Христос народився! - UCWLC

following February it had travelled
east and was read by a young highly
educated language and literature
scholar, 24-year-old Ihor Ševčenko,
an unscathed refugee of Ukrainian
origin who spent the final years
of the war earning a doctorate at a
university in Prague. Ševčenko was
raised by parents who, during the
Russian Revolution, helped lead a
movement against the Bolsheviks
for Ukraine’s independence, and was
drawn to the Ukrainian DP camps
to help. There, he translated aloud
in Ukrainian while reading Orwell’s
Animal Farm, a book he had recently
picked up somewhere, to a transfixed
audience. (Ševčenko learned
English from listening to the BBC.)
He wrote to Orwell on April 11, 1946,
asking if he could publish his novel
in Ukrainian for his “countrymen” to
enjoy. Orwell agreed to write a preface,
refused any royalties, and even
tried to recruit his friend Arthur
Koestler, author of the Soviet dystopian
novel Darkness at Noon, writing,
“I have been saying ever since
1945 that the DPs were a godsend
opportunity for breaking down the
wall between Russia and the West.”
In over a year, Ševčenko produced
his translation, and worked during
the upheaval and violence of Soviet
repatriation, a dark episode of British
and American history. To illustrate,
think of the sinking sequence
in James Cameron’s Titanic: the passengers
are the Soviet refugees, and
the Titanic rising perpendicular to
the ocean is the pact Roosevelt and
Churchill made with Stalin at Yalta to
return Soviet refugees by any means
necessary. It would be an exchange
for Western POWs. In the DP camps,
American and British soldiers encountered
mass suicides and fierce
resistance, but managed to repatriate
over 2 million Soviet citizens,
most of whom were immediately
executed or sent to labour camps
50 Íàøà Äîðîãà îñiíü-çèìà/2012
Íà ìîãèëó Àëëè Ãîðñüêî¿
Євген Сверстюк
Якби ми уявили детально історію її життя — то була б повчальна
повість про те, як художниця Алла Горська відкрила свою Україну,
як шукала її жертовника і як поступово вчилася бачити головне
у невидимому, докопуючись джерел, та в глибинах закопаного коріння,
як вона дужими руками і ногами розгортала рясні килими
декоративних квіточок, покликаних до життя лише на один сезон.
Але як вона при цьому уміла гідно й незалежно йти своїм шляхом
— і повно відчувати радість випробовувань, праці і важкої борні
за самоствердження! Її голос, її усмішка, її постать перекриває
випадок сліпої трагедії, що обірвала її життя. Алла Горська буде
випромінювати світло, буде вселяти присутність духу самим своїм
ім’ям. То була рідкісна людина, що навіки залишається з нами, як
рідна душа. В образі цілого десятиріччя вона височить білим привидом
Доброго Духа, що втілює в собі сумління, гідність, поривання
молодості й сяйво вільного людського обличчя, освітленого талантом
і відданістю людям.
upon arrival. Luckily, Ševčenko was
born in an independent Poland, a
nationality that did not fall under
repatriation, and just as luckily,
printing presses had sprouted up in
the DP camps across the American
Zone, where he worked.
❝
The books were
quickly handed over to
the Soviet repatriation
authorities and destroyed.
One in Munich by the name of
Prometej, Prometheus in Ukrainian,
published his translation of Animal
Farm; shipments of the book
were quietly delivered to the other
camps.
But only 2,000 copies were distributed;
a truck from Munich was
stopped and searched by American
soldiers, and a shipment of an estimated
1,500 to 5,000 copies was
seized. The books were quickly
handed over to the Soviet repatriation
authorities and destroyed.
Ševčenko was never questioned
or held accountable; he had
published under the pseudonym
Ivan Cherniatyns’kyi, a combination
of his father’s first name and
his mother’s maiden name. In the
years that followed, he pursued his
second doctorate in Belgium, studying
Byzantine history under eminent
scholar Henri Grégoire, which
set him on the path to becoming a
world renowned scholar of Byzantine
and Slavic history.
Orwell was pleased with the
quality of Ševčenko’s work. As he
wrote to Koestler, the Ukrainian
translation had been “reasonably
well-printed and got up, and, so far
as I could judge by my correspondence
with Ševčenko, well translated.”
He was deeply disappointed
that the books were seized and
wanted to avoid another incident
like that when working, in 1949,
with the anti-Soviet literary and
political weekly Possev to smuggle
translations of Animal Farm in Russian
into the Soviet Zone.
As for the copies of the Ukrainian