Professor Андрій Содомора Andriy Sodomora

I finished school. At first, I thought about applying to the Printing [Faculty] — to study book and magazine design, I liked graphic arts and all that. I won’t even mention music, since, by then, I wasn’t really considering a music career, even though I loved music most of all. Now, writing was what I had wanted to do since my school days. I remember our Ukrainian literature teacher… We were writing about Honchar’s “Praporonostsi” [“The Flag Bearers”], you know, Golden Prague, that really resonated with me… I wrote [an essay] on “The Flag Bearers.” The teacher read it and kept me after school, everyone else went home, but I stayed. “Rewrite it,” he told me. He thought I had copied it from somewhere. When he saw I was writing the same thing, he let me go. I loved writing. But what would I write about? Back then, I had no idea what I was going to write about. Not a clue. Although, I did love psychology. I thought I’d write on historical topics, because I was engrossed in reading Karmeliuk, so you can see where I was drawn, to the History Faculty. But with my, so to say, biographical facts, there was no way in the world I would have been accepted into the History Faculty. And thank God — truly, it was fate, the hand of God guiding me — that I didn’t get accepted to the History Faculty due to the competition. I really didn’t get in — I didn’t know the dates, and my geography wasn’t great, not that I was deliberately failed or anything… But even if I had done my best, I wouldn’t have been accepted. [There was] also Dmytro Liskevych — a distant relative on my father’s side, a lab assistant at the Ukrainian Language Department, he had been to Siberia twice, a representative of our old intelligentsia, a very interesting man — God rest his soul. He pointed out that the Classical Philology [Department] had a shortage [of students]. And I slipped into that shortage, so to speak. And I ended up exactly where I was meant to be. You see, that’s what the lines of fate are. They are not straight lines — they are dotted, they are points that turn into… It’s coincidences that turn into the line of one’s fate.

As for my work, I always say that I immediately both felt a calling, and life turned out this way, the lines of fate converged in such a way that I was born nearly at the same time when Mykola Zerov perished in Karelia. And in a sense, it was as if I… I and my classmates who worked, say, in translation, later picked up the baton. He worked with Roman literature and translations, while I was filling in those enormous blank names, and all of us who worked in that field were filling in the vast gaps that remained in our literature — not because we were lazy or did nothing, but because the circumstances made it impossible for us to do so, whereas Russian literature had those [opportunities]. Even though I had desperately wanted to write something of my own since my school days, I put that aside for a long time. What I did, I did thanks to those gymnasium professors who maintained the national tuning fork, as I used to say — not explicitly, but we felt it. There were mentions of Zerov, of attention to national culture and literature, and we tried… There was Yuriy Mushak, Mykhailo Bilyk, Yosyp Kobiv, and others. That’s how I worked in the field of translation — I was doing my thing, so to say. Others were doing theirs, and I was doing mine. And that’s how I succeeded. Also because, at the time, people thought, “Greek, Latin — what politics is there in that? That’s ancient history, irrelevant now.” But in reality, that wasn’t the case. Actually, if you dig deeper, it is ancient literature that… where the roots of patriotism lie, that’s where love for one’s own [heritage stems from], respect for what language is, and so on… We know [the story of] the 300 Spartans, and later, we have Shevchenko’s “Three hundred of us comrades, pure as glass, have perished here!”, so, these patriotic ideas, these images that shone in antiquity, carried over to us and [continued] to sustain us.

The year [19]91, early April, a magnificent blue sky, an April deep blue sky, without a single cloud, the flag above the Town Hall. Four little boys with trumpets at the very top sounded their horns in four cardinal directions. A Cossack cannon fires, and the blue-and-yellow flag [was raised]. That happened too… The community stood shoulder to shoulder. I was looking at that flag, but [more than that], I was watching the faces because that interested me. I saw tears. On many faces, I saw tears. But I also saw faces that, to put it mildly, were far from happy about the event. And at that moment, I think not only I, but everyone understood that the road to true independence was still very, very long. But that moment was very moving, incredibly moving.

So how did I come to Seneca? I came to Seneca through the Osnovy publishing house. Solomiya Pavlychko did a tremendous job… Publishing, introducing ancient works in our literature. I remember it [as clearly as if it had happened] today: Solomiya Pavlychko came to Lviv and spoke with me. She asked, “What would you…?” Ah, she suggested, “Would you [translate] Seneca?” I [hesitated]…it was prose, so I asked, “What about Ovid? Ovid? I’m very…” “Ovid will come after Seneca!” she said. And I believed her because Solomiya Pavlychko’s word seemed firm and unwavering. I took on Seneca. I took on Seneca, and it was a wonderful task for me. Because… I still have that original Latin edition, where, even before translating Seneca, I had read and marked in pencil the thoughts that I liked a lot. So, I started Seneca already prepared, so to speak. And I translated. It was a massive amount of work. There was an extensive foreword, footnotes. Seneca’s introduction into Ukrainian literature, Seneca’s presence in Ukrainian history and literature. The Cossacks who were reading, were absorbed in reading. The Cossack elite used to heavily read the Stoics, particularly Seneca. And speaking of which, so I don’t forget, Artemiy Dymyd, our hero, our warrior, who, sadly, was killed, but all those who were killed live and exist in our memory, he had Seneca with him right there on the frontline. I wrote about this in the Zbruch [newspaper]. Danylo Ilnytskyi wrote about it. And it’s incredibly moving, and for me, an immense encouragement — seeing how the classics still work. How their words, their quotes, literally speak to us today. Literally to us. “Even if the enemy presses forward, retreating is shameful — hold your ground.” That’s Seneca writing in his dialogues. Directly to us. I’ve cited these passages somewhere. I don’t remember them by heart anymore, though.

Although it’s to differentiate, to separate, let’s say, a workspace from a non-workspace. I work, and probably not just me — everyone works this way: while walking, sitting on a bench. Then you come to the desk, to the computer, and write down what you’ve seen, heard, thought through. The workplace of someone who writes, someone who composes, and so on… is under the open sky, just as the classics always worked under the open sky. I remember, sometimes a phrase lingers in my mind, the beginning of one of the short [written] forms, but I just can’t get to write it down. Just can’t. I remember it as if it were today, I’d even… decades and decades have already passed. I stepped outside, and I even remember exactly where I stopped, and then that phrase, as they say, flew into my head. I rushed home and wrote it down. Immediately, I wrote the short story, it’s called “Gypsies.” A tiny miniature, but very dear to me. A wind blew somewhere, and with that wind came the breath of that first phrase, and it came to me. This work, this “laboratory,” it’s fascinating, truly fascinating.