Hirsh—Grigorii—Hryts’ko

Biographical data on Kerner is insufficient for a coherent narrative. What is known about him raises more questions than provides answers. Ihor Kachu- rovs’kyi’s short yet very informative essay on Kerner’s life and a brief note in­cluded in Kerner’s file at the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Lit­erature manuscript collection, in Kyiv, with some variation, simply follow the succinct introduction to Kernerenko’s poetry from the 1908 anthology The Ukrainian Muse.¹³

From these sources we learn that Hryts’ko Kernerenko was born Grigorii Borisovich Kerner in 1863 in Huliai-pole, Ekaterinoslav Province.

Kerner’s family was not atypical for the Jewish nouveaux riches that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Huliai-pole, situated in the center of a triangle formed by the three cities Ekaterinoslav (Dnipropetrovs’k), Iuzovo (Donets’k), and Melitopol, was a nicely planned town. In 1898, it boasted sev­enty-six plants, factories, and artisan shops, and some twenty stores. By 1914, it had 16,150 inhabitants, of them 1,173 Jews, three churches, one synagogue, five primary schools, one parish school, one workers’ school, one German and two Jewish schools, a library, a theater, and a cinema. The Kerners significantly con­tributed to the town’s economic blossom.¹⁵

Anatol Hak (pseud.; real name—Ivan Antypenko), a Ukrainian writer, liter­ary critic, and journalist born in 1893 in Huliai-pole personally knew the Kern­ers and provided elucidating insights into Kerner’s life. Among other things, Hak notes that Kerner’s family comprised a father and his three sons.

As to the rich dwellers of Huliai-pole, who shared pro-Ukrainian sympathies, it is worthwhile to mention the poet Hryts’ko Kernerenko. Unfortunately, there is not a word about him in the Ukrainian Encyclopedia. A member of a rich Jewish family (his real name is Kerner), Kernerenko, who got his higher education de­gree in Munich and Kharkiv, composed genuine Ukrainian poetry, and also translated into Ukrainian the poetry of Heine, Pushkin, etc. In 1909, he pub­lished in Huliai-pole a collection of his poetry Menty natkhnennia [Moments of Inspiration]. Yet it is obvious that his nationality and social position prevented Kernerenko from having firm contacts with Huliai-pole’s intelligentsia, let alone with the peasants. However, when my relatively “Ukrainian” moustache began bristling, I found my way to Kernerenko: I used to go to him for Ukrainian books. Hryhorii Borysovych [Kernerenko] treated me benevolently. Besides the books he gave me to read, I remember him giving me the address of the [Kiev] bookstore Ukrainskaia starina [Ukrainian Antiquities], from which I eventually began ordering Ukrainian books.¹⁷

Hak’s insights are illuminating in different ways. They suggest that Kernerenko belonged to the well-to-do of Huliai-pole; that he was known to be a lonely Jew­ish Ukrainophile at odds with his bourgeois Jewish, Russified Cossack, and in­tellectual Ukrainian milieu; that he had a collection of Ukrainian books; and that he seems to have inspired and encouraged those interested in things Ukrainian. Unfortunately, except for a brief reference to the post-1917 turmoil, when Kerner was made to pay ransom to local anarchists, Hak does not provide any de­tails on Kerner’s later years.¹⁸

Under his pen name Hryts’ko Kernerenko, Kerner composed five books in Ukrainian, all of which are rarities: the short tale Pravdyva kazka (1886 and 1890), and four books of poetry, including Nevelychkyi zbirnyk tvoriv (1890), Shchetynnyk (1891), Vdosuzhyi chas (1894), and Menty natkhnennia (1910).

Volodymyr Stepanovych Aleksandrov (1825 - 93), a medical doctor, writer, and folklorist from Khar’kov, belonged to the “old style” Ukrainian-oriented in­telligentsia generated from the clergy and integrated into the East European populist movement of the 1870s. Aleksandrov served as a military doctor in left­bank Ukraine and was known for his Narodnyi pisennyk (The People’s Song­book, 1887) and his populist folklore-based plays. Apparently he studied He­brew and translated parts of the Bible, including the books of Genesis, Psalms, and Job, into Ukrainian. In the 1880s, he edited two issues of the highly repre­sentative almanac Skladka (The Collection). A memoirist notes that Aleksan­drov’s house in Khar’kov served for irregular meetings of some old-style Ukrainians.²⁰ Kernerenko, who shared the same principles of Ukrainian pop­ulism and imitated Ukrainian folk poetry, seems to have been very close to Aleksandrov, calling himself the latter’s disciple and perceiving his death as a personal loss.

Hardly aware of the fact that he was writing to the only contemporary Ukrai­nian poet of Jewish descent other than himself, in February, 1898, Kernerenko penned a letter to Kesar Bilylovs’kyi, who continued editing the Skladka after the death of Aleksandrov. Here is Kerner:

I would like to thank you for starting your good job of enlightenment by having already brought to light two almanacs. May God help you! It is really a pity that I could not have joined the participants in the collection in memory of the late Vladymyr [sir] Stepanovych. Had I known that you have such a dear soul and had I known where you live I would have written to you and sent something: since I am one of the acquaintances and disciples of the late Vl[adymyr] Stepanovych; alas, what has passed cannot be returned! At this point I would like to ask you, your kindness, should you plan to publish something literary in memory of the late Vl[adymyr] St[epanovych], do not exclude me.²¹

The letter seems to suggest that Kernerenko (unlike Bilylovs’kyi) was not part of the narrow circle of Ukrainian literary figures rallying around Aleksandrov’s al­manac and that he was not even known to the friends of the person whose disci­ple he considered himself. Kernerenko’s spiritual solitude is further corrobo­rated by the letter’s closing: as he did in many other cases, he signed the letter with his pen name but asked Bilylovs’kyi to respond to Hryhorii Borysovych Kerner in Huliai-pole.²² While perhaps a mere convenience or formality, it may also suggest that in his native town, Kerner, already the author of three books in Ukrainian, was hardly known to anybody as the Ukrainian poet Hryts’ko Kernerenko.

Kernerenko’s encounter with Ivan Franko requires a brief digression. Back in 1880, the Kiev governor general Dondukov-Korsakov had allowed Ukrainian plays to be staged only on two conditions: first, they should be about the simple folk, not about intelligentsia, and second, a theatrical troop had to offer Russian plays to the public simultaneously. Apparently in the mid-1880s, Kernerenko tried his pen as a playwright. For the plot of his play—the only one we know he penned—Kernerenko chose a village-based love story. The play was entitled “Khto pravdy vkryvaie—toho Boh karaie, abo Liubov syloiu ne vizmesh” (Those Who Conceal the Truth, God Punishes; or You Can’t Force Love). The play, ornamented with all the accessories of a sentimental folk drama and perme­ated with the populist idealization of the village, may have been written for the Khar’kov Ukrainian troupe. Kernerenko’s cast of characters includes the astute and cruel village scribe Rad’ko and his romantic-minded sister Nastia; the ambi­tious nouveau riche Mykyta Syla and his rebellious daughter Horpyna; the vil­lage orphan Levko; the innkeeper Lukeria, who is engaged in witchcraft; and Semen, a handsome young man about to be drafted into the army. The play was set in the safe and distant first half of the nineteenth century: in the opening scene potential village draftees discuss the humiliating custom of “forehead shaving,” the marking of conscripts in the imperial army cancelled as part of the Great Reforms of Alexander II.

Kernerenko’s drama is built around a complex system of love relations and rivalry. Semen, the orphaned son of a district clerk, is going to be drafted into the army. His name has been forged onto a conscription list due by Rad’ko, the clerk, whose sister Nastia is in love with Semen. Rad’ko seeks to marry Horpyna, who also loves Semen. Sending Semen into the army, Rad’ko plans to kill two birds with one stone, paving the way for his future marriage with Horpyna, the daugh­ter of Mykyta Syla, the local rich man, and for his further control over his sister Nastia.²³ But Horpyna, who now moves into the focus of the plot, rejects Rad’ko’s unscrupulous advances and plans to inform the authorities about the forgery. To bring Semen back to her and to make Nastia, whose love Semen re­ciprocates, an inappropriate match for him, Horpyna turns to Lukeria, the innkeeper, who supplies her with magic herbs. A moving fare-thee-well before the draft brings Semen and Nastia together for what happens to be their final embrace, marking the end of the first act of the play.

The second, shorter act, which takes place two and a half years later in a nearby provincial town, finds Horpyna in prison, accused of poisoning and thereby blinding Nastia. On the day of the trial, Semen, temporarily released from the army, goes through the town toward his native village in search of Nas- tia. In the town square in front of a church, Semen meets a blind woman and her guide asking for alms; he recognizes his Nastia and embraces her. At the same moment, convoyed to the court, Horpyna pushes aside the soldiers, rushes to­ward Semen and Nastia, prostrates herself in front of them, confesses her crime, prays for clemency, and dies.²⁴

Neither the inoffensive plot nor the artificial characters could help Kerne- renko. Both Russian and Ukrainian literature have long portrayed the horrors of Nikolaevan conscription, the arbitrariness of communal elders, the corruption of the administration, the prejudices of the peasants, the passions of the simple folk, and witchery. But the situation in Ukrainian literature was different. Cen­sors thought that Ukrainian authors should to be content writing about the beauties of the Ukrainian landscape and the pastoral innocence of the Ukrainian peasantry.

The censor, who did not sign his report, read Kernerenko’s play closely, an­grily marking each and every socially explosive theme. He did not like Rad’ko’s deliberate forging of the conscription lists to include Semen. He also underlined the passages that echoed Ukrainian folk songs critical of the Nikolaevan draft and that depicted draftees streaming into a local inn to “waste their freedom in drink.” The entire second act of the play, according to the aggressive red-pencil marginal notes, enraged the censor: he had no desire to authorize the portrayal of the horrible conditions female inmates faced in Russian prisons and the sexual harassment and brutal language of the prison supervisor.²⁵The play was banned and returned to its author despite the fact that its moderate social criticism never went as far as the classical dramas of the Russian Aleksandr Ostrovskii (1823 - 87) or the Ukrainian Ivan Karpenko-Karyi (1845 -1907). Kernerenko’s play was not published until 1910, when it appeared as part of his collection Menty natkhnennia under the title “Syla pravdy” (The Power of Truth).

To Kernerenko’s good fortune, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the center of Ukrainian culture moved across the border to Ukrainian Galicia, part of the Austrian Empire.²⁶ In the 1880s, known as the “dead years” for the development of Ukrainian culture, most writers, thinkers, and literary critics ei­ther had to emigrate, like Mykhailo Drahomanov, who began his Hromada (first published as a collection of articles, then made into a journal) in Vienna, or re­main in the Russian Empire and take the risk of sending their works for publica­tion to L’viv, where in 1898 Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi and Ivan Franko launched Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (Literary and Scholarly Herald, hereafter LNV), a key journal for twentieth-century Ukrainian thought.

On June 13, 1899, Kernerenko wrote a self-disparaging letter to the editorial board of LNV, asking it to publish his translations and poetry, and promising a play. The editors welcomed Kernerenko, publishing his work twice in the course of the year. Inspired by this new opportunity, on May ι, 1900, Kernerenko, hav­ing made some changes to his play and shortened its somewhat pretentious and cumbersome title to Syla pravdy, sent it to the LNV editors. In January 1901, LNV informed Kernerenko that his poetry and play would be published, yet two years passed without any publication. Kernerenko sent one inquiry after an­other, then asked that his manuscripts be returned, sent payment for the return postage, but again received no response. Finally, in February 1903, he turned to Ivan Franko.²⁷

By the 1900s, Ivan Franko’s literary depiction of Jews had drifted from por­traying them predominantly as corrupt capitalists to seeing them more sympa­thetically, as rank-and-file proletarians. Moreover, he reworked some of his ear­lier novels, turning rapacious Jews into entrepreneurial, progressive-minded, and positive characters. He also became personally acquainted with Theodor Herzl and developed a deep appreciation for the Zionist cause. As reflected in his diaries and newspaper publications, Franko’s interest in the Jewish Enlighten­ment suggests that the Galician thinker, writer, and poet supported and was ready to promote a Jewish encounter with the vernacular language and culture, be it German, Polish, or Ukrainian. Kernerenko represented for Franko a rare yet commendable case of the Ukrainian acculturation, particularly dear to him given the colonial status of the Ukrainian language and culture in both the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires. Franko’s acquaintance with Kerne- renko hardly changed his perception of the East European Jewish problem, yet it widened his vision of Jewish intellectual endeavors.²⁸

Franko’s answer to Kernerenko is not available, nor do we know how their re­lations evolved between 1903 and 1906, but one of Kernerenko’s later letters helps us to understand the character of his epistolary relations with Franko:

I thank you so much for your kind letter. You have asked who Sholem Aleichem is. This is the pen name of S. Rabinovych, one of the most outstanding modern writers in jargon [Yiddish—YP5]. S. G. Frug is no less talented in poetry, also in jargon. On Sholem Aleichem and S. G. Frug you may learn a bit from the en­cyclopedic dictionary Brokhaus, vol. 22, page 495 “Jewish-German dialect or jargon.” I am sending you a poem “Wine” that I translated from S. Frug’s Yid­dish poetry. The tale I have sent you is entitled “Der Veter Pini mit der Mume Reizi,” though I translated “Reizi” as “Khyvria:” it seems to sound better in our language [bil’sh po-nashomu]. As for an article on the most recent Jewish litera­ture, I am afraid I would not be able, nor would I dare, to write it, yet as for the translations from Yiddish [z ievreis’koi] I will be sending you from time to time poetry and prose, and also something from my own writings.²⁹

Kernerenko’s answer to Franko is remarkable in many ways. It demonstrates that Kernerenko apparently was responsible for introducing Franko to such classic Yiddish writers as Sholem Aleichem and Frug and eventually to the phenome­non of Yiddish as a national Jewish language possessing high-quality literature and outstanding literati. Also, Kernerenko emerges from his letter as a modest, self-ironic, even shy individual, who understands both his capabilities and his limitations and who addresses Ukrainian as his mother tongue.

There were very few, if any, Jews around Franko who shared Kernerenko’s sensibilities. Unlike the situation in the 1910s, LNV publications in the first decade of the century imply that in Franko’s milieu at that time, no Jews except Kernerenko were familiar with modern Jewish culture and at the same tame able to write in Ukrainian. In addition, Franko could have welcomed Kernerenko both as a poet and as a translator who helped enrich the LNV rubric “From Foreign Literatures” that Franko launched and edited. It is not clear whether Franko knew Kernerenko before 1903, but there is little doubt that he eagerly supported the Huliai-pole poet: between 1904 and 1908, Kernerenko appeared at least ten times in LNV sometimes twice in one issue. Kernerenko was not the only Jew published in a major Ukrainian journal, but he was the only Jewish lit­erary figure who merited the regular attention and readership of the Ukrainian audience of LNV serving as a conduit between Jewish literature and the Ukrai­nian reader. Kernerenko’s active collaboration with LNV is the last clearly doc­umented episode of his life.³⁰ Save for his scarcely documented efforts to pub­lish a volume of his selected writings, there is very little evidence of his life and literary endeavors after his last publication in LNV in the 1908 issue.

Inspired by his relations with LNV, sometime around 1907 Kernerenko be­gan planning his Menty natkhnennia. It seems that with all his contacts with edi­torial boards and his rising number of publications in the periodical press, Kernerenko still did not belong to any literary circles and remained outside the Ukrainian literary mainstream. His letter to Oleksa Kovalenko of November 5, 1907, implies that he did not know how to go about getting his book published:

Dear Mister Oleksa Kuz’mych!

It occurred to me to publish my writings (though not numerous) in a separate book, yet I do not know what to begin with. Will you be so kind as to instruct me where and to what censor committee I have to send my writings first to obtain from them permission for publication? Many things have changed since the time I published my small books, and together with them, indeed, conditions for pub­lication have changed. You, my dear sir, are an expert in this field, therefore I turn to you for advice on how to start this issue.³¹

The three-hundred-page volume Menty natkhnennia appeared in 1910 and was extensively reviewed by the leading Ukrainian literary critics. Yet we know virtu­ally nothing about the life of the poet after 1910. It is not difficult to imagine what might have happened to Kerner, a Jew and capitalist, in the midst of the civil war turmoil, the White Army advance and retreat, the military campaign of the Directory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Red Army advance, and Makhno’s anarchist revolt, each of which coincided with or was followed by pogroms and Jewish casualties.

Whatever the circumstances of Hryts’ko Kernerenko’s death, it is significant that before 1934, according to the legend circulating among today’s Huliai-pole intelligentsia, there was a grave inscribed “Kernerenko” at the local cemetery, a site that did not survive the twentieth-century upheavals.³² There is little doubt that Hryts’ko’s brothers and father not have wanted to have this name inscribed on their gravestones. It could have only belonged to Hryts’ko, who in his life was routinely addressed as Hryhorii Borysovych but whose last wish apparently was to be buried as a Ukrainian poet.