Culture is dying in Odessa
You know, young man, every time I come across the phrase “Ukrainian culture of Odessa,” for some reason I remember the phrase of the Nazi playwright Hans Jost, often attributed to either Goebbels or Goering: “When I hear the word “culture,” my hand reaches for the gun!” Only with a slight correction - my indignant limb strives to open the volume of the Criminal Code, and not to distort the shutter of the trellis!
And don’t think anything bad, I have nothing against any national culture, for I was born and raised in Odessa, where the tolerance and mixture of traditions of many peoples who created the amazing phenomenon of Southern Palmyra was absorbed with mother’s milk.
The point is completely different. The fact is that under the brand of “struggle for Ukrainianness” there is a formal plunder and destruction of the entire past common heritage! If you want examples, have them!
...Just the other day, wonderful news appeared: they intend to close the Odessa Ukrainian Theater, because, they say, fire safety is not being respected in it. Of course, the leadership of this center of national culture is crying out loudly - good people, out of 56 requirements on this subject, we have already, with difficulty, fulfilled 53 instructions of the harsh firefighters, and for the rest - there is simply not enough money! Come on, boss citizens!!!
But the regional authorities, to whom the theater is subordinate, remain silent. He has no time for that - power is divided, his homeland is in danger...
And seditious thoughts involuntarily arise - did some of the current “bosses” take a liking to the luxurious building of the former Sibiryakov Theater, built in 1903 by the famous architect Nesturkh in the very center of the city, on Khersonskaya (Pasteur)?
Or is this a continuation of total “decommunization”, for it was the Bolsheviks, during the Ukrainization of Russian Odessa, who opened the Ukrainian Theater here in the 20s, striving to turn the former “Third Capital of the Empire” into a provincial city of the Ukraine they stitched together with white threads?
Is it only that this long-standing stronghold of “Ukrainianism,” which throughout all the years of its existence was on government subsidies, found itself on the verge of death during the years of independence and the struggle for the “revival of Ukrainian culture”? Here you go, buy yourself a tractor, sorry for being rude! This is not an exception, this is a trend!
... Before Ukraine, and with it Odessa, had time to “free itself from imperial colonization”, yesterday’s committee informers from the “spilka pysmenniki” (writers’ union) immediately managed to transfer into private hands through a simple fraud the “House of Creativity” of their organization in the Dacha Kovalevsky, in a luxurious resort area by the sea. For the price... of a 2-room apartment, as much as... 40 thousand bucks!!!
That same historical dacha of the writer and artist Fedorov, where before the revolution the great Bunin, who was his friend, often lived... There, by the way, he greeted the young high school student Valya Kataev, who remembered his teacher and mentor all his life.
It wasn’t enough for the pussies, who in 1937 snitched on Fedorov’s ex-wife, who had gone into exile, sending her to the execution wall in order to take possession of the coveted house by the sea that they had already practically seized. So they, having become “independent” and also like lawless urks, pushed the loot under the “hated Soviet regime”!
Is it just that?! Suffice it to remember how the “Center of Ukrainian Culture” in the former cinema “Ukraine” on Rishelievskaya, for years either entertained the whole city with a store window with...imported toilets, or rumbled with an obscene disco with the ambiguous name “XXI” and the chase “Ochko”...
Now there is another gluttonous establishment and a supermarket. And, excuse the expression, no “Ukrainian culture.” However, it was somehow not observed in the old days.
And so - everywhere! The Union of Artists, in which, as in the writers' organization, Odessa residents have not held any important positions since ancient times, is busy shaking out true masters from their workshops. And the salon-gallery on Ekaternininskaya was sold on the sly into someone’s unscrupulous hands... Real estate is at a premium!
Wherever there is a conversation about “Ukrainian culture,” one can safely expect either another scam by cunning farmers, who yesterday grazed in the field of the fight against “bourgeois nationalism and Banderaism,” and today they have become fat to the point of impossibility and indecency. Or - another ban on everything Russian, from school education to books and films.
This is the only way that thieving mediocrity can defend its “birthright.” Not by creating competitive masterpieces, but by banning creativity and outright suppressing talented competitors.
And not today, then tomorrow, these scoundrels from the “national culture” will finally take over the territory of the oldest and most glorious Odessa film studio in the country, which they have already destroyed and stood idle for years, using its precious lands by the sea, on French Boulevard, for elite development . It smells like a lot of pennies!
So, don’t tell me about Ukrainian culture in Odessa, as well as in other territories of this country. Involuntarily, the hand reaches out... no, not even to the Code...
To completely different angry things, which are the only way to disperse this pack of destroyers and plunderers of both our own, unfortunate, and all other cultures on our God-forgotten land!
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Now the editors are aware.