Celebrity Celebrations

2016/5/6 13:48:43

It was the genius of the Communists not to make a direct assault on what they opposed, but to subvert it through trivialization…. one of Communism’s proudest achievements in Ukraine… stands triumphant.

 

 


Commentary by Andrew Sorokowski* for RISU:

 

The “Kyiv Post” of 29 April 2016 (Good Friday by the Julian calendar) featured a story by Natalya Trach on how four Ukrainian celebrities planned to spend Easter Day.

 

Who cares how these individuals celebrated the day of the Lord’s Resurrection? In fact, many people do. In Ukraine, as anywhere, ordinary people are curious about the private lives of highly successful politicians, athletes, and entertainers. Many admire these celebrities, and even mimic their behavior. Even if they cannot imitate the daily lives of rock stars or billionaires, ordinary people are surely influenced by their conduct.

 

How, then, do Ukrainian celebrities celebrate Easter? According to the “Kyiv Post,” Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko likes to bake Easter bread, while his children paint traditional Ukrainian Easter eggs. The mayor also decorates his home with Easter bunnies. Drag queen Monroe straightforwardly admits that being from a Soviet family that rejected religion, she is not “a religious person.” Thus, while she “adores” the Easter holiday, she does so “only in the context of cooking, baking and festivals.” This is understandable. What is not understandable is why Ms. Trach chose to interview Monroe about Easter.  This is like asking a Hindu how he celebrated Hanukkah. Except that Easter has evidently become, like the American Christmas, a sort of pagan festival, emptied of religious content.

 

Rock star Ruslana Lyzhychko celebrates the holiday by painting Easter eggs and baking Easter bread, and gets together with friends and family. Public relations and sales agency owner Daria Shapovalova likes to spend Easter traveling, especially to Lake Como. (After all, what Ukrainian sophisticate would be caught dead in some dank village church, jostled by sweating old women in hideous headscarves?) But this year, in an apparent burst of patriotism, Ms. Shapovalova planned to visit a Ukrainian resort near Odesa. A devoted mother, she even resolved to decorate her hotel room with Easter bunnies for her three-year-old son.

 

In all these Easter accounts there is one obvious omission. There is no mention of religious services. Ruslana, to her credit, does speak of going to church to have the Easter bread blessed. But she says nothing about actually attending Resurrection Matins or the Easter liturgy.

 

Now it may be that these individuals thought that their religious practices were too private a matter to mention in an interview with a daily newspaper. Apparently their modesty did not extend to what they baked or how they entertained their children. If the private lives of celebrities are public, why should religious worship – a public, not a private act – be a secret? Or it may be that the “Kyiv Post” correspondent felt that she should not cover religious subjects, as if this somehow violated the separation of Church and State. But of course, outside the case of Mayor Klitschko, the State had nothing to do with it.

 

The one theme that clearly emerges from these accounts is a devotion to folk traditions: the Easter breads (paska and babka) and Easter eggs (pysanky). The Ukrainian Easter, it appears, has become a culinary-ethnographic event. (As for the Easter bunnies – our attempts to locate this figure in the pantheon of East Slavic tradition have not met with success.)

 

But to bake the paska and babka without reference to Jesus as the Bread of Life, or to decorate pysanky without understanding that even to the pagans, they signified rebirth, is to miss the point of the exercise. To draw little wavy lines and crosses unaware that they symbolize eternity and the Passion is to draw in ignorance. How long can a people continue to do things without comprehending what they are doing? How long before, realizing that they neither understand nor believe in the meanings of their symbols, they discard the symbols themselves?

 

And so this treasured folk culture will drop away like a dried husk, because the core of faith has died. Spiritual death leads to cultural extinction. Some like to ridicule the Russians, most of whom profess Orthodoxy as a national trait yet rarely if ever show up in an Orthodox church. But has not the same thing happened – except for the western regions -- in Ukraine?

 

It was the genius of the Communists not to make a direct assault on what they opposed, but to subvert it through trivialization. Thus, Ukrainian national identity was reduced to sharavarshchyna– a set of quaint ethnographic practices suitable for a hobby – rather than being taken seriously as a basis for state development. Borshch and the hopak were fine, but not a vibrant national culture that challenged the monolithic Soviet state. Similarly, religion was reduced to mere custom and ritual, safely confined to the home or even an Orthodox church, but by no means allowed to revolutionize culture and society. Traditional Easter and Christmas folk practices and beliefs could be tolerated, as long as religion remained a purely private matter, unable to challenge the “Soviet way of life.”

 

If the habits of celebrities are any indication of the national psyche (and most likely they both reflect and affect it), then one of Communism’s proudest achievements in Ukraine – the reduction of Christianity to a set of entertaining folk customs disconnected from any fundamental beliefs, moral or ethical standards, or an ecclesial community – stands triumphant. Ukraine’s churches face a colossal challenge.

 

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* Andrew Sorokowski is a lawyer and historian. In 1984-87 he was the Ukrainian researcher at Keston College, England, which monitored religious liberty in communist countries. In 1989-90 he served on the staff of the late Myroslav Ivan Cardinal Lubachivsky's Rome chancery, participating in the transfer of his offices to L'viv in 1991. He worked as Managing Editor of the scholarly journal "Harvard Ukrainian Studies" in 1993-1997. Currently he is a historical researcher at the U.S. Department of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources Division, in Washington, DC. He has published a number of scholarly articles, and is the editor of a collection of articles and documents on the history of the Ukrainian Patriarchal movement published by "Svichado" in 2009.

 

The op-ed above represents the views of the author and appears here through the courtesy of the Religious News Service of Ukraine. Ukraine Business Online presents this information merely as a matter of public information. Our publication of this material should not be construed in any way as an endorsement - or rejection - of the views contained therein.

 

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