To Criticize the Critic

Kernerenko had little success among his contemporary readers. It could hardly be otherwise. He entered the Ukrainian literary scene with his populist, didactic, and sentimental verse when leading Ukrainian writers, and especially critics, rejected populism, didactics, and sentimentalism.

There were additional circumstances complicating his encounter with his readers. Because of the inclement censorship, it took Kernerenko’s nationally oriented verse some fifteen years to make its way into the Ukrainian press. Meanwhile the publication of his poems imbued with folk eroticism made him an easy target for the literary adepts of social positivism and utilitarianism. The lifting of the ban on Ukrainian publications in 1905, which opened the pages of the newly established Ukrainian periodicals to previously unpublished Kerne- renko texts, could not save him from critical attacks, yet it certainly allowed his critics to revisit the received perception of the poet.

In the 1890s, hardly aware of possible attacks against him, Kernerenko unin­tentionally triggered the sharp criticism of Pavlo Hrabovs’kyi (1864-1902), one of the democratically oriented nineteenth-century Ukrainian poets. Hrabovs’kyi’s only reflection on Kernerenko was his famous pamphlet “Pro tvorchist’ poety- chnu” (On Poetic Creativity, 1896), which has since become a manifesto of the social trend in Ukrainian poetry. Hrabovs’kyi penned it after having read a re­view of Kernerenko’s collection Vdosuzhyi chas (In the Time of Leisure). The review was signed “M.K.,” most likely penned by Mykhailo Komarov; it ap­peared in the Odessa-based journal Po moriu i sushe (By Sea and Land). Hra­bovs’kyi was not personally familiar with Kernerenko’s poetry, nor did he know the poet: in his critical essay he did not quote a single line of Kernerenko, relying solely on Mykhailo Komarov’s review.⁶²

It is even more certain that Kernerenko’s Jewish origins were unknown to Hrabovs’kyi, whose philosemitic stance has not gone unnoticed in twentieth­century Ukrainian thought. But the fact that his essay targeted Kernerenko, whom Hrabovs’kyi apparently judged solely on the basis of a negative review, is of particular importance. Mykhailo Komarov’s review, later reprinted in the Galician bimonthly Zoria, singled out Kernerenko as an inept author of weak verse, in which poor poetic motifs were almost entirely limited to erotic coquetry (horobtsiuvannia) and in which “limpy” rhymes and lengthy nonsensical plots revealed nothing but the poet’s graphomania.⁶³ Indeed, Kernerenko was neither a first-class poet nor an influential thinker. But one has to keep in mind that Kernerenko served as a pretext for Hrabovs’kyi’s ars poetica pondering rather than as the immediate target of his critique.

Ironically, Hrabovs’kyi used Kernerenko as a paragon of one of the most egregious versions of what he himself considered a purely aesthetic and antiso­cial turn-of-the-century trend, “art for art’s sake.” Hrabovs’kyi associated this trend with Kernerenko, basing his critique on unshakable positivistic grounds.

Not knowing anything about Kernerenko’s attempt to build bridges between Ukrainian and Jewish cultures, Hrabovs’kyi wrongly suggested that Kerne- renko, as well as all poets who stand for “art for art’s sake,” failed to show the reader “the way to follow.” His poetic concoction had nothing to do with the genuine goal set before the poet, which Hrabovs’kyi defined as “the struggle against universal falsehood.” Ignoring Kernerenko’s defense of the Ukrainian cause and of colonial Ukrainian culture, Hrabovs’kyi argued that his verse was not a “brave voice for all the oppressed and slandered.” Kernerenko did not cor­respond to a positivistic (that is, the only trustworthy) vision of poetic utility and therefore deserved nothing but admonition. Hrabovs’kyi defined Kernerenko’s alleged “art for art’s sake” as vociferous tendentiousness, the satiated landlord’s whim, and negligence toward contemporary empiric reality. The more Ukrai­nian poets educated themselves and turned their attention toward contemporary events, claimed Hrabovs’kyi, the less the chances for such collections as Ker- nerenko’s to emerge on the Ukrainian literary landscape.

Once his socially and politically sharpened poetry on Ukrainian and Jewish themes and his translations appeared in Ukrainian periodicals, and especially af­ter the publication of what is presumably his last collection, Menty natkhnennia (Moments of Inspiration, 1910), the reviews of Kernerenko’s poetry became more balanced.

With his Nietzschean pamphlets firm in hand, Ievshan criticized Kernerenko (among other representatives of the “old” poetic school) for blindly imitating the old-fashioned Ukrainian romantics. The sarcastic Ievshan did not spare even the most talented contemporaries from his sharp critique. No wonder he argued that Kernerenko, one of the elders, did not even attempt to alter their dead stereo- types.⁶⁶ Serhii Iefremov, a prominent literary historian, was also quite skeptical of Kernerenko’s talents. In his review of Kernerenko’s Moments of Inspiration for the Kiev daily Rada, he argued that inspiration “is exactly what is lacking in Mr. Kernerenko’s book” and that there was no reason for publishing those epigone love verses. Amazingly, Iefremov, who was usually quite sensitive to Jewish issues, did not see in Kernerenko anything worth mentioning except his erotic verse.⁶⁷

In contrast, Khrystia Alchevs’ka, herself a Ukrainian poet, focused above all on Kernerenko’s Ukrainian-Jewish stance—therefore hers was perhaps the most positive review of his poetry. Reviewing Kernerenko for the influential Ukrains’ka khata, the mouthpiece of Ukrainian modernism, she called the poet from Huliai-pole a “nice and generous person” whose verse is imbued with “dramatic observations and philosophic ponderings” and “marked by poetic tal­ent.” She suggested that the antisemitic minded Ukrainian patriots should “look through the book by Hryts’ko Kernerenko.

Shapoval, whose articles were dubbed “the pinnacle of contemporary Ukrai­nian journalism,” pointed to the centrality of “Ukrainian patriotic sympathies” in Kernerenko’s poetry, stressed how unusual a Jew with Ukrainian sympathies was in the early 1900s, and lamented that Kernerenko’s verse did not allow one to trace the evolution of his “Ukrainian identity.” It was particularly crucial, ar­gued Shapoval, that Kernerenko managed to overcome the barriers of faith and entirely identify with Ukraine and the Ukrainians. Shapoval did not hesitate to underscore the major paradox of the phenomenon of Kernerenko, centered in the choice of language, by no means trivial: “To be brief: why did Kernerenko write in Ukrainian? Given Ukraine’s situation, he could have easily written in the ‘cultural language,’ that is to say, in Russian. Certainly, he could have. But his Ukrainian aesthetic and psychological element had its upper hand over the ‘cul­ture,’ casting his humanistic ethical convictions into the Ukrainian mold.”⁶⁹ De­spite his emphasis on Kernerenko’s Ukrainian-Jewish aspects, Shapoval found it crucial to distinguish between Kernerenko’s praiseworthy civil stance and his artistic qualities, which left much to be desired. His opinion, however, was not supported by Bohdan Lepkyi, the editor of the Ukrainian poetic anthology Strings, who emphasized that Kernerenko’s verse manifests a high level “literary culture.”⁷⁰

Thus, Kernerenko’s deliberate deviation from the empire-oriented Russian- Jewish acculturation trend and his Ukrainian cultural “schism” noticed by Alchevs’ka and Shapoval shaped one of the features of the rising Ukrainian-Jew- ish literary tradition. What Hrabovs’kyi did not like in Kernerenko was exactly the feature that a quarter of a century later a number of Ukrainian poets of Jew­ish descent, such as Leonid Pervomais’kyi, independently and perhaps without any knowledge of the “Hrabovs’kyi—Kernerenko” case, began to develop and cherish.