Authors

Olha Honcharova¹;  ¹ Keele University, UK

Discussion

In social sciences, national identity is presented in two concepts, civic and ethnic, which generally reflect an individual’s citizenship and nationality, respectively. If the first is a category of choice and a variable value, then the second is due to generic predestination, commitment to one’s family, traditions, religion, and language. In a democratic society, with its rule of law and the idea of human life as the highest value, civil and ethnic identities are inalienable human rights and freedoms, while in authoritarian and totalitarian states, like the former Soviet Union, both are an instrument of control, manipulation, a subject of political bargaining, an attribute from which a person can be deprived or forced to refuse. In the USSR, a special role was assigned to the process of Sovietisation of the entire population, that is, the creation of a new type of Soviet man, without national differentiation, with distortion or even destruction of ancestral and historical memory, and with one language of communication – namely Russian as the language of the 'titular' nation. This paper examines the life and work of the Russophone Ukrainian poet Borys Chichibabin (1923-1994), with an emphasis on his national self-identification, which has certain contradictions and, in connection with this, becomes the subject of Russian propaganda speculation. Born in Ukraine to Ukrainian parents and spent his entire life in Kharkiv, with the exception of a five-year sentence in a forced labour camp during Stalin’s repressions, Chichibabin perceived the dissolution of the USSR and the declaration of independence of Ukraine in 1991 as the loss of his homeland, a personal tragedy. In 1975, he created a poem 'With Ukraine in my blood, I live on the land of Ukraine,' and in early nineteen-nineties he wrote that 'now I am a man without a Motherland, because my Motherland is all those who speak and write Russian,' – though Kharkiv, where he lived, even after Ukraine gained independence, remained a favourable place for the coexistence and development of different cultures and languages, the borders remained open for many years, and the movement of citizens in both directions between Russia and Ukraine was free. I will try to answer the question why the poet, being a victim of the Soviet totalitarian regime, like Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova, so much loved by him, did not accept the collapse of the country, which he called the 'evil empire,' and why, sympathising with the deported Tatar people and persecuted Jews, the poet remained silent in relation to the Ukrainians who survived the tragedy of the Holodomor, and who suffered during Stalin’s terror only for their adherence to their national identity. To this end, I will analyse political, psychological, family and literary factors that could have influenced the poet’s worldview and played a decisive role in the formation of his ethnic self-awareness.