New Horizons

In the mid-1920s, Pervomais’kyi sacrificed his symbolism for the sake of a new romantic, revolutionary, and socialist vision of what he called “life,” which he perceived as “joyous, beautiful and radiating.” This “life” was synonymous with the revolutionary stream pushing Jews out of the ghetto, most preferably onto arable land, into the rising urban industry, into the Bolshevik revolution, and to­ward socialist culture.

His change of name followed his change of identity. Regardless of what was inscribed in his Soviet passport, Illia Hurevych was no longer Illia Hurevych. He adopted the first name of Leonid, an acclaimed warrior in ancient Sparta, and changed his last name to the Soviet neologism Pervo-may (The First of May), emphasizing his total support of democratic ideals and, above all, of the emancipated world proletariat.

Pervomais’kyi outlined his new worldview in his first published poem “My” (We, 1924). The “life” or, to be precise, “just the beginning of life” praised in the poem implied a revolutionary rupture with the past; it was “song, word, plough, and deed” with which Pervomais’kyi was tailoring the “lethargic centuries.”¹⁸ Pervomais’kyi clarified this vision in the play Mistechko Ladeniu (The Shtetl Ladeniu, 1931- 34), in which a shtetl Jew explained to other shtetl Jews reluctant to resettle on the land in southern Ukraine, “Life is a collective farm in the Kherson province.” In addition, at the very end of his first short novel, The Promised Land, he penned an enthusiastic panegyric to his new vision of “life,” adorning it with biblical metaphors, mostly from the book of Psalms, that claimed to praise the divinity:

In front of him stretches the black, beaten road, all rutted—he knows that this was also the road to his goal which was and which will be covered with thorns and stones, yet here it is, the promised land of humanity, already approaching and shining. He sees it, his bosom is filled with an ineffable desire to pronounce one word which would be the acknowledgment of a goal, the oath to attain it, but he cannot hold his feelings and then in his heart is born a song:

—Here it comes, life, incomparable, radiating as the sun!

—Take timpani and harps and sing hosanna to its coming!

—Take your best feelings and put them under its feet!

—Join like vibrant streams an incomparable and living sea of the humanity!

— Give your strength for life. Draw them from life.

—Sing the song of the young and joyous, for here it comes, incomparable, beautiful, radiating, as the Sun—life!¹⁹

Obviously, “life” for the seventeen-year-old Pervomais’kyi was a concept with an immense variety of signifiers, one of which was the “Ukrainian land,” another, the “road to happiness,” and yet another, “moving out” from the shtetl.

With his optimistic poetry notebooks in a cloth shoulder sack, and inspired by the social transformations occurring around him, Pervomais’kyi moved to Kharkiv, where the then-influential party and literary bosses, such as Ivan Mykytenko and Ivan Kulyk, recognized his talents and took him under their aegis.²⁰ Sava Holovanivs’kyi—with whom Pervomais’kyi was in close yet com­plex relations from the mid-1920s until his last days, and who was an admirer of Ivan Kulyk—recalled referring to Pervomais’kyi’s becoming a mature Ukrai­nian literary figure: “I guess that Ivan Kulyk performed a gigantic role.

In Kharkiv, the uncrowned capital of the state-orchestrated Ukrainization campaign, Pervomais’kyi’s enthusiasm generated a remarkable productivity. He edited the Molodniak (Yearling) literary journal, which was close to the group of the established proletarian writers supervised by Kulyk, published nine books of prose and one book of poetry, and frequented the Slovo House, where he im­pressed his listeners by reciting his plays from memory.²³ An active Komsomol member, Pervomais’kyi helped literary bosses fight against all sorts of “quasi­proletarian” literati; he also supervised groups of proletarian-minded writers, encouraging them, quite amusingly, to select their would-be brides first and foremost from among the pool of young female members of the Communist Party.²⁴ At the height of his career, he spent several months riding a horse through the narrow paths of the Pamir Mountains. Back in Kharkiv, he estab­lished himself as a playwright, and his plays were accepted and performed in Ukraine and throughout the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, his second book of po­etry was highly praised by the most demanding critics. In early 1930, when he had just turned twenty-five, the major state publishing house offered to issue his first collected writings.

Revolution demanded offerings, and Pervomais’kyi gladly brought them to its altar. For the sake of his personal career, public success, and literary opportu­nities, he did not hesitate to sacrifice his empathy for old books and libraries, for the Jewish culture of yesterday, and for the shtetl life. Pervomais’kyi elucidated these offerings in his Ukrainian drama “Kommoltsy” (The Young Communist League Members, 1930), later renamed “Pochatok zhyttia” (The Beginning of Life), which romanticized the first generation of passionate young Bolsheviks.²⁵ A certain Neifakh, a graphically Jewish protagonist, joins a group of members of the Young Communist League, harbingers of the new Soviet power in a small Ukrainian town. Pervomais’kyi ascribes to Neifakh his own life experience and his own dreams. Like Pervomais’kyi, Neifakh is a real bookworm: his interests range from the French Revolution to Asian geography. Among the semi-literate young men, he looks like a revolutionary Socrates. Ironically replicating Pervo- mais’kyi, who in the early 1920s headed the House of Farmer Library, Neifakh strives to become a people’s commissar of the Village Libraries. In full accord with Pervomais’kyi’s own choice, Neifakh sacrifices his books for a more serious vocation and joins the revolutionary army.²⁶ Books colonize him while he seeks freedom.

By the same token, the cemetery guard and gravedigger Elya (Eliyahu), one of the Jewish protagonists of Pervomais’kyi’s play Mistechko Ladeniu, rejects old Jewish books for what he called a real life in a Kherson collective farm: “Where is the truth? In new words or in the yellow rotten paper of an old book? I don’t know but I cannot guard the dead.”²⁷ Bowing down to the yellow pages of a rot­ten old book is as bad from his viewpoint as religiously prescribed guarding the dead: both colonizing patterns are to be eliminated from the happy future. Un­like his characters Neifakh and Elya, however, Pervomais’kyi did not entirely re­ject his books. He reflected on his rupture with the past, embodying it in a series of short stories, essays, a novel, and a play on Jewish themes that appeared be­tween 1926 and the mid-1930s. In them, Pervomais’kyi attempted not only to squeeze a Pale-of-Settlement Jew out of himself but also to overcome the literary spells that prominent writers, first and foremost Isaac Babel, had cast on him.