Nothing Ukrainian Is Alien to Me

Before the 1900s, three themes permeated Kernerenko’s poetry: love, Ukraine, and Shevchenko. Common to a good many Ukrainian poets at the turn of the nineteenth century, these themes had an unexpected spin in Kernerenko’s writ­ings.

Not surprisingly, only the first theme (love) found its way into Ukrainian anthologies; the love poems “Na vse svoia pora” (Everything Has Its Time), “Marne dozhydannia” (A Vain Expectation), “Pevnomu druhovi,” (To a True Friend), “Madchens Wunsch,” and “Na pozychenyi motyv” (On a Borrowed Tune) represent Kernerenko’s whole published universe. Other Kernerenko po­ems, especially those dedicated to Ukraine and to Shevchenko (whose very name infuriated Russian authorities), could not make it through the censor. For exam­ple, in 1894 a Russian censor allowed Kernerenko’s collection Vdosuzhyi chas to be published on the condition that the poet remove a poem entitled “The 37th Anniversary of Shevchenko’s Death.” Kernerenko wrote to the editors of LNV: “The 37th anniversary of Shevchenko’s death is approaching. I am sending you poems that I wrote to commemorate the anniversary. If you find fit, please pub­lish them for we cannot do it here: censorship does not allow it, and there is neither a journal nor a periodical.”⁴⁴ To a great extent these circumstances, unknown to the public, explain the anger of Pavlo Hrabovs’kyi, who in his acclaimed essay “Deshcho pro tvorchist poetychnu” (On Poetic Creativity, 1896)—to be discussed later—pronounced his verdict on Kernerenko, finding him guilty of pursuing “art for art’s sake.”⁴⁵ In fact, Kernerenko’s poetry to a great extent exonerates him as no rhapsodist of pure love and broken hearts.

The images of Ukraine, his motherland, are crucial in Kernerenko’s writ­ings. His poem “Na chuzhyni” (In a Foreign Land) introduces the dichotomy “Ukraine” and “Europe.” The unnamed but recognizable Europe is “sunny,” “sociable,” and “warm,” yet it does not alleviate the poet’s profound solitude and sorrow. Kernerenko compares himself to a bird in a golden cage: the allegory significantly suggests that Ukraine—and only Ukraine—is the poet’s freedom. In his “I znov na Vkraini” (And Again in Ukraine), Kernerenko associates his na­tive land with an island of utopia: there no evil exists, no calamity, no sorrow. Ukraine embodies solely an immense happiness. Kernerenko uses the biblical metaphor of the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey but recasts it as a different promised land, Ukraine.

For Kernerenko, Ukraine allows for poetic enthusiasm and creativity. Ukraine, a metaphysical rather than social category, is about holiness and free­dom. It is associated with the dearest and most humane images. Ukraine is not only its people’s “mother” but also the poet’s own “mom,” his nurse, his closest and dearest kin. The poet is overwhelmed with the joy of return:

And now, again, my holy Ukraine,

I returned to your sacred land;

Do accept me, my nurse, for I am your child,

And for you I sing my song!⁴⁶

Yet Kernerenko’s love does not blind him: he is aware of Ukraine’s colonial un­derprivileged and humiliated status.

Kernerenko conveys this vision through the Shevchenkian peasant meta­phors (and even direct quotes). In his “Na stepakh Ukrainy” (On the Ukrainian Steppes), an itinerant Truth wanders throughout the land and sings the song be­moaning its native Ukraine, a decaying flower: the sun burns it, the winter dries it out, and the people abandon it. My unrhymed literal translation hardly con­veys the folk charm and succinct metaphors of Kernerenko’s verse:

What field is this stretching

That the sight cannot envelope?

Look at it: it’s only a dream

That something will rise.

This it is,—Ukraine,

Where the Truth wanders

And sings to everybody

A song with rebuke:

“Good folks, Ukraine

Fades as a flower.

The sun burns it, the wind dries it out,

Nobody cares about it.

The ploughed field over there

Is covered by weed.

And through that weed hardly grows

The planted seed.

It would have grown much better

If there had been more room.

If somebody cuts off the weed

The seed would start to rise!”⁴⁷

With a hidden rebuke to the negligent listeners, Truth depicts Ukraine as a field covered by weeds, preventing the growth of its grain-bearing stems. The final stanza is a crescendo of the national idea: uproot the weeds and let the field grow! Placed in a broader context, this second-person-singular vocative seems to sug­gest that it was Russification that prevented the Ukrainian field from growing— a dangerous and not inoffensive idea for a turn-of-the-century Ukrainian poet, let alone for a Jew.

As for most Ukrainian poets of his generation, Shevchenko had become for Kernerenko coterminous with both poetry and the Ukrainian people. In his “Rokovyny smerti Shevchenka” (Shevchenko’s Death Anniversary, ca. 1890), Kernerenko makes everybody in Ukraine aware of Shevchenko’s omnipresence:

A poor widow

And a girl impregnated by a lord

For whom you have shed your tears,

A barefoot bastard

Forgotten under a fence,

Who does not know his father’s name,

The high mountains

And steep slopes

And wide infinite steppes,

And the entire Ukraine

And even a child

Nowadays remember you!

Your mighty word,

The Dnieper has carried

And the wind spread it all over,

And your healthy grain—

Your honest word

Has planted in our hearts.

This great word

For us, disabled humans,

You have left in your songs:

How to live in the world,

How to love—

And you have glorified yourself forever.

While we, step by step,

Follow you

And plant your Fatherland

And sing songs

In which we pray the Lord

To give us at least one stem with grain.

Maybe it will come

That desirable time

And the stem will begin to blossom—

“The brothers would embrace one another

And the mother

Will look at them and smile.”⁴⁸

A redeemer who suffered for his people and died an untimely death, Shevchenko is on everybody’s mind and tongue.

There is little doubt that Kernerenko ignores those Shevchenko writings, such as “Haidamaky,” in which Jews are “them” and the “enemies” and Ukrai­nians, “us.” Kernerenko boldly includes himself, a Jew, among those associated with Ukraine and with “us.”⁵⁰ Continuing to elaborate the idea of Shevchenko’s all-embracing humanity, Kernerenko resorts to the Kobzar^,s “family” meta­phors, conveying his own self-identification with the Ukrainian people, in “Pam’iati Shevchenka” (To Shevchenko’s Memory, 1909). As human beings are children of God, all Ukrainians are Shevchenko’s children (Usi na Vkraiini/ Buly ioho dity). Shevchenko, sensitive to human suffering and grief, is a fighter for universal freedom (za spil’nuiu voliu). His death was the greatest sorrow for the Ukrainian people, but his immortal soul continues to live in the songs and in the “houses and palaces of Ukraine.”⁵¹