Acelebrity among Ukrainian writers and highly ranked in the national pantheon, Leonid Pervomais’kyi defies classification.

His critics re­peatedly emphasized his unique capacity to change and grow. A So­viet Ukrainian romantic of socialist convictions and proletarian ori­entation in his early work, he had turned to classic poetry—which one of his Western critics dubbed “hermetic” and a Ukrainian one “ontological”—by the end of his career.¹

Two idiosyncratic features constantly informed Pervomais’kyi’s work.

Second, for Pervomais’kyi, being a poet signified reviving and recording voices of the victimized, raped, humiliated, oppressed, imprisoned, silenced, and murdered. In a story Pervomais’kyi wrote at age sixteen, an autobiographi­cal eight-year-old Jewish child who has just witnessed a pogrom and the rape of his sister fills his mouth with water and sprinkles it on his sister’s face to bring her back to consciousness—and to make sure she regains her ability to speak. Metaphorically, this is what Pervomais’kyi did throughout his literary career: he helped the victims of violence speak up, and he made their voices heard through his poetry and prose.

Always concerned with the voice of the speechless, Pervomais’kyi was silent about himself. His biography has never been written. His entire prewar archive was lost, except for perhaps one manuscript saved by a friend.² Aware of the KGB surveillance, he was always on the alert in his postwar correspondence, which has been published only partially and without adequate commentary. What is known about Pervomais’kyi’s life is meager—entire periods of his ca­reer, for example, the 1930s and the 1960s, remain a mystery. Almost nothing is known about his attitude toward the Ukrainian national revival under Petro She­lest or the persecution of national-minded dissidents under Volodymyr Shcher- byts’kyi. There were (and still are) dozens of people who knew Pervomais’kyi personally between the 1940s and the 1970s, but they all agree that he almost never spoke about himself and shrug their shoulders when asked about his per­sonal life. His short autobiography provides no information on his life after 1934, which is particularly puzzling given that he wrote it in 1958.³ People who knew him in the last decades of his life recall his sense of self, sobriety, and stoic silence—hardly enough to reconstruct his attitude, for example, to the persecu­tions against nationally conscious Ukrainian thinkers, to the Six Days’ War much discussed in the contemporary Ukrainian media, or to his literary detrac­tors, rivals, and friends. This makes research of his career and identity particu­larly daunting.

Pervomais’kyi’s personal documents are located in three government ar­chives in Moscow and Kyiv, some of them not in his personal collections, but a significant part, unpublished, are either privately held and not known to scholars or in the possession of Sergei Parkhomovsky, his grandson living in Austria, and out of reach for scholars.⁴The most important part of Pervomais’kyi’s epistolary legacy, his letters to Sava Iosypovych Holovanivs’kyi, a Ukrainian poet of Jewish descent, are in the possession of the Holovanivs’kyi family and are unavailable. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that Pervomais’kyi’s early writings on Jewish themes—including novels, short stories, journalism, and plays—have not been published since 1930, have never made it into his collected writings, and can be found only in the special book depositories of literary archives, not in the libraries. Some of his writings on Jewish themes that were partially reprinted were thoroughly purged of their Jewish substance and, should one want to make sense of them, need to be compared with the rare, original publications of the 1920s. Based on the pool of available sources, both published and archival, this chapter pursues a threefold task. It focuses on the way Pervomais’kyi con­structed his dual Ukrainian-Jewish identity in his prose and poetry, sometimes consciously imitating Heine’s toying with his dual German-Jewish identity; it reconstructs briefly Pervomais’kyi’s life as a Ukrainian literary figure of Jewish descent; and it analyzes how the Jewish themes and imagery in Pervomais’kyi’s early work morphed into something more universalistic, without losing its Ukrainian-Jewish ingredient.

Pervomais’kyi tended to transcend the cultural and national, the religious and gender, and the class and ideological borders that in most cases separate the broadly interpreted “colony” from the no less broadly understood “metropolis.” His stance in most cases is best depicted and easily recognizable as anticolonial­ist, but one should keep in mind that Pervomais’kyi would reject this definition as ideologically, geographically, or ethnically based and therefore wrong.