“The crisis of the European Union has two sides. One is political, about the lack of democracy within European institutions; the other is philosophical, about the erosion of Europe as a source of and home for universal values.”
“The political crisis is on view in Germany and Greece. As we observe today, it never made sense to create a currency union (the Euro zone) without a fiscal union (a substantial common budget). A fiscal union would require more European democracy to legitimate the taxing and spending. When the Euro was established, the hope was that the common currency would create political solidarity that could foster European democracy; this simply has not happened. The Greek crisis has become a clash of multiple European democracies, in which the weak must bend to the strong. Greeks are not getting the policies they voted for; but then again Germans and other Europeans would not have voted, given the chance, to bail out Greece. Without a European budget, crises of this nature are inevitable; without European democracy all solutions will lack political legitimacy.”
“The philosophical crisis is on display in Russia and the eastern borderlands of Ukraine. Ukrainians in 2013 demonstrated, in their revolution, a strong commitment to the idea of European integration. From the perspective of those who risked their lives on the Maidan, the central square in Kiev that was the center of the uprising, cooperation with Europe was essential for Ukrainian civil society to be able to mend the corrupt Ukrainian state. The essence and explicit purpose of Russia’s war in Ukraine, on the other hand, is the destruction of the European Union as a universalist project that Ukraine could join. In its place, Moscow wants to establish a rival to the EU, known as the Eurasian Union. Rather than universal recognition of the legality of states and rights of citizens, the Eurasian project proposes a Russian hegemony of territories that Russian leaders regard as historically theirs, such as Ukraine. Its moral premise is that members of the European Union have abandoned traditional European culture (by which is meant religious, sexual, and political exclusivism) for “decadence” and that only Russia represents civilization.”
“For George Shevelov (1908-2002), one of the great philologists of the twentieth century and a professor at Columbia and Harvard, the whole history of relations between Ukraine and Russia was one of risky (Ukrainian) universalism encountering powerful (Russian) provincialism. His essays, published in Ukrainian in 2013, provide a learned guide to this durable perspective.”
“Some of the best novels of the period, such as Valerian Pidmohylny’s The City, are about the experience of socialism in Ukraine’s great cities. Khvylovy himself described living in Kharkiv in a way that is hard to experience as romantic: “In a faraway church a fire is burning and forms a poem. I am silent. Maria is silent.””
“But then, as Shevelov saw it, came Joseph Stalin and a new ideology of Russian provincialism. Soviet socialism was no longer a universal project that could begin from nations building a new European culture, but rather a highly centralized economic transformation, directed from Moscow, whose failures could be blamed on the satellite nations, above all Ukraine.”
“The idea of communism as international liberation everywhere was replaced by the Stalinist conceit that communism was a specific system of political control directed from Moscow.”
“One of the people who has tried to return the memory of Shevelov to Kharkiv was Zhadan, the poet who was attacked last year. The subject for which he is best known is the experience of post-Soviet life in big cities. In a major prose collection, Hymns of Democratic Youth, published a few years before the Maidan, he portrays the beginnings of the latest Kharkiv, the post-Soviet one. The first story in the collection, “The Owner of the Best Gay Club,” is probably not best read as resistance to the official homophobia of the Russian Federation or the anti-gay sentiments that are still dominant in Ukraine. Its message in the end is less about the particularities of the gay experience in Kharkiv or of the tragicomedy of those who seek to make money from it, but rather on the nature of love. In the end we learn that the titular figure, the manager of the best gay club, a former street enforcer, secretly believes that gays must be the ones who understand sex. In the end, even that turns out not to be so simple. The story sublimates the particularities of provincial post-Soviet Kharkiv into a universal question, whether love between two people can be a response to the overwhelming alienation of a society in profound transformation. This is a serious move executed quickly and skillfully against a comic backdrop, leaving the reader wanting more.”
“At points in Lives of Maria, Zhadan sounds like Czesław Miłosz, the twentieth-century Polish poet, who also strove toward Europe through both the local and the universal: “I wanted to give everything a name.” Miłosz was the preeminent poet of a borderland, one to the north of Kharkiv, Lithuanian-Belarusian-Polish (and Jewish) rather than Ukrainian-Russian (and Jewish). His position, not so different from Zhadan’s perhaps, was that Europe can best be recognized on the margins, that uncertainty and risk are more substantial than commonplaces and certainty. And indeed, the last section of Lives of Maria is devoted to Zhadan’s translations of Miłosz. Zhadan begins with two of Miłosz’s poems, “A Song on the End of the World” and a “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” that ask the most direct questions about what Europeans did during the twentieth century and what they might and should do instead. The second poem communicates the pain and difficulty of actually seeing and trying to learn from the Holocaust, which was, or at least once was, a central idea of the European project. The first transmits, almost breezily, certainly eerily, what a European catastrophe might feel like. It concludes: “No one believes that it has already begun/Only a wizened old man who might have been a prophet/But is not a prophet, because he has other things to do/Looks up as he binds his tomatoes and says/There will be no other end of the world. There will be no other end of the world.””
“The underlying message of Russian propaganda is that working for Europe, whether inside the European Union or beyond it, makes no sense, since democracy and freedom are nothing more than the hypocrisy of a doomed order, and history has no lessons other than those of power. Russian nihilism cheers on European narcissism.”