FROM THE PUBLISHER In the 1950s-60s, during the period of post-Stalinist spiritual thaw, three plays appeared in Ukraine that made more or less an attempt to expose the crimes of the Soviet government. These were: Wings by O. Korneychuk (1954), Silence is Forbidden by M. Vingranovsky (1955), and At the Bottom of the Sea by M. Rudenko (1960). Around the same time in Moscow, there appeared The Thaw by I. Ehrenburg, Not by Bread Alone by V. Dudintsev, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by A. Solzhenitsyn. None of these works were ideologically safe at the time; they all posed a threat. They managed to crack the armor of imposed ideological dogmas. Perhaps the least daring of them was Wings by O. Korneychuk. Even so, it still depicted, albeit fragmentarily, how a person could become a victim of repression by the “organs” (Soviet security agencies). Although Wings was destroyed by the publishing house Molodaya Gvardiya, it “found its way to the people.” But Silence is Forbidden had an even more tragic history. Mykola Vingranovsky was forced to “voluntarily renounce” the work with a cynical farewell: “Good luck to you!” As a result, the play was removed from the literary process. Later, after returning from Russia, the author destroyed his manuscript. Only by chance did an article titled Create Songs, Poets! appear on the front page of the student newspaper Komsomolets of Poltava, mentioning Vingranovsky’s planned play Silence is Forbidden. However, when the author brought the manuscript to the Soviet Writer publishing house, he was told: “You are young, you have everything ahead of you!” Initially, the play was accepted, but later it was withdrawn from publication, and the author was “written off.” The deeply ingrained and burdensome “parent-child” complex creates the greatest tragedy in M. Rudenko’s play. And in this, it seems to us, lies its great artistic power. For Mykola Luhovyi, the protagonist of the drama, it was clear that the crimes of the Stalinist era must be punished. However, he also realized that there were no conditions for this just act yet. Confronting the dead wall of silence, he had to perish. This, in some way, mirrors the fate of the play’s author himself. Isn’t his fate also tragic? The author of At the Bottom of the Sea staked his life for truth and justice. Mykola Rudenko endured the torture chambers of the Gulag, suffered exile, and broke through the walls of totalitarian oppression, just like his characters. Similarly, with his feelings and soul, he declared the necessity of punishing the crimes of Stalinism. The Ukrainian Helsinki Group, which emerged after the truth about the Holodomor of 1933 was revealed, was born in the same struggle. Apart from Mykola Rudenko, this movement included figures such as Petro Hryhorenko, Oles Berdnyk, Mykola Rud, Vyacheslav Chornovil, Vasyl Stus, Oleksa Tykhyi, Levko Lukianenko, the Horyn brothers, Yuriy Shukhevych, Yuriy Badzo, and others. A word of truth emerged, which the imperial communist system feared so much. And so, its collapse began. At the Bottom of the Sea is just as much an indictment of the communist regime as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Unfortunately, we have not yet reached the point of passing historical verdicts on the executioners who shot, tortured, and murdered the best of the best, dragging them into their nameless lair… The abyss of the past. You judge them strictly. Perhaps even more harshly than they deserve. Because you judge them not from the standpoint of where they came from, but from where you have arrived. Their weary eyes saw suffering that you could not even imagine… And once again, the stories begin—of the years of famine and devastation, of how your fellow countrymen threw themselves onto the embrasures of enemy pillboxes. You are deeply troubled by the persistent doubt in the loyalty to great ideals. You lie awake at night, tormented. And in your sleep, you cry out: — It’s not true, not true! And in the morning, clenching your teeth, you pound your fists into the unknown, trying to break through to the truth. Because no pretense of truth satisfies you… It is difficult to shake off the burden of suffering and the bitter experience shaped in ways incomprehensible to you, filled with pain and joys. Could you truly understand with your heart, with your own blood, what it means to survive on one hundred grams of bread per day? Born of harsh circumstances, doubts drove Mykola, the protagonist of At the Bottom of the Sea, to death. But there was no other way out for him. His path was the path of an entire generation that believed, adapted, renewed itself, and gained insight. And they paid dearly for that insight. Mykola Rudenko and his generation wanted to believe that in new novels and plays, there would be no place for such tragic figures as Mykola and his mother from At the Bottom of the Sea. But the past few years have shown that in real life, in today’s Ukraine, they still exist. This was the reason why At the Bottom of the Sea was never staged again, was never published, and why its author, an unyielding truth-seeker, continues to suffer severe repression even today. Ukrainian Publishing House “Smoloskyp” Named after V. Symonenko