A Dedication to Dialogue

...This fable reveals much about the political and moral outlook of History's Carnival...

...But Suvortseva is more than a mere model, she is the embodiment of Plyushch's fable: "a human spirit that has overcome animal fear," a human being who has surmounted the absurdity and the vulgarity of her surroundings...

...that] economically the USSR is a state-capitalist society...

...In one sense this is surprising, in another it is entirely appropriate...

...This sad state leads Plyushch to decry the "total ideologization of society," which he believes has led to the ideologization of sex as well...

...He has a gift, moreover, for vividly capturing the spirit of the men and women who shaped his life...

...The blood rushed to my head, and right then I became a Ukrainian once and for all, the way Soviet Jews fully realize that they are Jews when they are bar-raged with 'anticosmopolitan' or 'anti-Zionist' propaganda...

...geologists and road workers come here from Russia, and the area is rich in useful minerals...

...is an exercise in reclaiming a lost past: "Brought up in an intelligent and progressive family of Ukrainian patriots [Plyushch feels the term nationalist is pejorative], Suvortseva is an aristocrat in the best sense of the word: A noble, cultivated person, [her] Ukrainian is a synthesis of songs, proverbs, and jokes, and the criminal slang of the camps...

...One sketch of an elderly ex-Commun-ist who spent 28 years in Stalin's death camps, Nadya Suvortseva...

...I was overcome by autism...

...In describing a trip to Lvov, a city in the Western Ukraine, for example, Plyushch recalls his discussion of the nationalities problem with a Ukrainian patroit: "The trouble was the terrible tangle of historical grievance, recrimination and subjectivity...

...hollering and interrogations by the doctors, pranks and beatings by the orderlies, and deliriums, cries of pain or desperation . . . cursing, stories about sports, stories about sex, public masturbation, eating of feces, and scrounging for cigarette stubs among [sic] the lavatory paper used by the inmates...

...that he begins to reclaim his culture...

...We learn, too, of the pent-up hostilities that fuel some Ukrainian oppositionists...

...The frightened Bear sought the Porcupine's advice, and the next time the Bear went to the river, it smiled at He, Who Dwells in the River...

...It is the year of Nikita Khrushchev's speech to the 20th Party Congress attacking the Stalinist cult of personality, and its effect on young Plyushch is profound...

...I must not forget...

...They're perplexed, too...

...What makes History's Carnival exceptional is Plyushch's ability to combine his intellectual pursuits with everyday human concerns, the theoretical with the real...

...From a cosmopolitan, anti-Semite and Stalinist, Plyushch evolves into a Ukrainian, Judeophile and Marxist humanist...

...Plyushch begins his drift toward open dissent...

...At the age of eight, tuberculosis forces him to enter a sanitarium that "was much like a prison, but with compassion and kindliness from the staff, and decent food...

...Plyushch's survival is testified to by this uncommon book, scrupulously translated, copiously footnoted and sensitively edited by Marco Carynnyk...

...I must not give up...

...he snarled...

...He, Who Dwells in the River, responded in kind...

...Through him we confront Soviet society's numerous zones of silence, subjects that are avoided or discussed in a hypocritical manner: the national question, racism, anti-Semitism, sexuality, and sexual relations...

...This largely is the interpretation he holds to this day...

...Reviewed by Adrian Karatnycky Contributor, "New Republic," "Commonweal" In one of his early samizdat essays, entitled "An Ethical Standpoint," exiled Ukrainian human rights activist Leonid Plyushch tells the following fable: "When the Bear glanced into the river, he was frightened by the Being he saw there...

...By 1956 a reversal occurs...

...But if there is an attempt 10 o\ ercomea myth, then that myth must exist in the unconscious...

...The Bear then raised his paw menacingly...

...New Year's Eve 1976 an orderly pulled the blanket of f a patient and discovered that he had cut his throat...

...Under its influence Plyushch starts to speak his native language: "At first it was difficult because my vocabulary was limited and everyone around me was speaking Russian...

...Billboards in the Carpathians advertise for workers in the Crimea...

...The three developments are part of a single spiritual awakening...

...Yet critical as the nearly three harrowing years he spent in the Dnipropetrovsk "Special Psychiatric Hospital" are to his life, his account of the horrors he endured there makes up no more than 10 per cent of his narrative...

...Western U krainians do not understand why retired Army officers from Russia settle in Ukrainian cities and are given privileges when Ukrainian boys who have finished their Army service are sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan...

...His writings contained the most cogent arguments I had ever encountered for freedom of speech, press, trade unions, and assembly...

...The Bear, however, did not flee, but grimaced menacingly at the Being...

...and that "the bureaucrats are not new exploiters but, rather, servants of an abstract capitalist—the state—that shares profits with them...

...The Being grimaced back...

...In her memoirs of the camps, she writes about how beautiful nature was in Siberia and Kolyma, which she loved despite the sufferings...

...Early inquisitiveness does not diminish his total commitment to the Soviet State, however...

...cold and hunger she experienced there...

...Plyushch's profound study of his roots is an occasion for our learning a great deal about Ukrainian poets Taras Shevchenko and Pavlo Tychyna, about Ukrainian folksongs, films and art...

...On the conscious level this was through a desire to emphasize that Jews are good people, an attempt to overcome the myth about Jews...

...Growing up in the Ukraine, he participates in various vigilante organizations and applies for a position in the KGB, denied because of his physical condition...

...By 1964, Plyushch recounts here, "I turned my attention to Marx...

...An almost parallel growth occurs in Plyushch's awareness of his Ukrainian heritage...

...The moral and ideological foundations that Plyushch had established, though, help him to survive: "I maintained a grip on myself only by saying over and over: I must not become embittered...

...Suvortseva's courage, like the quiet courage of others he encounters, instructs Plyushch in how he himself is to live...

...Facts and more facts were cited from all sides, emotions barring their objective evaluation...

...The tragedy of the failed revolution," Plyushch argues, "has left deep marks on society, and almost every family 1 met had a drama involving sex, conflicts between the generations, professional problems, crime, or drinking...

...Leonid Plyushch remains a Marxist, a humanist and a committed democrat determined to expose the hypocrisies of both the Left and the Right...

...The banality and repetitiveness of his suffering teaches him no central lesson...

...words and ideas start to play a central role for him...

...An intellectual whose time is spent in confronting ideas has little to say about years of incarceration where drugs render him incapable of uttering coherent sentences, reading or writing down his thoughts...

...It provides a moral lesson that will help him survive the hell of psychiatric torture...

...There, he becomes interested in telepathy and in yoga, and continues his voracious reading: Ray Bradbury, Stanislaw Lem, the Hindu philosopher Vivekananda, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway...

...The painful injections of haloperi-dol, insulin and sulfur, not to mention the daily sights he had to confront, deadened Plyushch's intellect, drained him of all emotion...

...Even after he has consciously repudiated his hatred of Jews, he confronts the inner ghosts of his past: "I caught myself several times adding 'Jew' when I was praising someone...

...Imprisonment in the psychoprison led to a complete imprisonment of the mind: "My memory was slipping away, and my speech became jerky and abrupt...

...His father dies on the front in 1941, when Leonid is two years old...

...Plyushch's most severe trial comes with his arrest and subsequent incarceration for his dissent inxhe psikhush-ka...

...Although educated in a closed society, Plyushch writes knowingly about Arthur Schopenhauer, Denis Diderot, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Zen philosophy, Jean-Paul Satre, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery...

...His reading of Marx enables Plyushch to formulate a coherent critique of Soviet society...

...During the long isolation from the real world due to his illness, Leonid begins to develop his intellectual capacities...

...Can't you speak human...

...Plyushch's credo—to engage in dialogue, and through dialogue to attain mutual understanding—results in a rich and varied experience that uncovers hidden aspects of Soviet reality...

...For Plyushch's autobiography is animated by a dedication to dialogue and understanding, to the struggle to retain one's dignity under frightening and inhuman circumstances...

...the Soviet psychopnson...

...One day in a shop I asked a young man, in Ukrainian, to hand me a book...

...Western Ukrainians are reluctant to go, despite their high unemployment, because they sympathize with the Crimean Tatars—entire Western Ukrainian villages were deported to Siberia...

...Plyushch leaves his teaching position, marries and enters Kiev University's mathematics program...

...I was losing my will to live...

...It is an intellectual odyssey that ranks among the most eclectic and brilliant works Soviet dissent has yet produced, and is remarkable even by Western standards...

...In his first samizdat work, entitled "Letters to a Friend" and written when he was 25, he argues that "democracy is essential for socialism...

...Despite his collaboration with Ukrainian human rights activists in the early '60s, it is not until he reads a book by the literary critic Ivan Dzyu-ba titled Internationalism or Russifica tion...

...And He responded with a warm and friendly smile...

...It shakes the foundations of his ideology...

...An apprenticeship as a schoolteacher in a tiny Ukrainian village introduces Plyushch to unbelievable squalor and poverty, conforming his feelings about the need for a "change in society...

...Indeed, in the last pages of this memoir Plyushch, whose analytical skills are on display throughout History's Carnival, is reduced to the role of a mere witness: "Thus the days passed...

...The life he recounts is a series of separations and losses...

...Plyushch is searingly honest in his discussion of the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism, including the anti-Semitism of his own youth...