From the Circus to the Capital

Kharkiv was the next and most significant stop in Raia’s itinerary. Again, not much is known about the reasons for her move, except for what can be gleaned from a brief essay by her daughter, her own autobiographic poetry, and Iurii Smolych’s testimony.

Although one should treat Smolych’s account with caution, it may contain evidence ofTroianker’s self-perception. She seemed to be telling her story to Smolych with the intention of inventing her own poetic beginnings. According to her daughter’s memoir, her first poems were entitled “In the Menagerie,” “The Tamer of Tigers,” and “To the Unforgettable Leonid Jordani.” (The orig­inal texts of the first two were lost, and the last one was published as “Recollec­tion.”) Troianker dedicated these texts to her circus experience, not to Sosiura. Yet she was right in suggesting a different point of departure for her poetic ca­reer. Whoever Jordani was, an Italian or a Jew, he spoke and wrote in Russian, whereas Raia’s first poetic experiments were in Ukrainian. Jordani helped her to come to grips with her bodily ego, but her poetic ego she found elsewhere.

Even without Troianker’s confessions one could have identified Volodymyr Sosiura, a revolutionary romantic poet, as one of the spiritual mentors from whom she learned to express herself poetically.

After an abrupt romance with Volodymyr Sosiura, who may have been the father of Troianker’s only child, in the mid-1920s, the seventeen-year-old Troi- anker fell in love with and soon married Onoprii Turhan (Rus.: Onufrii Turgan), an Uman literary critic of proletarian orientation, an active member of the Pluh (Plough) literary group uniting writers of “village” themes, and an author of short stories, poems, and feuilletons in the Ukrainian press.¹⁸ Soon she gave birth to a daughter, which scandalized her parents. The old Troiankers could not forgive the fact that their daughter cut herself off from family tradition. For them, as well as for many other observant Jewish families who preserved in their memories heartbreaking stories of Cossacks victimizing Jews, marrying out in general and marrying into a Ukrainian family was metaphysical treason and a personal catastrophe.

For the Troiankers, if we follow Raia’s own account, the timid and shy Ono- prii Turhan was no better than the antisemitic Cossacks who slaughtered the Uman Jewish population in the wake of the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising and once again a hundred years later during the Haidamak rebellion led by Honta and Za­lizniak.

My father has banished and cursed me

For my child has been born from a goy,

He has told, may the earth fall through

Under both of us, my Olenka.

My dad, he is as old

As the yellowed folios of the Talmud,

He cries, “Oy, for my daughter’s sin

People will mock me!”

“Oh my cursed, my cursed girl,

There were not enough Jews for her!”

Tears are in his eyes,

And in his beard, silver as hoarfrost.¹⁹

Troianker was by far not the first to undergo this conflict, familiar to hun­dreds—if not thousands—of East European Jewish families in the early twenti­eth century. Statistically, Jewish mixed marriages were skyrocketing in the 1920s and became a common phenomenon.²⁰ Raia’s was one among many. Yet she was the first to portray the impact of an exogamic marriage between a Jew and a Ukrainian with the precision of a reporter, the ingeniousness of a playwright, and the sincerity of a Ukrainian poet.

Indeed, as Marcus Moseley argues, autobiographical narrative can hardly serve as an accurate source for an author’s life, because it reflects the appropria­tion of other autobiographical patterns that the author read elsewhere.²¹ Most likely Troianker knew Sholem Aleykhem’s Tevye (The Milkman), which por­trayed a similar family tragedy. If so, Troianker as a reader significantly reworks Sholem Aleichem’s pattern: instead of the perspective of pater familias, she of­fers a female take on it.

In 1924, the Soviets decided to move the Ukrainian capital from Kyiv, which constantly reminded them of the nationalist-minded and conspicuously bour­geois Central Rada and the Directory, to the proletarian and ideologically pris­tine Kharkiv, the town where the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, Ivan Kulyk among them, had established their headquarters in the very first year of the revolution. In the mid-1920s, the transfer of the capital transformed Kharkiv into a cultur­ally and artistically blossoming town. Here Les' Kurbas fought for his innovative aesthetics on the stage of his Berezil Theater, transferred in 1925 from Kyiv, cre­ating his dazzling versions of plays by Mykola Kulish.²² Here the new proletar­ian spectators in workers' clubs laughed at the hilarious Jolly Proletarian The­ater's (Veselyi Proletar) satirical performances, and Kharkiv children applauded the shows at the Children's Theater, slowly getting accustomed to the new Ukrainian-language repertoire.

In the realm of belles lettres, the Blakytnyi Literary House and the newly erected writers' Slovo House dominated the scene. Part of the Soviet-style cen­tralized apparatus and an anticipation of the future Union of Writers, the Slovo House placed literary figures in one big apartment building. It hosted writers of various origins, most prominently Jews and Ukrainians, such as Mykola Bazhan, Pavlo Tychyna, Itsik Fefer, Ezra Fininberg, Mykola Khvyl'ovyi, Dovid Gof- shteyn, Ivan Kulyk, Leyb Kvitko, Les' Kurbas, Leonid Pervomais'kyi, Valer'ian Polishchuk, Iurii Smolych, and Volodymyr Sosiura, and the literary critics Abram Leites, Mykhailo Dolengo, and Volodymyr Koriak.²⁴ This “proximity” of Ukrainian and Jewish writers, critics, and poets generated a transethnic coop­eration among them: Holovanivs'kyi, Pervomais'kyi, Sosiura, and Kvitko dis­cussed freshly written poetry together; Fininberg read out loud the poetry of Pavlo Tychyna; Kvitko discussed with his Ukrainian colleagues the contents of his Yiddish collection of Ukrainian tales; Kvitko and Feldman worked on their first Yiddish anthology of Ukrainian prose; Teren' Masenko and Kulyk trans­lated Kvitko into Ukrainian; and Kulyk negotiated with the visiting Der Nister the translation into Yiddish of Kulyk's anonymously published Pryhody Vasylia Rolenka (The Adventures of Vasyl' Rolenko, 1929).²⁵

At the writers disposal was the Blakytnyi Literary House, a beautiful build­ing in the Ukrainian baroque style, the very epicenter of Ukrainian cultural life associated with the “golden age” of the Ukrainian renaissance: it was here that almost all of the more or less important literary debates about the fate of Ukrai­nian culture took place.²⁶ Here, as Teren' Masenko recalled, Ukrainian writers met with Henri Barbusse, Johannes Becher, Maxim Gorky, Anatolii Luna­charsky, and Vladimir Maiakovsky.²⁷ Kharkiv brought together literary figures from a variety of trends, for example, Avanhard (Avant-Garde), Nova heneratsiia (New Generation), Pluh (Plough), Hart (Tempering), the VAPLITE (Vil'na Akademiia Proletars'koi Literatury; Free Academy of Proletarian Literature), and others.

Troianker adored Kharkiv, an embodiment of her urban utopian dreams. She witnessed its transformation from a provincial imperial town into a new so­cialist urban utopia. Astonished by Kharkiv's metamorphosis, the seventeen­year-old Leonid Pervomais'kyi exclaimed:

Oh, evening Kharkiv!

Oh, the tide of the workers' streets!

Oh, lights and cinema!

The wine of the fenced boulevards!

You are buzzing

Like a sweet

And fruitful bee-house!

You are burning,

Never to be extinguished.²⁸

Dovid Feldman, a Yiddish writer and coauthor of the acclaimed Yiddish anthol­ogy of the Ukrainian literature, dubbed Kharkiv “a mixture of Paris and Polon- noe.”²⁹ For Yiddish-speaking visitors from the United States and Europe, the city represented the cutting edge of Soviet construction. “Whoever knew Khar'kov before,” wrote the mystical-minded Yiddish writer Der Nister in his travelogue, “now does not recognize it.” Der Nister resorted to a Kabbalistic metaphor of the Creation, yesh mi-ayn, “everything from nothing,” portraying Kharkiv's remarkable transformation into a key city in the new culture: “And who wants to see a miracle—how from nothing everything is born—should come here.”³⁰

Perhaps the first Jewish image of the new postrevolutionary Kharkiv emerged in Ben-Yaakov (pseud.; real name—Kalman Zingman) utopian novel. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, Zingman established his Yiddish pub­lishing house in Kharkiv, celebrating the 1917 lifting of the tsarist ban on Yid­dish publications. In 1918, he published here his short Yiddish novel In der zukunft-shtot Edenya (In Eden, the Town of Future), depicting a brief visit of a Jewish statistician from Palestine to Kharkiv, the imaginary city of a utopian communist economy and a cosmopolitan Yiddish future.³¹ Edenya was intended to replace Theodore Herzl’s Zionist visionary Altneueland (1903) with a Yiddish- and Diaspora-based utopia. The tour through the new Kharkiv featured sky­scraper-hotels with Yiddish signs, top-notch bio laboratories with Jewish di­rectors, a Jewish opera house, and two streets named after the most prominent Yiddish classic writers, Mendele Moykher Sforim (1835 -1917) and Isaac Ley- bush Peretz (1851-1915). Kharkiv’s emancipated Yiddish coexisted peacefully with the postcolonial Ukrainian. There were no traces of the imperial Russian presence. In Zingman’s book, the blossoming of Ukrainian paralleled that of Yiddish. A monument to Taras Shevchenko featured the golden inscription “The Prophet of Ukraine.” Self-governing Ukrainian and Yiddish communal institutions (kehile) ran and ruled the town as a joint venture. Apparently this Kharkiv-based utopia, mediated by the Ukrainian poet Valer’ian Polishchuk, shaped the futuristic and utopian urban metaphors so prominent in Troianker’s first poetry collection.

Back from his Uman voyage and most likely annoyed by the passionate Troianker, Sosiura introduced her to his friend, neighbor, and coauthor, Va- ler’ian Polishchuk (1897-1937), who was the founder of the Hrono group in Kyiv and the literary journal Shliakhy mystetstva in Kharkiv (together with Khvyl’ovyi and Koriak), and who had became one of the most active harbingers of the Europeanization of the Ukrainian literature.³² Although the details of their encounter are not known, one may surmise that Troianker cleaved to Pol­ishchuk for a number of reasons. The son of a destitute Ukrainian peasant fam­ily, Polishchuk, after years of intensive self-training, became an independent thinker, a superb interpreter of European poetry, a connoisseur of French litera­ture, and a remarkably prolific Ukrainian poet and writer (he planned to publish a ten-volume edition of his selected writings by 1930). Polishchuk participated in the activities of the Pluh and established the Avanhard literary group, which Troianker joined, or possibly cofounded, in the mid-1920.

Growing into a poet under the impact of Whitman, Verhaeren, and the French poets of the Abbey group, Polishchuk gained fame as one of the leading avant-guardist Ukrainian writers close to Marinetti and Maiakovsky. A Western­ized polemicist, Polishchuk strongly believed that the rapidly approaching utopian future would put an end to Ukrainian colonial situation. He had been consistently integrating Ukrainian into European, long before Khvyl’ovyi traced a Europeanizing vector for Ukrainian culture. A dazzling communist utopi­anism deeply impressed but did not deceive Polishchuk. In the wake of the first five-year plan he became indignant with one of the early anti-intelligentsia public trials, stigmatizing them as “social sadism.” Nor was the anti-imperial minded Polishchuk misled by the faceless mass enthusiasm. His aversion to so­cial demagogy was based on his deep sympathy toward the individual, the spe­cific, and the personal, something that Troianker could appreciate. Polishchuk’s uniqueness was not unnoticed by his contemporaries. “A lonely heretic who opposes any cliches,” is what the influential Marxist critic of Jewish origin Volodymyr Koriak called him. “His vast erudition excited me,” wrote Sosiura.³³

Sosiura was well aware of what he was doing when he introduced Troianker to Polishchuk: among his other talents, Polishchuk was one of the most hand­some young men in Kharkiv. His bright blue eyes, his shock of golden hair, his fine features, and his expressive mouth were firmly embedded in the memories of Ukrainian literati, especially among the women.³⁴ In addition to Polishchuk’s endorsement of social utopianism, Troianker found Polishchuk an attractive companion for two further reasons: his consistent philosemitism and his bizarre sexuality.³⁵ Sometimes Polishchyk was incapable of differentiating between the two. In 1921-22 Polishchuk settled down in Kharkiv, were he met two Jewish girls, the sisters Olena-Rachel (lolon’ka) and Lida (Lichka) Konukhes, and fell in love with both. The sisters were students at the Kharkiv Institute of People’s Education (Instytut narodnoi osvity), where Troianker also enrolled a couple of years later. Polishchuk’s passion toward Rachel and Lida was reciprocated. Po­lishchuk celebrated his menage a trois publicly and privately.³⁶

Among other things, the Konukhes sisters opened up the world of Judaic tradition to Valer’ian, who was always ready for a vertiginous intellectual en­deavor. One can find some remarkable rumination on Talmudic quotations in his private correspondence with one or both sisters. Ironically, when signing the let­ters, he dubbed himself Mishe-Namu, a Jewish name perhaps derivative of Moshe-Nahum. It is not impossible that the Konukhes sisters, who most likely spoke Yiddish, also familiarized Polishchuk, susceptible to local urban myths, with Ben-Yaakov’s Edenya, the technocratic pathos of which is reflected and re­jected in Polishchuk’s erotic utopia. Probably under the intellectual impact of the sisters Konukhes Polishchuk began rewriting biblical stories, emphasizing the sexual impetus of the personages as the driving force of the action. Thus, for example, in the short story “Liubov Amana” (The Love of Aman), he rewrote the whole book of Esther, replacing Haman’s deep hatred for Mordechai and the Jewish people with Haman’s unbridled lust and passion for Esther, the Jewish queen. In the poem “Onan,” Polishchuk undertook a similar attempt to craft an apocryphal biblical myth, celebrating one of the sexual perversions as a protest against the laws of nature.³⁷

It seems likely that turning somatic metaphors into a key poetic device was but another idea Troianker borrowed from Polishchuk. Sometime around 1920 Polishchuk penned his utopian fantasy novel Na shliakhu do velykoho maibut- nioho (Toward the Great Future), which remains unpublished. In it, Polishchuk wondered why human beings have crafted a wide array of social, technocratic, political, artistic, and other utopias but did not figure out the simplest one: so­matic. In his imaginary future, clothes are eliminated as redundant: “People have long thrown off the unnecessary convention of clothes.”³⁸ Likewise, humans had rejected psychology as a burdensome luxury of the hypocritical past. They did not conceal their sexual desires. On the contrary, they externalized the inti­macy of sex, a key moment of their revolutionary sense of beauty.

Perhaps Troianker’s own poetic sensuousness made her so susceptible to Po­lishchuk’s ideas. At any rate it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate her per­sonal and poetic sensuousness, her body-centered poetic universe, and her con­sistent eroticism, on the one hand, and Polishchuk’s sexual utopianism, on the other. Troianker was not the only one for whom Polishchuk embodied these per­sonal and artistic qualities, but other contemporaries were not particularly en­thusiastic about them. For example, Polishchuk’s physical attractiveness and his iconoclastic vision of sexuality left a deep impression on a young Kharkiv-based stenographer Oksana Chykalenko, who recalled almost eighty years later: “I re­member Valer’ian Polishchuk: handsome, with his luxurious puffy light hair. He was not particularly tall. He pushed me off. He talked too freely, precisely on erotic theme. We got together once, two or three friends of mine and Polishchuk. And he started to tell us that people should be like cats, and began comparing people with cats. When a cat wants something, it climbs to the roof and expresses its feelings, meowing. Why are people forbidden to do that? People should have an opportunity to speak out their desires like a cat on a roof.”³⁹

Although the archive of the Avanhard group was thoroughly destroyed by the NKVD in the early 1940s, several details underscore the significance of the encounter between two of its founders. Troianker apparently was one of the three most active members of this small, cosmopolitan, and constructivist liter­ary group that revolved around Polishchuk and opposed other literary groups of proletarian origin: she signed the group’s manifesto and was even reported as one of its founders.⁴⁰ Hryhorii Kostiuk, a keen observer and participant in Kharkiv literary life, portrayed the Avanhard as “Polishchuk’s group of con­structivists. It comprised, as I remember, three literary individuals: Valer’ian Polishchuk himself; the young poet Raisa Troianker, famous for her predomi­nantly unpublished poems on sexual themes; and the then-beginner, absolutely unknown, and only later, after the war, acclaimed poet and playwright Oleksandr Levada.”⁴¹ Troianker published her first poetry—both in Ukrainian and in Russian—in Polishchuk’s literary almanac Avanhard, which according to the founder, “started the struggle for a genuine contemporary Europeanism.”⁴²

Perhaps Polishchuk advised Troianker to speak in her own voice, that of a young woman fascinated by her past, her love, and her new urban environment: Polishchuk underscored a number of times how significant feminine voices were in literature and history. He also seemed to be preoccupied—unlike his impe­rial-minded contemporaries—with the ethnic minority issues in literature that so much disturbed the young Troianker. Their contemporaries did not overlook Troianker’s indebtedness to Polishchuk. One critic argued that one of the best, if not the best, ofTroianker’s overtly erotic poems “Trava pryvialena” was marked with Polishchuk’s impact, and another one remembered her in the context of Polishchuk.⁴³

In Kharkiv, Troianker not only joined the Avanhard, but also enrolled in KhINO, the Kharkiv Institute of People’s Education, which trained teachers for adult learning institutions, and published her verse. Troianker’s first collection of poetry, Poviri (Inundation), was published by the Pluzhanyn Publishing House, a fact that attests to her continuous association with the village writers’ milieu. Three motifs shaped this collection: the Jewish past, eros, and, to a much lesser degree, communist utopianism. They were represented unevenly in the book: eight poems were on love, and there were three each on Jewish and urban prole­tarian themes. The sequence of poems seems to have been thoroughly premedi­tated—Jewish and communist themes introduce and close the collection; erotic themes take the lion’s share of the book.

Although almost all of Troianker’s poems were permeated with a confes­sional intimacy, her voice was manifested best in her crafty, provocative, and in­novative erotic poems, which dovetailed eroticism with nature and, in particular, with Ukrainian autumn landscapes. Her heroine’s encounter with a partner oc­curred in the fields, right after the harvest season, when rich grain crops shaped memories of the summer and the orange shades of the foliage designated the im­minent fall. Sometimes Troianker assimilated her male images into the imagery of rural Ukrainian autumn. She implicitly equated golden love, golden fall, and golden Ukraine. She seems to have transgendered Ukraine, which is feminine in Slavic languages, by associating it with masculine poetic metaphors. If so, it im­plies Troianker was going against the colonial perception of Ukraine as a beauti­ful, docile, and subservient female loyal to her powerful yet changeable male lover. Yet Troianker, with one exception, did not bring this idea to completion.

While she linked the Ukrainian yellow autumn with romance, the end of the romantic affair came to be associated with winter. The new season epitomized the new status of Troianker’s alter ego: no more a shtetl girl prone to erotic ad­venture, she underwent a transformation and became an urban-based mother. This weakened Troianker’s ties with the village-centered Pluh and simultane­ously strengthened her connections with the urban-focused and highly intellec­tual Avanhard. A well-read young woman in search of a literary milieu, Troianker was well equipped for this change. She impressed her most well-educated Ukrainian interlocutors. Iurii Smolych, who claimed to scorn Troianker for her bizarre private life yet nevertheless emphasized her fascinating intellectual gifts: “Raia was a peculiar phenomenon among women. Despite her young age (she had not even become a legal adult), she was a girl of unusual erudition: she knew literature very well, genuinely loved it, had a real taste for it, and knew how to differentiate between good and bad; when she was free of her erotic adventures, that is to say, from morning till night, she read a lot, and due to her extensive readings she could easily handle any problem of literature and arts, as well as of science. In particular she loved history and geography.”⁴⁴ The end of Troi­anker’s “poetic” fall manifested a new period in the life of her heroine, a fact that Troianker emphasized in her second book of poetry.

In 1930 the State Publishing House issued two thousand copies of Troi­anker’s second collection, Horyzont (Horizon).⁴⁵ The book comprised three parts, reflecting different periods of Troianker’s life, the most important themes of her verse, and various sets of images she crafted. In terms of genre, they cor­responded to the Jewish family chronicle, Ukrainian bucolic romance, and ur­ban lyrics. The first part is written in a poetic plus-que-parfait, Troianker’s per­sonal past perfect, and its Yiddish subtitle, “Olte und Inge” (Old and New), sets the tone by evoking a bygone shtetl.⁴⁶ Four poems taken from the previous col­lection were grouped together here and came to be associated with Troianker’s autobiographical day-before-yesterday. Predicting the inevitable catastrophe of the traditional Jewish town, Troianker included in this section the IosifUtkin- inspired poem on poor Haim, a tailor who lost his mind after his family of ten was murdered during a pogrom.⁴⁷

The fourteen poems of the second part, entitled “Dzvinke povitria” (Clear Air), introduced Troianker’s heroine, who discovers her talents as a mother, a poet, a lover, and a new female Faustus. Here Troianker’s eroticism was no less explicit than in her previous collection, yet it was not left unchallenged. The au­tobiographical images of a young mother caring for her child and a woman-poet ready to sell her talent to Mephistopheles made Troianker’s eroticism more nuanced and ambiguous. Since most of the biographical references reflect Troianker’s life before and immediately after her marriage to Turhan, one may surmise that this part of her book covered Troianker’s yesterday, or her most re­cent past.

The third part, “Moie siohodennia” (My Nowadays), consisted of six poems manifesting her today and tomorrow and dedicated to the poet’s encounter with a new industrial city. Troianker’s constructed her urban environment as simulta­neously realistic and utopian, resorting to the metaphors of contemporary pro­letarian poetry and to a futuristic vocabulary. Although Troianker’s utopian fu­ture was firmly rooted in her Jewish past, one should bear in mind that her second collection—with its new emphasis on urban culture, idiosyncratic to many Jewish writers of that period—differed significantly from her first.

A new urban dweller, Troianker substituted a booming socialist construction for her only too petty-bourgeois rural past. Yet urban motifs did not push aside Troianker’s engagement with the somatic. The concrete-and-glass bodies of the growing Kharkiv edifices came to replace the decayed body of the shtetl and the passionate yet suffering female body. She claimed to be ready to change the “sad walls for the fires of the proletarian suburbs.” She anticipated her vertiginous enthusiasm when she entered the classroom to teach robust and scary proletari­ans. Nothing was left of Troianker’s Ukrainian rural landscapes, her motley fall, or her idiosyncratic gloom. Under the decisive influence of Polishchuk, whose “Radio,” for example, celebrated the same promised land of technological progress, Troianker made a decisive step toward constructivist Avanhard poetics, switching to the urban poetry and focusing on her imaginary spacious room in a newly erected skyscraper.⁴⁸ In addition to her new urban metaphors, Troianker portrayed the organized left-minded youth, the optimistic-spirited intelli­gentsia, and the joyous new-world construction. She seems to have forgotten about her bitter memories and transformed her body imagery into the images of newly built social edifices. Social enthusiasm pushed away her orgiastic excite­ment. The individual body was transformed into the communally erected build­ings. Her universe became simple and straight.

Summing up her first twenty years, Troianker epitomized her new sensibil­ity in the last poem of her Horyzont collection. She claimed not to know “what a tear means,” rejected “the romanticism of an evening,” and came to scorn the colonial “drizzle of the fall” and “the question mark” at the end of a thought. The streets of her life, she argued, were “as obstinate as Mongolian streets.”⁴⁹ The third part of Troianker’s book dramatically moved away from the myths of the past into the utopia of the future, her new credo. Here is Troianker:

In a street, a movie theater, office, or at work

I dream of the great future city.

My personal anxieties seem chimerical

And the liberating-colorful distances emerge.

If someone shortsighted calls this a “utopia,”

I would scratch out his eyes,

For I am already hearing the clatter of the future.

For I am already reading the script of the upcoming.⁵⁰

This new utopianism notwithstanding, Troianker did not allow ideological cliches to suppress her spontaneous exaltation. The vision of the growing urban miracle mesmerized her, yet Troianker, perhaps not without Polishchuk’s ad­vice, never associated it with the class struggle, industrialization, or the shallow optimism of the party slogans of the first five-year plan. Although she did not ac­knowledge the utopianism of her dream, she still associated it with orgiastic pre­monitions, not with a real sense of the empirical reality.

Kharkiv literary critics, moderate Marxists at best and leftist preachers of class struggle at worst, noticed Troianker’s collections but misunderstood them. For some, Troianker’s poetry was a pretext to reflect on her allegedly outdated ethnic motifs, her purportedly unpolished form, her artificial family dramas, and her secondhand eroticism, bordering on the pornographic. For Marxist crit­ics in the 1920s, eros in poetry manifested either a tired decadent and harmful solipsism that challenged the optimism of a nationwide social construction or an individualistic immaturity that could be overcome by joining the ranks of the rosy-cheeked socialist workers. Iakiv Khomenko, for example, analyzed Troi- anker’s verse “My Dad Is Sad and Calm” in the context of the father-son di­chotomy. He emphasized the autobiographical character of this and other Jew- ish-themed Troianker poems but rejected Troianker’s portrayal of generational conflict as something that “does not have a vital social significance, above all be­cause causes behind this conflict have lost their topical interest.” The didactical and tired Khomenko underscored the lack of originality in all of Troianker’s writings, and her poetically informed sensual experience he found as bad as Akhmatova’s. A certain V.M., most likely Vasyl’ Mysyk (1907-83), a prominent poet “destined for a high flight,” was more benevolent. He noticed in passing some Jewish themes in Troianker, but spent most of his review rebuking the au­thor for overplaying “sexual experience.”⁵¹

Some of Troianker’s poems, written with “courage” and “naturalism,” trig­gered mixed emotions for the politically correct Mysyk, who did his best to sup­press his sympathy. Mysyk wished that Troianker would find her own indepen­dent voice, since he considered her Jewish and erotic themes as mediocre and petty-bourgeois as the Russian poetry of Sergei Esenin and the Ukrainian of Volodymyr Sosiura. Dmytro Zahul (1890 -1944), first a symbolist poet and later a revolutionary romantic, found Troianker a talented and promising poet with her characteristic “immediate sincerity and some freshness,” yet he sharply crit­icized the Poviri collection for its shameless eroticism, technical flows, petty- bourgeois taste, painful individualism, and bad language and grammar. Ivan Momot (1905 -31), perhaps one of the most talented young literary critics from the Molodniak group and later a member of VUSPP, in his review “Literary Routine,” quoted Troianker’s line “What are you singing, yellow mandolin?” and sarcastically concluded that Troianker’s mandolin does not know how to sing yet.⁵²

On the contrary, in a lengthy review entitled “The Live and the Dead in Ukrainian Poetry,” Iakiv Savchenko (1890-1937) saw a certain promise in Troianker’s first collection. From his viewpoint, Troianker’s small book was the­matically limited and stylistically naive; some of her poetry reminded him of a teenager’s notebook. And yet her openness, her instinctive kindness, and her for­mal dexterity attested to the professional liveliness of her poetry and her steady spiritual growth.⁵³ Others, such as the much-sought-after critic Mykhailo Dolengo (1890-1981), held Troianker in high esteem, placing her next to other realistic poets, such as Volodymyr Sosiura and Natalia Zabila. In his extensive re­view of new trends in Ukrainian poetry, written for the same Krytyka journal two months before Khomenko’s review appeared, Dolengo pointed to Troi­anker’s “motifs of Jewish everyday life presented in a revolutionary light,” briefly mentioned her “bohemian motifs,” and stressed that “surely the poetess has artistic talent.”⁵⁴

Yet almost nobody commented on Troianker’s urban utopianism, on her emancipating eroticism, or on her deep empathy toward the Ukrainian Jewish shtetl. Only the famous Ukrainian literary critic Stepan Kryzhanivs’kyi (1911 - 2002), though much later, made a clumsy attempt to assess the Troianker phe­nomenon, calling her “a Ukrainian Sappho,” as if Troianker had celebrated Les­bian love, which, as already mentioned, she never did.⁵⁵ Kryzhanivs’kyi was right, however, in his emphasis on Troianker’s unusual, if not pioneering, eroti­cism in Ukrainian literature. Since Jewish and erotic motifs dominate both of Troianker’s collections and convey her search for a Jewish-Ukrainian synthesis, they will be discussed momentarily.