Mikhail Bulgakov - rysk eller ukrainsk författare

Mikhail Bulgakov. Vykortets foto: Roger-Viollet

The New York Times skrev i oktober 2014 bland annat:

 

In “The White Guard,” Mr. Bulgakov chronicled the trials of a middle-class family of White Russians in 1918 as the czarist order collapsed around them. (Many suggest the book echoes current Russian sentiment toward Ukraine.)

 

The Bulgakov museum is a two-story, mustard-colored house that was the family’s last residence in Kiev and was the model for the Turbin family home in “The White Guard.” A small sign by the front door reads, “People who support the military occupation of Ukraine are not welcome in our museum.”

 

Mikhail Bulgakov var en ukrainsk författare som skrev på ryska. I dag är det många ukrainare och andra, som har svårt att läsa honom, och menar att han legitimerat och representerat rysk, imperialistisk kultur.

I hans bok Det vita gardet, skildras ukrainare som  “cowardly, cruel, anti-Semitic and treacherous.” Genomgående spåras det grova förakt mot Ukraina och dess folk, som också nu blommar upp.

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I essän The Ally of Executioners, från Spectator, kan man läsa om Joseph Brodskys vidriga dikt om Ukraina, som var ett slags ”reaktion” på Ukrainas självständighetsförklaring 1991:

Genuinely incensed at the very idea of Ukraine’s newfound sovereignty, Brodsky repeatedly resorts to the ethnic slur of khokhol in reference to Ukrainians, and further sets the tone with mocking allusions to the Chornobyl disaster, the disparagement of Ukraine’s fertile chernozem black earth as “podzolic soil,” and various hackneyed mentions of sunflower seeds and borscht. It takes only a few lines for “On Ukrainian Independence” to reveal itself as a work completely suffused with bile, and it only gets worse from there.

Brodsky’s vulgar imagery of scornfully “spitting, or something” into the Dnieper River is merely puerile, but the bizarre, sadistic fantasy of “bastard” Ukrainians returning to their “huts” to be “put on all fours” by “Huns” and Poles starts to test the outer limits of bad taste.