Heinrich Heine Reinvented
A German classic, a purported atheist, a baptized and assimilated Jew, and an allegedly proto-Marxist well integrated into Soviet culture, Heinrich Heine moved from the periphery to the fulcrum of Pervomais’kyi’s literary predilections.133 For Pervomais’kyi, he became a quintessential Jewish poet engaged with gentile culture.
Pervomais’kyi was well aware of the differences between the two of them. Heine was baptized and Pervomais’kyi was not. Heine sought entre into the high culture of what was considered at that time the most civilized nation in Europe, whereas Pervomais’kyi chose integration into Ukrainian culture, positioned low even in the East European context. Heine was ironic, elusive, and ambiguous about his Jewishness; Pervomais’kyi publicly and privately affirmed his.Yet the advantages of self-identification with the German-Jewish poet outweighed for Pervomais’kyi the disparities between them. Pervomais’kyi turned to Heine’s irony, misunderstood but beatified by Soviet literary officialdom, furnishing himself with an excellent opportunity to remain within the ideological canon while elaborating themes and motifs bordering on the forbidden. Pervo- mais’kyi viewed Heine’s dual identity as similar to his own. He focused on Heine’s posthumous fate when under the Third Reich the German poet was outlawed for being Jewish. And he pondered the destiny of Heine’s books, which had been destroyed for their subversive democratic content. If not during his life span, then at least in his afterlife Heine was victimized and silenced and hence deserved Pervomais’kyi’s sympathy as a victim of violence, not solely as a dual-identity Jew. Among other things, in the 1950s Pervomais’kyi returned to Heine to overcome the spell that Heine had cast on Pervomais’kyi’s self-perception.
Perhaps as early as 1927 or 1928, Pervomais’kyi recognized Heine as a major reference.
Scarcely nineteen years old, Pervomais’kyi produced a literary selfportrait in which Heine appeared as a parodic version of the Stone Guest or the Bronze Horseman—rusty, clumsy, and vengeful, pursuing and trying to strangle his inept imitators, the alleged interloper and impostor Pervomais’kyi among them, who were robbing Heine of his posthumous glory. From this ironic selfassessment, Pervomais’kyi emerged as Heine’s foremost progeny, who deserved a symbolic blessing rather than the capital punishment that the imaginary Heine had in store for him. The following episode, part of his Romantychni zustrichi (Romantic Encounters) essay, starts with Pervomais’kyi walking in the street suddenly finding someone’s ironclad fingers not very romantically squeezing his throat:I realized immediately whom I was dealing with.
“Citizen Heine!”—I yelled, chocking. “And to Ivan Senchenko, is it allowed? He has penned his entire ‘Travel to Chervonohrad’ imitating your ‘A Travel to Garz.’ Why don’t you tell him anything? Perhaps you have not read the Vaplite journal? I can share with you, I have a free copy.”
The gloomy Heine took his iron hand off my throat.
“And Senchenko, too?”—he murmured. “My God, this is what I am living through! And you, young man, what has brought you to my pathway?”
“I have picked up the weapon that was left behind rusty on a literary path. You must forgive me, citizen Heine!”
Heinrich stood silently wrapping himself into his wide overcoat.
“Why are you silent?” I dared go on. “I don’t think you have forgotten your own words.”
He shuddered.
“Which ones?”
Hardly containing my anxiety I quoted:
The dead won’t rise from the dead
And only the living are alive.
He stretched his hand to me and in a moment disappeared as inadvertently as he emerged.134
Turning Heine’s line onto its author, Pervomais’kyi implied that the Ukrainian- Jewish poet was alive and kicking, unlike his illustrious German-Jewish predecessor.
And although Pervomais’kyi’s tone was anything but diffident, there was hardly anything more serious in Pervomais’kyi’s journalism than this self-parody: Pervomais’kyi appears as a victimized, almost strangled poet who manages to speak up in his own defense. Above all, this episode indicated that Pervo- mais’kyi followed Heine’s path, used Heine’s arms, and fought Heine’s battles. Even more astonishingly was that Heine appeared as serious, rigid, and infuriated, whereas Pervomais’kyi himself was the embodiment of Heine-esque romantic irony. The fame of Heine, the perfect example of a Jew acculturated into a gentile culture and one of the most famous nineteenth-century representatives of that culture, tickled Pervomais’kyi’s ambitions and perhaps informed his literary endeavors. It was particularly important that Heine personally endorsed his literary career, and, for a change, Pervomais’kyi’s Ukrainian fellow countryman from Chervonohrad, too. Pervomais’kyi and Senchenko, a Jew and a Ukrainian, became certified Heine offspring. Others, warned Pervomais’kyi, should not even get close to the legacy of the German master.Pervomais’kyi had always been an avid reader of Heine. In 1930, during his voyage on the Black Sea to Istanbul, he recorded: “I have reread already for the tenth time ‘The Travel Pictures’ of the extraordinary Heine, ‘The Vagabonds’ of Knut Gamsun, and the American poets translated by I. Iu. Kulyk.”135 Motifs from Heine were inherently present in Pervomais’kyi’s earliest prose, which at first glace appeared ideologically charged, imbued with Komsomol hubris, and quite far from Heine’s romantic irony. That Pervomais’kyi’s short stories, plays, and poems about the Communist League teenagers were quite often parodies of the officially endorsed and solemn proletarian realism was overlooked by both contemporary and modern critics. Heine-esque irony was among Pervomais’kyi’s favorite stylistic devices. Its consistent application made Pervomais’kyi different from a good many of his Russian and Ukrainian colleagues.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that it was his Heine-esque irony that helped him successfully transform the Kiplingesque imagery so popular in the Soviet literature of the 1930s and 1940s.In the 1950s, Heine became not only the point of departure for Pervomais’kyi as poet but also one of his key themes as a translator, editor, literary critic, and publisher.136 Pervomais’kyi obstinately fought the red tape of Soviet literary bureaucracy for the publication of a four-volume collection of Ukrainian translations from Heine and argued for new, even better translations to be commissioned. He looked for and found the best literary scholars to be collaborators on the project dedicated to the 175 th anniversary of Heine’s birth.137 He painstakingly edited the translations for this collection.138 In the midst of this overwhelming work, he again resorted to Heine’s romantic irony to assess his own experience as a Ukrainian poet. His “Koly b ia narodyvsia v Arhentyni” (If I Had Been Born in Argentina) is perhaps one of Pervomais’kyi’s best self-portraits and his most Heine-esque verse. Indeed, he asked himself, what would have happened had he be born in distant Argentina? Would he have depicted the Teuco and Parana rivers, as today he depicted Ukrainian rivers? What would his dreams have been about? Would he have recollected in his old age the icy summits of the Cordilleras? Then he turned to the question of the Ukrainian language, inseparable from his identity:
How would I delve into the depth
Of the syllabic melodies, alien to me,
And how would I survive there without my language?
No, how would the language survive here without me?139
One must keep in mind that this switch of perspective is characteristic of those Heine poems that toy with the idea of his dual German-Jewish self-awareness. Here, however, unable for reasons of self-censorship to look at things Ukrainian from the Jewish viewpoint, Pervomais’kyi places himself on the Argentine soil.
He asks whether he is really inseparable from the Ukrainian language and the Ukrainian language from his own self. Unfortunately, once Pervomais’kyi’s volatile irony framed by a question mark is translated into scholarly prose, it loses both its charm and its delicate reference to Heine.For Soviet officialdom, Heine was an exemplary revolutionary romantic whose antibourgeois satire prefigured the Marxist critique of capitalism, but for Pervomais’kyi, Heine came to signify the metaphor of the poet threatened by persecution, death, annihilation, and oblivion. Pervomais’kyi’s Heine was a deadly sick poet who demonstrated an astonishing capacity to work and create. Pervomais’kyi’s Heine was no bon vivant German aristocrat residing in France and living on a pension from his wealthy Jewish uncle. Rather, Pervomais’kyi identified with the sick poet doomed to what the dying Heine dubbed his own “mattress grave” and who against all odds continued to write, composing such masterpieces as Romancero (1851).
Pervomais’kyi was not interested in a victorious Heine: on the contrary, he needed Heine the martyr, fighting for his physical survival and cleaving to what Pervomais’kyi considered redemptive writing. Heine appeared in Pervomais’kyi’s poetry as a field soldier: mortally wounded and very well aware of his sad posthumous fate, he did not abandon the battlefield. Simultaneously, Pervomais’kyi’s Heine came to symbolize the tragic fate of the Jewish people and, what is particularly remarkable, of Heine’s books. The following lines of his poem “Nepodolanyi” (Unassailable, 1973 or 1974), addressing the inseparably interwoven fate of Heine and his books, point to such a reading:
They will burn and destroy them—up to the last page,
They will scorch their tears, kill their laughter,
But he will survive the Treblinka chimneys
And the stakes of books in the Berlin desert.140
The poem juxtaposes three different metaphors, underscoring their affinity: the fate of the Jewish people, murdered in Treblinka; the fate of Heine and of his irony (“laughter”), hated and outlawed in Nazi Germany; and the destiny of Heine’s books, which his grateful readers of yesteryear were now throwing into the street fires in sacred racial disgust.
Heine, poetry, books, and the Jewish people are victimized, murdered, destroyed, and cast to oblivion—yet they are unassailable merely because Pervomais’ky’s poetic verdict cannot be appealed. Identifying with the persecuted, silenced, and murdered—Jews and poets and books—Pervomais’kyi turns into their voice, proving their immortality. If there is a final hope, Pervomais’kyi seems to say, it lies in the poet’s ability to identify with the victims and make their voices heard. One is advised to think that his work on the edition of Heine in the last years of his own life (when he was also dreadfully sick) should be interpreted in the same context.Rethinking Heine helped Pervomais’kyi entirely revisit Heine’s romantic irony. Whereas Heine designed his ironic situations by unexpectedly introducing distances between his alter ego and his characters, Pervomais’kyi eliminated them. Heine construed his romantic universe by making it spin around the poet’s alter ego, and Pervomais’kyi crafted the other-centered self-abnegated universe. Heine rarely let his characters escape his sharp comments; Pervo- mais’kyi let his characters speak for themselves. Pervomais’kyi certainly knew Heine’s adage (“God will forgive me. That is his job”), which implied among many other things Heine’s concern about personal redemption. But for Pervomais’kyi the key issue was not how God feels about him but rather how he, the poet, feels about those striving for redemption or memorialization. Giving this issue a personal spin, Pervomais’kyi penned a verse on a Jewish lad standing on the edge of the ravine at the moment of execution and crying out to the poet. Again, as in many other cases, the nearby cemetery, the ravine, the slope seem to refer to the Babi Yar massacre, which never stopped challenging Pervomais’kyi’s poetic imagination:
I stood in the crowd at the cemetery
Nude, among grave mounds and gravestones
Recollecting lofty strivings,
The world without pain and without blood.
And when I fall down, dead, from the slope,
Into the dreadful clay of bloody bodies
I believed that against all odds
You will come to revive me from the dead.141
The poem employs the paradigmatic Heine-esque duplication of the poet’s alter ego, yet it turns Heine-esque irony upside down. The “you” is simultaneously the reader, the listener, and the poet. And the “I” is both the victim and the poet. Although Pervomais’kyi seems to identify with both “you” and “I,” he is “you,” the distanced reader, listener, or author of the Ukrainian verse, while he is “I” as the massacred Babi Yar Jewish victim. Pervomais’kyi is no egocentric poet satirizing or bemoaning his life circumstances or his despotic environment: he identifies both with the poet’s awareness of his unpaid debt before his people and with his people treating the poet with bitterness and hope. Rather than discovering himself through the Other, Pervomais’kyi discovered the Other as the extension of himself.