Exploring Ukrainian Culture: Insights from Hromovytsia Berdnyk

Children are not obliged to imitate their parents, but upbringing influences and shapes people. We talked to Hromovytsia Berdnyk, a Ukrainian journalist, writer, and researcher of traditional culture who is the daughter of the philosopher Ole Berdnyk, about the life of a dissident's daughter and the first years of independence. Watch the full interview and read the abridged version of the exclusive interview about the struggle, truth, family, and culture of the South.

You are researching traditional culture. What is its place in our region or in the South in general?

Traditional culture is everywhere. Ukraine is a very multicultural country, territory, and land. And it has always been like that. Each region has had traditional cultures, primarily Ukrainian, but also of other ethnic groups and peoples who lived together. This is especially true of Odesa and the South, because it is probably the most multicultural region.

I haven't really researched the southern region. Until now, my area of interest was more Hutsul region, the Carpathians, and a little bit of Polissia. I had a dream of making a good expedition to the South, not only to Odesa region, but also to Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Zaporizhzhia. I planned it for the summer of 2022.

I have a long-standing dream to come and see one of these malanka rituals. I know that in the Odesa region, in the village of Osychky, there are these Didkas. It's very cool. In fact, it's part of the European carnival culture. I would be interested to see it with my own eyes. I saw that this year they were marching, so it was all happening. So if everything goes well, next year I'll come and I'll be able to see and reflect on some things myself, compare them with something else. What I saw in Bukovyna, for example, or in the Carpathians, or in Europe.

Whenever I have the opportunity, I go to carnival events in Europe. Carnival culture is one of my hobbies, you could say, because it's like a part of a sacred tradition. But I have a dream to write a study about the sacred aspect of pan-European carnival culture. And, of course, the Ukrainian carnivals that have survived. We call them Malanka, Maslenitsa, or Masnytsia. That is, these are two periods when people used to wear costumes. It all has its own sacred meaning, it all has its own symbolism.

Of course, I'm sure that a lot of its own traditions have been preserved here, perhaps even magical traditions. That is, what is my main theme - Ukrainian magic. I worked more with the Carpathian tradition because there are many living carriers there, and I could talk to them and record them firsthand.

We need to understand that Ukraine is not only a multicultural territory. Each region had its own history and went through different stages of development and formation, different historical experiences. But much was destroyed during the Holodomor. The South of Ukraine has its own history: the Russification, the influence of the Russian Empire, which tried to destroy identity, especially the Cossack identity.

Perhaps there were some distinctive traditions here that have not survived to this day because there was a generation gap. The period of the liberation struggle, then the Holodomor, the Second World War, the famine after the war-all of this left its mark.

My maternal ancestors are from the Cherkasy region. It was only in the late 80s, when my grandfather was dying, that we found out that there were healers in our family, that my great-grandmother was a fortune teller, that she had these powers, and so on. People were just afraid to talk. And many are still afraid. It's being lost because people are silent, they don't pass it on to anyone, not even in words, let alone pass on the real tradition.

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Photo: Intent/Natalia Dovbysh

The Soviets came to western Ukraine after World War II. Moreover, there were insurgents in western Ukraine until the late 1950s. So the tradition has been preserved at the level of living transmission from grandfathers to grandchildren.

Your father is a well-known dissident who was imprisoned several times for his pro-Ukrainian position. How did you react to these events as a child, did you understand what was happening and why?

I am one of those children who knew what searches and interrogations by the KGB were from the age of two. When my mother married my father, he had already been expelled from the Writers' Union. I was three years old when he, together with Mykola Rudenko, Oksana Meshko, and Levko Lukyanenko, created the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. But, in fact, he had been searched much earlier, because he was a disgraced writer. They visited him regularly.

My childhood playmate was Oksen Lisovyi, who is now the Minister of Education. He and I had a childhood game. I would hide under the table, and he would go knock, knock, knock. Who is it? You have a telegram. The door opens. We came from the KGB to do a search. And I asked, do you have a warrant? And when Oksen's mother and mother heard this from a three-year-old child, it was, as they say, both a laugh and a sin. But in fact, my mother is a very good person, she has been telling me since childhood that we are right, that my father is right, that he is being persecuted because he writes this and that, because he wants freedom for our people and country. This has been ingrained in me since childhood, as well as the fact that there is no need to be afraid because we are right.

There was a story. My mother and I have always spoken Ukrainian - it's our mother tongue, our native language. Moreover, I didn't speak Russian at all until I was 12 years old. I mean, I knew it, but until I went to school in Kyiv, I didn't speak Russian. We were riding in a trolleybus in Kyiv, my father was already in the camps, and we were speaking Ukrainian, and I was telling something quite loudly. There was an aunt sitting opposite me, apparently annoyed by the Ukrainian language or an active child. But she said: "Girl, you are so noisy, aren't you afraid that the police will take you away?" And I stretched out like this: "I'm not afraid of the police, I'm not afraid of those KGB bastards of yours." The trolleybus went silent, and a dead silence fell.

We got off at the next stop. Of course, my mom told me that I shouldn't make such loud statements in public transportation. But this is, as they say, a not-so-funny illustration of the situations in which my childhood was spent in general. I had absolutely no thoughts that this was wrong. On the one hand, I didn't know any better, because I was born into this family. On the other hand, my mother told me a lot of things. In particular, when my father was in the camps, I wrote him letters, he also wrote me individual letters, he wrote me many poems from there, and there is even a collection called "Poems for Daughter" written in the camps.

What did gaining independence mean for your family?

First, it was the realization of what my father fought for. And it was the realization of what he dreamed of. Actually, this was the essence of the Ukrainian Spiritual Republic. It was a program for the cultural, ideological, and national development of the state. Dad understood that for 70 years Ukraine was under the rule of an empire in which certain ideological contexts were very clearly at work.

When Ukraine became independent, it needed to be given new contexts and a new plan for development not just as a state, but as a cultural nation, culture in general, historical identity, and understanding of itself. In other words, my father believed that every nation, state and people, in addition to ordinary life, has a very high goal. Why does the state exist at all? What should we do to leave a mark on history? There is the great American dream, the Japanese miracle, and so on.

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Photo: Intent/Natalia Dovbysh

My dad used Japan as an example: they are a very high-tech country, with very high achievements and a development plan for many years to come. But at the same time, they remember their past: the samurai spirit, traditions, art, and self-awareness are at the heart of education.

He believed that we should lay down the Cossacks, princely history, knowledge about our heroes and ascetics as a cornerstone. That these should be the guidelines on which we should be brought up. He had the idea that we need heroes, that Ukraine should become a nation of heroes. He always said that if we didn't do this, Russia would not let us go. He didn't say that there would definitely be a war, but he predicted that there could be bloodshed if we didn't build national identity from the very beginning of our independence.

Some people even laughed at him at the time, and even his fellow dissidents of yesterday told him: "Oles, you are talking out of your mind, what war? We will find a common language. And we don't need heroes, we need economists, bankers, we need to develop the economy. And you are talking about some kind of heroism." And now, for the last 10 years, I have been constantly recalling this, that if this heroic cult had been introduced at the level of consciousness then, everything would have turned out differently for us.

At the same time, the last 10 years have shown that the heroic spirit has not disappeared. If the nation has it, it will awaken in extreme conditions, at the moment when it is needed. This happened in 2014, and then in 2022. I hope that this spirit will never die and that children will always be born who will carry it.

There is a situation in your family that has become familiar to many since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. A kind of confrontation with Berdnik's eldest daughter Myroslava, who is a Russian propagandist. How did it happen that such a family has a person with such polarized views?

In fact, there is nothing surprising. It is sad. I would not like it to be so. But it is what it is. In fact, her father practically did not take part in her upbringing because he divorced her mother when she was 10 years old. Then there was a completely different upbringing. This is the first thing. Secondly, after her father died in 2003, she stopped communicating with us. Her husband is also a journalist. We worked together in several media outlets. I do not deny any of this. Moreover, in the early 1990s, she also wore an embroidered shirt and spoke Ukrainian. She even answered questions in Ukrainian when asked in Russian, so she had it all.

In 2004, there was a turning point, and she stopped communicating with us. Starting in 2008, when she began to write her live magazine Varyag, we realized that she was just following the money, becoming a propagandist, working for Russia. At first it was strange, we tried to explain something, but then I realized that there was no need to explain anything, you just have to do your own thing.

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Photo: Intent/Natalia Dovbysh

I told everyone that we don't communicate. Apart from the fact that she is my father's daughter by blood, we have nothing in common. In 2013, when the Maidan started, we mutually blocked each other on all social media because she started to use my name in her posts. Of course, the worst part is that she uses my father's name, taking his phrases out of context, using them to support what she was promoting.

Then I got tired of it. I offered her to take a DNA test publicly, saying that I doubted that we had the same father. Of course, this tore her to pieces, and we mutually blocked each other. Now, as I understand it, she writes much less about all this because there is an article now. Given that she didn't go to Russia, she's on her way to the SBU. Of course, it's sad that this is happening. But, again, parents are not responsible for their children, and children are not obliged to imitate their parents either. She is what she is, I am what I am, each of us is doing our own thing.

Марія Литянська