A Note in the Margin

Raisa Troianker was far from the only Jewish woman who established herself in the Ukrainian cultural milieu. Varvara Bazas, a futurist poet of the 1920s, and Dokiia Zhmer, a writer and dissident in the 1950s, were also visible on the Ukrai­nian literary horizon.

Troianker used Ukrainian as a medium to develop herself into a public fig­ure, a woman, and a poet. The Ukrainian language helped her to negotiate the meanings of, and feelings about, her shtetl past. Ukrainian men helped her to re­discover her body and she discovered the body image in Ukrainian poetry. Eroti­cism and sex brought her to Ukrainian poetry, and she brought eroticism and sex into it. Ukrainian writers were partners in her sexual adventures, and she turned them into her love-heroes in her poetry. Her eroticism flatly rejected sentimen­tal, if not pathetic, features of Ukrainian love poetry. Troianker made her eroti­cism visible, passionate, and somatic: it was revolutionary and subversive. She connected social, personal, ethnic, and sexual emancipation in a single nexus of unparalleled images. Seventy years before the celebrity feminist writer Oksana Zabuzhko penned her novel Poliovi doslidzhennia z ukrains’koho seksu (Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, 1996), Troianker started this fieldwork in life and poetry.

There is little doubt that her encounter with the Ukrainian language made Troianker into a poet, but it is unusual that Troianker continued the tradition ranging from Lesia Ukrainka to Lina Kostenko that elaborated the image of a woman-poet in the Ukrainian literature. As a woman-poet, Troianker placed the image of a poet in the center of her imaginary love story. As a zhinka-poet (woman-poet), she adored not only men but literary men: eros for her was always about art and about Ukraine. And she smuggled Ukrainian national colors into her poetic realm, celebrating Ukrainian land, Ukrainian men, and decolonized independent Ukraine. She was on the brink of transgendering the image of Ukraine, traditionally associated with a servile, docile, and colonized feminine: Troianker came closer than anybody else in the twentieth century to associating Ukraine with masculinity—something she found powerful and positive. It was not enough for Troianker to decolonize herself through Ukrainian: she deftly grasped the demise of the Jewish shtetl, of traditional East European Jewry, and of her own family. Troianker contributed to Ukrainian poetry an unparalleled Jewish imagery imbued with intimate autobiographic detail. Nobody before her (and after her only Pervomais’kyi in his prose) has ever parted ways with Judaism by depicting it with such grief and profound empathy as Troianker.

Whereas Russian literary figures adored Troianker, dedicated their verses to her, and commemorated her in their memoirs, the memory of Troianker in Ukrainian culture—as well as of many other outstanding literati of the 1920s— was almost obliterated. With some exceptions, those Ukrainian literary figures who survived the purges were silent about Troianker in their memoirs. Some ref­erences to her, especially in works published in the West or after the breakdown of the USSR, did not change the perception of her more than modest place in Ukrainian cultural memory. With the beginning of perestroika, Troianker spo­radically reappeared in Ukrainian publications.

The commentator on Volodymyr Sosiura’s posthumously published memoir did not bother to find out anything about her but merely noted, “ Troianker Raisa—little-known poetess [malovidoma poetesa].”¹²⁵ The posthumous recol­lection of Troianker as the Ukrainian Sappho testifies to the fact that Ukrainian cultural memory is indifferent to her Jewish-Ukrainian legacy, a fact that made Svitlana Matvienko regret that Troianker’s eroticism had been overemphasized, whereas her “Jewish motifs” and “transparent, pure lyrics” were by and large neglected.¹²⁶ In this sense Troianker may be seen as a double of Hryts’ko Ker- nerenko. Like Kernerenko, Troianker attempted to craft Jewish themes and im­ages in Ukrainian poetry. Like him, she did not establish a viable pattern that in­formed the literary endeavors of later generations of Ukrainian poets of Jewish descent. And like him, she was resuscitated in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the wake of a rising postmodern interest in previously outlawed themes, includ­ing religious, ethnic, and erotic ones.

The time between Troianker’s splendid start at the age of sixteen and the end of her Ukrainian career at the age of twenty-one was too brief to create a feasible literary paradigm that could have triggered the birth or shape the development of the Jewish cultural encounter with the Ukrainian. Her promising beginnings abruptly ended and her switch from Ukrainian to Russian can be interpreted as a default acknowledgment of the victory of the imperial Russian culture over the once again colonized Ukraine. At the end of her career, the Russian, the impe­rial, and the bellicose suppressed the Ukrainian, the anti-colonialist, and the unashamedly Jewish. Amazingly, Leonid Pervomais’kyi started exactly where Raisa Troianker finished. Amid state-sponsored anti-Jewish and anti-intelli­gentsia persecutions, Stalin’s purges, the murder of conscientious Ukrainian lit­erary figures, and the triumphant and pugnacious march of socialist realism, he managed to find his way out of the imperial discourse, bringing his Jews out of the shtetl to Ukrainian agricultural settlements, to the fronts of World War II, and into the midst of the Ukrainian intelligentsia.