I knew her all too briefly, but she was one of those rare people who, the first time you meet them, inspire you with the wish that you’d known them always. Not only because of their charm, wit and intelligence, but because of an inner passion for life and for the vocation that they’ve chosen or been chosen by, a passion as contagious as it is illuminating.
I worked with Solomea on an anthology of contemporary Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Canadian writing called Two Lands: New Visions. The introductory section she produced impressed me by its ease, erudition, and the enthusiasm it conveyed not just for Ukrainian writing but for all writing that challenges and recreates us with its Rilkean capacity to change our lives. It was, therefore, with enormous anticipation that I flew off to a writers’ conference in Saskatoon where the anthology was being launched, and where I was, at last, to meet my co-editor.
I had heard that Solomea Pavlychko was an impressive person on all accounts: born into Ukraine’s cultural and intellectual aristocracy; she was brilliant, beautiful and distinguished. To discover that she was unpretentious, gracious, and possessed of a delightful sense of humour, as well as a passion for sushi, was an unexpected pleasure. I shall never forget undertaking a filmed minivan tour, with Solomea and Oksana Zabushko, as well as another Canadian writer, of the Ukrainian block settlements between Saskatoon and Regina: although appreciative of the endless church hall dinners offering up platters of varenyky and holubtsi, Solomea always had her eyes peeled for that impossibility in rural Saskatchewan: tempting arrangements of maki and sashimi as well as udon noodles and miso soup.
It was at a sushi restaurant in Toronto, where we had assembled for the eastern launch of Two Lands, that Solomea introduced me to someone who has become one of the most important people in my creative life, as well as a close friend: the painter Natalka Husar. So that I owe another debt to Solomea, one that I hope to repay in some small way through the collaborative projects that Natalka and I will be undertaking in the next two years, involving journeys to and through Ukraine and, I sincerely hope, meetings with people who knew Solomea in her capacity as teacher, researcher, editor and public intellectual. Surely this is one extraordinary consolation that we all share, those who knew Solomea well and those, like me, who had only begun to get to know her: that in spite of her untimely death, she has left behind such a considerable body of work, and provided such a rich legacy for all those to whom art, thought and discourse matter.
When I remember Solomea, what comes most forcefully and hauntingly to mind is a scene from the documentary made during that Saskatchewan road trip of 1999. We had parked the minivan by a cemetery filled with the graves of dozens of Ukrainian pioneers to Canada: most of the markers were made of stone, incised with Cyrillic lettering as well as crosses and crescents; some were simple crosses fashioned of deeply-grained cedar, and bearing only the names and dates of those who had perished so far from their homeland. Against a late-spring sky—deep, deep blue and cloudless—and a screen of poplars, their leaves still tightly furled, the director filmed Solomea speaking of how moved she was by the memorials she had seen, and by the sense of mortality which they, the stark landscape against which they were set, and the architecture of the simple wooden church conveyed. Her lovely and expressive face and voice; her speaking of the silent and forgotten dead in fine and flawless English remain with me, as does the conviction that Solomea herself is one of the immortals, due to the words she has left behind and the people whose lives she has so remarkably influenced and inspired.
Janice Kulyk Keefer, the University of Guelph, Canada.