The Tower of Babel in the Yevhen Sverstyuk’s Symbolic Space

Abstract

The essayistic heritage of Yevhen Sverstyuk is revealed over time in its prognostic potential. This makes his works relevant to reading in the context of civilizational confrontations of our days.

The aim of the article is to analyze the semantic richness of allusions to the biblical plot in the book “The Rebuilding of the Tower of Babel”.

The book of essays by Yevhen Sverstyuk “The Rebuilding of the Tower of Babel (The Chernobyl Parable)” was published by the Munich publishing house “Suchasnist” in 1989. This publication reflected the attention of the Suchasnist publishing house and the Prolog Research Corporation to the dissident movement in the USSR and specifically to the person of Sverstyuk. His essay “On the Pogruzhalsky Trial” was published in the “Suchasnist” journal back in 1965. Ukrainian circles in the West followed Sverstyuk's public speeches, his persecution by the Soviet authorities, and his arrest in 1972. The book “The Rebuilding of the Tower of Babel” appeared after the author was released during the period of relative liberalization of the Soviet regime, called “perestroika” (rebuilding) by Mikhail Gorbachev. The book's title was a clear allusion to this propaganda slogan, just as the subtitle addressed to painful memories of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. The archetypal image of the Tower of Babel carries a bundle of connotations centered around a central concept: the inevitable catastrophe of social projects inspired by the desire for self-affirmation and manifestation of one's own greatness — purely illusory. The visible manifestation of this catastrophe is the explosion of a nuclear reactor and the radiation contamination of Ukrainian lands. The inevitability of the destructive finale of the communist experiment, which was still ongoing in the USSR at the time of the book's publication, is also easily read in the interpretation of the archetypal image. But Sverstyuk is not limited to retrospectives. He is concerned about the tendency to overturn the bureaucratic system instead of completely abandoning its model. Sverstyuk is looking for institutions and individuals capable of posing a fundamental question to society about the spiritual foundations of its development — and he does not find them. He is concerned about the apathy and inertia of thinking not only among bureaucrats, but also among intellectual and creative elites. He cherishes hope for the emergence of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) on the basis of folk religious tradition, capable of being the driving force behind the construction of an entirely new country. Later, Sverstyuk became one of the leaders of the lay movement in the UAOC, edited the newspaper “Nasha Vira” (Our Faith), and belonged to the close circle of Patriarch Dimitry Yarema. But the UAOC did not live up to Sverstyuk's expectations: after the death of the patriarch, it made moral compromises with the post-communist authorities. Finally, on February 4, 2005, a group of racketeers, sent by the then Primate of the UAOC, Methodius Kudryakov, threw Sverstyuk and the archive of the editorial office of "Our Faith" out of the patriarchate building. The sad predictions of the essay about the decorative reconstruction of the Tower of Babel were revealed with cruel irony.

This allows us to conclude about the deep cautionary content of the central image of the book “The Rebuilding of the Tower of Babel” and its openness to the Ukrainian perspective of post-colonial transformations.