A Souvenir and a Song

We begin with an inexpensive but telling souvenir that I once brought home from Kyiv. It is a work of junk art which may be legally exported from Ukraine (as it says explicitly, tongue-in-cheek on the back), and is printed on a small block of “ecologically clean wood” (as it also says on the back). The front is an image of Ukrainian faces in shades of white and grey drawn against a gloomy black background. In the center is a familiar portrait of a young Taras Shevchenko, the beloved “bard of Ukraine,” representing the heart and soul of the nation. There are also some church domes, such as those in the title of this book, and a small rendition of the heroic statue of Batkivshchyna Maty (Mother of the Fatherland), the enormous Soviet-built World War II monument. However, most of the images and all of the larger ones other than Shevchenko suggest the “demons” side of the book's title. There are big-breasted beauties sipping cocktails (one has vampire teeth); a creepy-looking gangster with a shaved head and a cigarette in his mouth; someone dancing with the face of death; and a mix of symbols of consumer society (the front of a BMW automobile and an advertisement for Coca-Cola reflected on the sunglasses of still another shady character). I could not resist buying this “art” because as soon as I saw it I envisioned this paragraph. Instead of calling on comrades to join the famers’ collective or win the war effort, as the heroines of Soviet society had done so famously, the caption to this image says (in English): “Welcome to Ukraine: Not Smiling Country!”

Yet, a popular song that is heard often in the city, “Kyeve miy” (“My Kyiv”), carries a refrain with the rhetorical question: Yak tebe ne lyubyty, Kyeve miy? (How can one not love you, my dear Kyiv?). The melody is catchy. The 11 notes for the 11 syllables of the refrain play on Independence Square in the center of the city as a clock tower chimes the hours. The song is also heard, with or without lyrics, over the speaker systems in subway concourses and platforms during the morning rush, and want to or not, it is easy to wind up carrying the tune around all day afterwards.