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The Cathedral
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The Cathedral - Honchar
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Pip has a really great review of The Cathedral. It would be great if it could be duplicated and added to this string.
The Cathedral stands largely ignored in a Soviet era industrial city yet it stands as a unique representation of who has gone before. The city contains steel works that employ most of the town and which also pollutes the city, river and countryside around it. Yet, these steelworks bring pride to the workers, organize their lives and represent the ambitions of a nation forging a new future. The author describes the countryside and the river with deep affection and his characters have a tendency to truly care for each other although there are key exceptions to this trend. The love story is a sweet one and although the ending is a touch ambiguous, it is the ambiguity of any current situation where the past is in danger of being forgotten, the earth is in danger of being destroyed and yet people still find reasons to take care of each other.
Gail wrote: "Pip has a really great review of The Cathedral. It would be great if it could be duplicated and added to this string."Thanks, here it is!
The Cathedral pits the utilitarian and filthy ore smelting plant against the dilapidated, but inspiring cathedral, ignored during the Soviet era and used as a grain store. "The plants covered the whole horizon with smoke. They had no days off. Day and night they smoked with epic calm. The cathedral exuded its soft silhouette from the sky. It stood on the distant horizon, protruding through in the transparent blue haze of distance. From a different perspective the cathedral domes and the plant chimney seemed to come together, to unite into one ensemble the edifices of the old and the new age".
The story is set in a village with traditional small town concerns and customs, but where the major employer is the factory where workers, despite the atrocious conditions are proud to contribute to the progress of the Soviet Union by forging steel. That the Cathedral has survived is a miracle of luck rather than design. It is mostly ignored, until a iron plaque, stating that the Cathedral had been erected by Cossack monks in memory of historical circumstances, is mysteriously removed by an ambitious Party official, who believes that demolishing the Cathedral in favour of a marketplace, will further his Party career. That the Cathedral may be threatened becomes a concern for the village, despite the day to day neglect it has suffered. In a discussion between two students, who have been commandeered for the grain harvest, one says," A cathedral like this doesn't belong to you or me; more correctly stated, it does not belong to us alone. It belongs not only to the nation which created it, but to all the people of the planet". Which reminds me of the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. I haven't been anywhere near the Ukraine, although I travelled one summer across Russia by train, and feel that Honchar's descriptions of the countryside were vividly expressed. His love of the acacias and the oaks, the marshes and the Lakes, and the Dnieper river in particular were all beautifully described. How bitter is the contrast to the television images we have of a stark, barren and destroyed region now. And I am vividly reminded of noting a beautiful old church in Moscow being used to store coal on my visit there in 1990.
Honchar describes how life is circumscribed by the need to have a passport in order to obtain a job, how petty officials dictate public life, how workers depend on state support for recreational activities and for holidays, the conditions of the factory workers, and how people survive by employing traditional farming and gardenign skills, all in passing while introducing the characters who live in the village. It is a wonderfully evocative plea for art and beauty instead of utilitarianism.
The iconic Ukrainian aesthetic church being turned into a Soviet steel works area is such a clear image: even when turned into a Soviet worker, the Ukrainian remains Ukrainian. This is a notion that runs through this novel, which was long censored in the Soviet Union. Still relevant today in how it depicts different groups trying to occupy Ukraine only to find the Ukrainian identity and pride in their Cossack history is unbreakable: whether this be the German occupation, USSR, or even the internal Makhno movement. Although, I will say the depiction of the latter leaves a little bit to be desired for me. What I find interesting, is that Makhno is portrayed as a bit of a power hungry hypocrite in this who is there to bury gold without his troops knowing. However, he is currently largely seen as a national hero in Ukraine for fighting both the Tsarists and the Bolsheviks ( to the extent that apparently many remember him as a Nationalist hero and not a radical anarchist). And, the story of him stealing gold from towns and hiding it is actually from German propaganda...wild.
It makes me wonder if this being published in the Soviet Union had something to do with this portrayal, or if Honchar just wanted to throw in everyone who had come through the area fighting for something in a group together as people ruining the lives of of peasants through upheaval.
BUT, there is this portrayal of both depressing stark reality and a certain affection for the place and its people at the same time that I really found arresting. There is a sense of the beauty in the horrible in it that I find really captivating in a 'the sublime exists between the dichotomy of life" sort of way. Also it has a sense of "yeah this is a shit town, but it's my shit town" that I love in things. I like that Gail brought up by how Soviet it seems despite the fact they censored this book. I found it interesting when looking stuff up for this book that his style actually is considered to be part of the Soviet Socialist Realism tradition. Which isn't a bad thing: while I condemn the fact that other forms of art were more suppressed during this time, the style itself has produced some remarkable paintings, statues, novels, movies, etc. It is actually one of my favorites, as I find the glorification of the regular and mundane, the peasant, often far more affecting than art that glorifies the religious or aristocratic.
And while I wasn't super connected to the love triangle story within, I felt very sympathetic and connected to the characters in general, particularly Yelka's story with her guilt over being victimized, how other people responded, etc . It was a bit heartbreaking but very grounded in how it would have gone realistically.
Overall, I would say it was a bit plot weak but that was compensated for in the strength of the characters, their lives, and the description of the village and Cathedral. I gave it 4 stars and would probably keep it on the list as a great example of both socialist realism and Ukrainian identity in art.
This was a very interesting book for someone like me who knows very little about Ukraine. Written and set in the 1960s during Soviet times, it follows several inhabitants of a town with a disused cathedral whose future is uncertain. I wanted to enjoy it more, but I was often confused because of the many characters with their different points of view and stories that sometimes came together but often didn't. There seemed to be too many stories for one book.
But I enjoyed many parts of it, and I appreciated the perspective on Soviet Ukraine and how the people saw their history - both recent, with many references to World War II, and more distant, with the frequent invocation of the Cossacks.
I can see that this is an important book in Ukrainian and Soviet literature. I just didn't know enough of the background to appreciate it fully.
I enjoyed this book, I found the story to be poetic in many ways. It was love story as well as a story of the Ukraine and of communism and the human spirit. As stated above, the characters were positive and negative. I thought there was a fair amount of philosophy in this work. Because of the censer of this book it can be found as a pdf file on -line and was published by the St. Sophia Religious Association of Ukrainian Catholics in Philadelphia in 1989.