From the Ukrainian Autumn to the Polar Winter
In 1931 the Ukrainian period ofTroianker’s biography came to a halt, but without a brief discussion of her later itinerary, the whole picture of her literary career would lose its utopian essence.
In Leningrad, Il’ia Sadofiev and Raisa Troianker settled into Sadofiev’s luxurious apartment in the Vladimir Maia- kovsky Writers’ House. Such Russian literary celebrities as Ol’ga Berggol’ts, Konstantin Fedin, Vera Panova, Nikolai Tikhonov, and Mikhail Zoshchenko were among their neighbors. Raia befriended many, men among them, a fact that made Sadofiev burst with jealousy and rage, in most cases, unsubstantiated.99 Her easygoing character and his extraordinary self-conceit turned their marriage into a short-lived enterprise. Sadofiev envied Troianker’s popular success with the Leningrad literary milieu, and Troianker disapproved of Sadofiev’s disdain toward all those who surrounded and worshipped him. To keep Raia under control, Sadofiev resorted to physical abuse. Around 1934, Raia apparently fainted after one such beating.The accident, similar to her clash with Leonid Jordani, exceeded her patience. Family oppression, domestic violence, and continuous suspicion on Sad- ofiev’s part contrasted sharply with her own independence and kindness. She may have also learned that Sadofiev had an affair with their housemaid and had molested her ten-year-old daughter. Troianker divorced Sadofiev, abandoning her comfortable yet totally dependent life, and moved to Murmansk, a city beyond the Arctic Circle, sufficiently far away to check Sadofiev’s renewed advances. It is a bitter irony that Troianker’s self-emancipation, which started in the midst of the golden Ukrainian fall, ended up in the reign of white snows, almost literally embodying the itinerary of her lyrical heroine. Two of Troianker’s unpublished Russian-language poems from 1935 -36 were dedicated to Sad- ofiev, and a good many of Sadofiev’s poems epitomizing his crisis testify that the parting was painful for both sides.100
Perhaps in reflecting on her escape from Kharkiv to Leningrad to Murmansk, Troianker realized that it was a mixed blessing.
Starting from the early 1930s, the Kremlin launched a brutal campaign to suppress Ukrainian national revivalism. In 1931- 32, the state-orchestrated famine wiped out the midrank Ukrainian peasantry. The repression of the old cadre of the Ukrainian intelligentsia ushered in the annihilation of all those who supported or followed Ukrainization. As Oleh Ilnytzkyj observed, in the 1930s, the party “launched [a] campaign against Ukrainian culture itself.”101 The leading ideologist of national communism Skrypnyk and the far left poet and thinker Khvyl’ovyi committed suicide one after the other. Onoprii Turhan, Troianker’s husband and the legal father of her daughter, was arrested on falsified charges, sentenced, and later disappeared in the Gulag. Valer’ian Polishchuk, Troianker’s mentor and friend, also was arrested for allegedly plotting to murder Sergei Kirov, sentenced to ten years in the Gulag, and shot without a trial, along with other prominent leaders of the Ukrainian national renaissance. The same fate was shared by Oleksa Vlyz’ko and Iakiv Savchenko, and Hryhorii Kostiuk was arrested, sentenced and exiled. In 1937, Ivan Kulyk and his wife, Luciana Piontek, were arrested and shot. Dozens of Troianker’s interlocutors from the Blakytnyi House disappeared. Those who survived, such as Tychyna, paid a very heavy price for their physical survival, becoming servile rhapsodists of the regime.None of the critics who reviewed Troianker’s verse survived, except perhaps Vasyl’ Mysyk, who spent ten years in the Soviet Gulag and another three in a Nazi concentration camp. Volodymyr Sosiura, Troianker’s early passion, survived only because of the ironic fact that his staunch enemies, the leaders of the proletarian writers’ organization Kulyk and Mykytenko, placed him in a psychiatric clinic in 1933, making him invulnerable to the political purges.102 Given how close Troianker was to those who ended up in the Gulag, there was hardly any chance for her to survive had she stayed in Ukraine.
Besides, by the early 1930s, the debates over the revolutionary role of sex in the Soviet press and literature was over. The sanctified and governmentally controlled family—a new holy unit of the rising Soviet society—firmly replaced the emancipating and individualistic eros. This replacement was epitomized in the rising literature of socialist realism that expurgated eroticism once and for all.103 There was only one way to read the fact that there were almost no reviews of Troianker’s second book, Horyzont, published in 1930, in comparison with dozen reviews of her first one: one part of her readership was arrested, another was more concerned with the consequences of collectivization and the destruction of Ukrainian village life, and a third found Jewish, erotic, and futuristic themes out-of-date. Leaving Ukrainian geographic and cultural realms and moving far away to Murmansk was detrimental to Troianker’s poetic development, but it saved her life. In the early 1930s she published her translation of the Yiddish poetic tale “A Streetcar” by Leyb Kvitko—and disappeared from the Ukrainian horizon.104Life in Murmansk in the 1940s was no less dangerous than in Ukraine in the 1930s. In 1941, the Wehrmacht expected the northern advance to be a decisive military success. Nazi troops were supposed to capture the Transpolar region of the Soviet Union and after Murmansk rapidly move toward Leningrad to secure Nazi predominance along the Baltic Sea coast. But the Nazi advance was checked near the Verman River. Despite regular and fierce bombing, the Nazis failed to capture Murmansk, which by 1943 had an average of four bombs per day per person. Troianker had established herself as the leading Poliarnaia pravda journalist by the mid-1930s, six years before the war, and with the breakdown of the war she refused to evacuate to the hinterland, becoming a prolific war correspondent on the Karelia Front.
A former assistant to a circus tamer, Troianker hardly changed in her thirties.
To say that she was courageous is to miss the point. She was fearless to the point of recklessness. In July 1941, she realized that Sadofiev had refused to bring his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter from Staraia Russa, where she was sent for summer vacation, back to Leningrad. And Troianker knew that the Nazi advance brought the front very close to Staraia Russa. To save her daughter, Troianker traveled barefoot through and across the front lines some hundred kilometers, found her daughter digging trenches, and brought her back to Murmansk.105 Later she was reported to have gone to the front lines in a fancy sheepskin coat, sexy leather boots, and a charming knitted beret, and to have spent time among the numerous protagonists of her articles, poems, and humoristic feuilletons. A. Sinkliner, the military interpreter who illustrated his memoir with Troi- anker’s verse, which he knew from memory, wrote about the 104th Division: “Among Murmansk dwellers visiting the division was a miniature woman with her beret flirtatiously moved to the side. It was the Murmansk-based poet Raisa Troianker. During one of the meetings with the soldiers, she went out into the lawn were the soldiers were sitting and simply said: ‘I will read to you my poetry.’”106 Troianker’s courage was proverbial: a central Murmansk postwar newspaper that retold one of Troianker’s frontline reports dubbed her “fire- proof.”107In addition to her journalistic activities, Troianker was active as a public and literary figure. Antonina Shabaeva, a frontline war nurse and the heroine of one of Troianker’s war publications, recalled being in a Murmansk bomb shelter where Troianker made a public presentation dedicated to March 8, International Women’s Day: “I was tired, hungry, and cold. And then I entered the hall and suddenly saw a short and charming woman reciting poetry and speaking very nicely about us women. I forgot my tiredness and hunger.”108 Perhaps Irina Koltsova, who survived the war in Murmansk, articulated the feelings of many of Troianker’s fans, writing: “Raisa Troianker was our star, our love.
I was a schoolgirl then but I remember her very well. She often visited schools, pioneer camps, spoke to us children, and was a bright, beautiful person, a charming woman. When I was evacuated, somebody from Murmansk sent me her poem on a Jewish girl tortured in Kiev by the Nazis. Once I recited this poem at a party. Later people I did not know stopped me and asked me to recite again those verses on Luba from Kiev. They were Kievans.”109Troianker’s sole Russian collection, Surovaia lirika (The Stern Lyrics, 1942), fell short of her two Ukrainian books. Whereas Troianker’s Ukrainian verse is innovative, picturesque, and rich in imagery, her Russian poetry is imitative, charged with war propaganda and cliches, and based on a limited variety of images. In her Ukrainian poetry, Troianker successfully transformed Akhmatova’s erotic metaphors, yet she succumbed to Nikolai Gumilev’s military images in her Russian verse. One will search in vain for joyous eroticism, the gloomy Jewish past, or the utopian future in Troianker’s Russian compositions. The rattling Russian military supplanted her feminine Ukrainian imagery. The problem of her Russian verse was not that it was Russian but that it was imperial. Several of the poems that she penned in Russian while still in Kharkiv show that the switch to another language altered her perception of Ukrainian-Jewish reconciliation issues.110
Following the undeclared fashion for Gumilev established by the prewar generation of Moscow Institute of Literature and Philosophy poets, in her Russian poems Troianker turned the bellicose passions and military fatalism of Gumilev’s warriors into the enthusiasm and stoicism of her Soviet soldiers. Even more than to Gumilev, Troianker owes the “sternness” of her Russian lyrics to Rudyard Kipling, perhaps the most evident source of Gumilev’s colonialist imagery. Troianker’s The Stern Lyrics portrays rank-and-file soldiers defending Murmansk: a sailor, the master of northern seas; a signaler, never in despair; a hero-pilot and a border guard; a military hospital nurse; a blood donor; a submariner; and the average Murmansk dwellers who contribute to the victory.
Troianker’s new protagonists are imperial heroes who stepped out of wartime propaganda posters: they dream of Stalin and pledge themselves to Lenin. They protect the sleep of Soviet children and hate the abominable monstrous enemy. Epic warriors who know neither private life nor individual feelings, Troianker’s soldiers rally around sacred symbols of the Soviet motherland and the noble task of destroying the Nazi evil. They are part of a transformed neoromantic myth: submarine sailors fight new pirates “unknown even to Mayne Reid”; soldiers are “Soviet giants”; planes, “red-star birds.”111 All of them are stoics ready to sacrifice themselves for the common cause. Their worldview is best articulated in the military signaler’s proverbial “everything is calm on the line.” Troianker’s repetitive call for revenge, dubbed “a sacred word,” and a firm belief in the defeat of the enemy transformed her book into a poetic continuation of Il’ia Ehrenburg’s acclaimed antifascist pamphlets that were regularly published in Krasnaia zvezda and collected in the widely circulated three- volume edition The War.112 Troianker’s metaphor of the Nazi “blitzkrieg” turning into “blitz-crack” seems to be a good match to Ehrenburg’s puns built on German-Russian bilingualism.113 It comes as no surprise that Konstantin Simonov, perhaps one of the most prominent Russian followers of Kipling, shared a connection with Raisa Troianker: Simonov and Troianker were reported to have been seen and pictured together reciting their poetry to one another.114
Luckily, the “stern” style did not entirely eliminate Troianker’s “lyrics.” Although the soldiers’ deeds acquired epic magnitude, Troianker’s empathy for her heroes remained profoundly intimate, sincere, and movingly personal. She talked to her soldier-protagonist as his demanding wife and protecting mother. In her best Russian-language verse, particularly in the poems portraying the events on the Ukrainian front, Troianker regained a voice that combined dramatic polyphony and tender lyricism. In her “My ne prostim!” (We Will Not Forgive!) Troianker sketched a previously flourishing town of her beloved native Ukraine, most likely Uman, now a grim town in ruins: the school where she studied reading was no more, blood covered the town’s apple trees. Depicting Ukraine, Troianker resorted to direct quotations from Pushkin and Gogol (“the town where the night is dark and the stars are countless”).
Yet it is particularly significant that when Troianker’s voice made its way through the militaristic cliches, she abandoned Russian and turned to Ukrainian and Jewish images. Evoking biblical lines while portraying the cruelty of the Nazis, Troianker called for revenge—an eye for an eye and a death for a death— and then switched to Ukrainian. The line in italics is in Ukrainian in the original. She addresses the enemy directly in Ukrainian, whereas the Russian lines are in the epic third person.
And the elders will say—we will never forget that nightmare, Forever be damned murderer, brute!
And my motherland, as omnipotent as the Sun, Resolutely repulses the enemy!115
It is noteworthy that the context of this poem is Troianker’s native town (again unnamed), which was destroyed by the Nazis. Though one may read this incursion of the Ukrainian into the Russian verse as nothing but a tribute to couleur locale, her poetic bilingualism in this poem and on a more general level seems to be more complex.
Once Troianker started speaking through her characters, her rigid black- and-white palette generated new colors. Troianker discovered that her lover from the frontline trenches had gray eyes like the gray-eyed king (seroglazyi korol) of early Akhmatova and that the sky above Murmansk retained its prewar blue. But Troianker’s triumphant “rage of a soldier and bravery of a poet” eliminated the other colors and stifles the poet’s genuine voice. Her Russian marches seemed more welcome than her Ukrainian erotic lyrics. Her readers welcomed her Kiplingesque celebration of a disdain to death and readiness for self-sacrifice. Many soldiers wrote her from the trenches: “We are going into the battle with your poetry, Raisa Troianker!”116