Ukrainian Gods Analysis

Every resident of present Central and Eastern Europe has at least a basic understanding of communism, either from personal experience, or from history teachers and older relatives. But while the majority of Europe agrees that the Eastern Bloc’s socioeconomic system was fundamentally flawed, there are still many proponents of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. These advocates of the socialist state are the topic of the poem “Slavic gods” written by Andriy Bondar, a contemporary Ukrainian poet, who grew up in the Soviet Union. In this piece, Bondar depicts the lives of communism supporters a decade after the USSR’s dissolution. These “slavic gods”, as the writer calls them, are portrayed as social outcasts because of their unwillingness to accept …show more content…
Evidently, they are seniors because they are “breathing their last breaths” (7). This is further proved by their “inability / to deal with today’s climate” (8-9), where climate can be interpreted as both the weather and society’s way of thinking. What is interesting is that they are not only unable but also unwilling to change as they “are comfortably aware of their inability” (8). The next four lines leave no room for uncertainty – these people have lived the greater part of their lives under communism, and they are reminiscing about those times. “The good old days before Christ” (10) refers to Marxist-Leninist atheism, which was propagated in Eastern Bloc countries. Тhis line has some additional meanings – it signifies a distant period in the past, identifies that period with laws and oppression, and characterizes the present with freedom and salvation. The remaining lines relate to the fixed low prices and the complete predictability of the centrally planned economy – “when sausage was cheap yogurt cost 11 cents / televisions could be had on credit and there was total confidence / in the days to come” (11-13). The language in this verse emphasizes the strong attachment of the protagonists to this past