grim times, although the author himself had no idea about any of it.
For eight years, from 1982 to 1990, in addition to my main job as a librarian in Winnipeg, Canada, I worked as a freelance correspondent for the “Voice of America” in Washington. According to my contract, I monitored new publications that covered the problems of the then-Soviet Union, especially Ukraine. I read books in the languages I knew and summarized them in my reports. I was particularly interested in academic research that touched upon the national question, which was the most painful for us. However, academic publications covered this topic very cautiously. Some authors, for example, doubted whether Ukraine was a colony in the classic sense, arguing that many Ukrainians held positions in the highest echel हाथ of the Soviet government in Moscow.
In the end, not only academic publications but also samizdat works somehow avoided overly sharp generalizations about Moscow's national policy.
However, in 1984, a new publication arrived from Great Britain at the library where I worked: Stepan Hoverlia, *Facets of Culture*. The author's name was a pseudonym. To my great satisfaction, this unknown author, a prisoner of Soviet concentration camps, in highlighting the empire's national question through the example of Ukraine, finally dotted all the i’s: he called Moscow’s policy toward Ukraine an ethnocide, a bleeding of the Ukrainian nation, an attempt to mix and destroy it in an all-consuming imperial melting pot; he emphasized the desire of all subjugated peoples to throw off the colonial yoke. It is not worth retelling the entire contents in this short article. That is not my goal today.
But back then, in 1984, after receiving the book, I set about summarizing it for Ukraine via the “Voice of America.” It is worth mentioning that I first boasted about it to my friend, Nadiyka Svitlychna, who, it turned out, had also received and read the book. To my surprise, Nadiyka had a different opinion and did not share my enthusiasm at all. She believed it was some kind of forgery by Ukrainian émigrés and that none of our prisoners could have written so sharply and openly, especially not from confinement. In the heat of our argument, I said: “Ivan Hel or Stepan Khmara could have easily written this.” I knew Ivan personally and had a rough idea of his line of thinking. I did not know Stepan Khmara at all; I had only heard of him. Most likely, in his case, it was an association of names, and the surname Khmara is somehow associated with Hoverla—since from our Hoverla Mountain, it’s not far to the *khmary* (clouds)…
Nadiyka and I did not reach an agreement—each of us stuck to our own opinion.
And I meticulously retold Stepan Hoverlia's book for the Ukrainian section of the “Voice of America,” and later, I forgot about both the book and Stepan Hoverlia.
...More than twenty years passed. Much water had flowed under the bridge, and many events had transpired in that time. I arrived in Lviv, Ukraine, for one of my regular visits. Mariyka Hel and I are sitting in their kitchen, reminiscing, sharing memories of times past, of our ordeals with the KGB agents, of our “voyages” to the concentration camps with small children and heavy food bags, of the “shakedowns” and the humiliating strip searches women were subjected to by the wardens in their search for anti-Soviet documents before and after such rare personal visits—there was much to recall! And Mariyka casually tells me: “I smuggled out the capsule with Ivan's work ‘Facets of Culture’ anyway, despite all those strip searches and shakedowns. I swallowed it and ate nothing until I returned to Lviv!” “Facets of Culture,” I ask, “so it really was Ivan's work? So, I accidentally, without much thought, stumbled upon the author's name twenty years ago! Maybe I would have made a decent Sherlock Holmes?”
I was surprised not so much by my own insight as by how Ivan could have written such a relatively large work, and under prison conditions at that. I leave Mariyka and hurry to ask Ivan all about it. What Ivan told me, I quote almost verbatim:
“If you’re asking whether it's possible to write a large piece in a special-regime camp, the answer would be: no. It is impossible to write a large work in a special-regime camp. But when Leonid Plyushch said that writing such a thing was a feat, that is also not true. It could be a feat, or it could be a matter of circumstance. It also depends on the person, on how dedicated they are to the cause they are imprisoned for.”
“In a special-regime camp, the warden walks in felt slippers to catch the prisoner off guard and confiscate forbidden items. That's why it's hard to hide anything. My situation was completely different. I was on a hundred-day hunger strike, demanding political prisoner status. At the same time, I made another demand because they weren't letting my letters to my family through. In the end, I held out for one hundred days and couldn't go on any longer because I was almost paralyzed. When you fast for a long time, your legs give out. Besides, they made concessions to me: they returned and sent the letters they had held back. And after the hunger strike, I was so exhausted that I couldn't walk—two orderlies led me, supporting me under my arms. Because of this, they didn’t want to show me to people: I was skin and bones. So they put me in solitary, as punishment for the hunger strike, even though I had stopped it.”
“When a person fasts for twenty or thirty days,” Ivan continued, “they are still a living person; the body is still there. After thirty days, only the spirit lives, and if a person did not have strength of spirit and inner willpower, they would not survive the hunger strike; otherwise, death would follow. In this state, you begin to feel as if you are on the same level as God—maybe that sounds like blasphemy, but there's no other way to explain this state. Your thoughts are only about higher things: about God; about eternity; it's as if you are conducting an examination of conscience over your entire life. It was in this state that they threw me into solitary, and although they began to feed me little by little, that feeling still lingered. There's nothing to do in solitary; it's boring, and then a KGB agent brings me Ivan Dziuba's penitent brochure ‘Facets of a Crystal,’ and even taunts me: ‘Here, read this, Ivan Andriyovych, see what your comrade writes. You used to pray to him, and now you are in prison while he is free and working...’”
“The brochure prompted me to write a response to Ivan. I wasn't going to criticize him harshly for his repentance, as I would have with someone else. Because I knew he had tuberculosis.”
“And so I began to write a response to Ivan Dziuba, not planning a long article, but I would take up a topic, and it would grow into a whole chapter...”
At this point, my patience wore thin, and I interrupted him. I was curious, how did he manage to hide and preserve what he had written?
“First of all, you had to write,” says Ivan, “on tissue-thin transformer paper with a very hard pencil, sharpened with the only ‘tool’ available in the cell—a spoon ground against the concrete floor. That pencil had to be sharpened against the floor after every three or four sentences. Technique... To write so densely and minutely (the eye strain was colossal!) that later the family had to use a six-power magnifying glass to decipher the text.”
To write and hide what was written in a solitary cell, Ivan emphasized, is easier than in a general one. Although here, too, the warden can peek through the peephole every five minutes, he cannot sneak up quietly in his felt slippers. Because a solitary cell is a solitary cell, very isolated from the general cells, and two more iron doors with iron locks lead to it, which are impossible to open quietly. So, by the time the warden reached Ivan's solitary cell to ask his usual question, “Well, Hel, haven’t you croaked yet?”, Hel had managed to hide what he had written and assume a calm, innocent posture.
And how to hide it? The things a prisoner resorts to, to hide his writing! Ivan rolled several written pages into a small note 3-4 centimeters long and thinner than a matchstick and hid it in the wall. The wall was roughly plastered with large lumps. Between the lumps in the protrusions, Ivan would dig out recesses (“chip away at that wall...”—almost as in Franko's poem!), place the written material there, and seal it with collected cement dust mixed with the gluten from chewed bread. A technique worthy of the gods' ingenuity!
And then you had to remember where you hid it, the sequence of what was written, to logically maintain the thread of the narrative, what follows what. To keep it all in your head, so as not to repeat yourself. A titanic labor! And finally, to roll all those little notes into one capsule and be ready to carry it out of the solitary cell…
...Ivan's wife, Mariyka, brought the capsule to Lviv by swallowing it, as already mentioned. Then, the whole family deciphered it, writing, typing, hiding, glancing at the windows, listening to every rustle behind the door, lest someone suddenly surprise them. The final act of this book odyssey was performed by Zenovii Krasivskyi, also a long-term political prisoner, who was at liberty at that time: hiding under a table, he photographed the text on film. A person was found who dared to take it abroad. And it was the same Zenovii Krasivskyi who brought the book to Ukraine from London. He handed it to a surprised Ivan, who had heard neither hide nor hair of his work's fate—an Ivan who, by that time, was already a deputy of the regional council, deputy chairman of our own government...
Written in a solitary cell of a Mordovian concentration camp in 1976, printed in London in 1984, broadcast to Ukraine that same year by my “enemy voice” from Washington, and first seen by its author with his own eyes in 1990. A journey of over two decades...
During his life in an independent Ukraine, Ivan wrote dozens more articles on pressing topics. However, this little book, “Facets of Culture,” written under such incredible conditions, is the most vivid testament, it seems to me, to Ivan's character, his deep faith, his unbreakable will, and his boundless love for his land. Eternal memory to a great patriot of Ukraine!
“Maidan,” March 24, 2011, http://maidan.org.ua/static/mai/1300969230.html
