And what is it like to be yourself? If you are Ukrainian, speak Ukrainian. In order to be myself, I had to convince the camp that I was not Nikolai, but Mykola. They said: "What's the difference?". I am Mykola! And she had to write it, even all those publications that were published in Moscow, the dissident Mykola was spelled with a nice and round Ukrainian letter "и". Mykola Horban, as Nikolai insists, but what's the d… I am Mykola! So I defended my name. And today we hear: Dash, Pash, Grish, Mash. What is that? We are children of bastards. Because if you had had a father, if you had learned the language, then your child would have known that they are going to their capital and that they should be Ukrainian, not "like everyone else", or "what's the difference". Doesn't matter, we will be reborn! Nation... There were even worse times, I was in first grade with a boy, and the next day he was gone. The NKVD arrived and took them to Siberia. Hundreds of families were taken out of Ukraine, they were shot. In Lviv all the intellectuals were executed in prisons, but somewhere those people emerged, they... If it is difficult for the nation, then I am already quoting from Horbal, I have already said it somewhere - then God sends the right people. I don't know how Svitlichnyi emerged in a one-room apartment, he is a man from Luhansk region, on the border with Russia. And in his apartment the thing started that was later called The Sixtiers. And Lina Kostenko, or, for example, Semykina - the Russian-speaking artist, they were all Russified, but after getting into the orbit of Ivan Svitlichnyi, they became Ukrainians. Or Alla Horska, Alla Horska opened up, she was from a sports family and she discovered Ukrainianness for herself and the KGB did not know what do it with her. They had to kill her. You know, when a nation is struggling, God sends the right people. As with Svitlychnyi - all this was formed in a one-room apartment of Svitlychnyi. Ivan Dziuba, who will later write "Internationalism…", Vasyl Stus, Lina Kostenko, Alla, also Semykina, Liudmyla Semykina, she is an artist. He says, "Liuda, you should think about becoming a fashion designer." And she dresses all of Kyiv and walks in Ukrainian clothes. She sews from that overcoat with national patterns, and then she says, "Suddenly I wanted to shake all our women out of their shorts and put on them princely clothes." It was Svitlychnyi who made her like this. Halyna Sevruk was russified - it was him who made her a ceramist... I'm not even saying that Vasyl Stus said - "my mustachioed sun". And when Svitlychnyi is arrested in 1965, they go to the cinema to the presentation of Parajanov's film with the intention to get people to rise. So he emerged… I thank God that I happen to eat thin broth together with Svitlychnyi. I call myself a poet, but poetry and poets were revealed to me by Ihor Kalynets. But I had to be lucky to get there once. So I'm happy, I thank God for giving me this path and all my struggle is not my own struggle, but as Huzar says, "to save yourself, your 'I'". I defended my name. Maybe someday you will have the opportunity to get there... There is a stand, I put up an envelope to show the geography where I was, in Mordovia, and they are all signed as "Ukraine". What is it? What a challenge is it? It wasn't Ukraine, it was Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The UkSSR was not a state, the UkSSR was an administrative division: there were republics, regions, districts, cities and the state was the Soviet Union. There were no states as such. And I write "Ukraine", all envelopes are signed in Ukrainian - "Ukraine". It's such a small challenge, but it stayed, it still is. Let's defend ourselves, let's be ourselves, and it will be, and that's the reason for our feat. Obviously, we can do nothing about all those who lived, became russified, exhausted, there is nothing you can do about it, but their children will wake up. They will wake up, it will explode! There is the law of the third generation: what grandparents didn't consider as important, what parents were indifferent to, that would be of a big interest for grandchildren. We have a beautiful land given to us by God, beautiful. We have an exceptionally rich black soil, we have rich subsoil, we have everything to be rich, but we have to become ourselves. This takes time. That's why I wanted to meet with the KGBist to write a book, with the KGB officer who was interested in the fact that we, Ukrainians, sometimes look hostile at each other. It takes a little time, but everything will be fine, we have wonderful youth. I say that once 40 people kept the empire in fear. It is obvious that we were all arrested, members of the Helsinki Group, but that was a group. So-called "a bunch of people", as (??) said, and Stus Vasyl said. But sometimes I wonder - what would have happened if Ukraine didn’t have Shevchenko? What if there were no Shevchenko. But you know that as his colleague Panko Kulish said, he said that Ukraine is so rural, and it's better to say Little Russia (Malorosiya). And they all started writing "Little Russia". They were collecting the folklore of Little Russia, went around this area. What can you do about that? And then suddenly a peasant- bondslave.
