Posthumous Fate
Following his rehabilitation, Kulyk’s name made its way into anti-Stalin publications in the Russian and Ukrainian press. A new edition of his Notes of a Consul, a small book of selected poems, and a heavily censored yet informative volume of memoirs about him, The Poet of Revolution, were published.
To get the Russian107 edition published, the Ukrainian critic Ihor PostupaFskyi personally petitioned the patriarch of Soviet ideology, Mikhail Suslov, to “push Goslitizdat to publish Kulyk’s 1936 Russian book.”131 The numerous Ukrainian publications on his career and poetry stressed his patriotism but mostly avoided dwelling on Kulyk’s dedication to Ukrainian revivalism, and they were uniformly silent on his real name and nationality.132 But at least as a genuine rhapsodist of proletarian internationalism, Kulyk was allowed a posthumous return. It is significant that Kulyk was rehabilitated both as a revolutionary and an artist. Revisiting his own reflections on Kulyk from the 1920s, Oleksandr Bilets’kyi analyzed Kulyk’s formal perfection and suggested that there was a clear distinction between Kulyk and other ideologically engaged poet-propagandists: Kulyk’s intonation “demonstrates a profound difference between political agitation in poetry and poetry that agitates by what it is.”133
Yet Kulyk’s story did not end there. As in many other cases, Kulyk’s public rehabilitation inspired those who wanted to see him return not only to the distant relatives who survived Stalin’s purges but also to the ordinary readers. Two people had launched the campaign to commemorate Kulyk. One was Haim Beider, a Ukrainian journalist from Kam’ianets’-Podil’s’kyi who in the 1980s became one of the editors of the Moscow Yiddish monthly Sovyetish Heymland and in the 1990s acted as a correspondent for the New York Forverts.
The other was Leonid Pervomais’kyi, by then a living Ukrainian classic of Jewish descent, who will be discussed in chapter 4. It is no accident that two Ukrainian Jews started this project. After the short-lived thaw had shaped new cultural policies in Ukraine, Beider painstakingly reconstructed the details of Kulyk’s activities in Kam’ianets’-Podil’s’kyi and promoted the placing of a memorial plaque in Kulyk’s honor in the town.134 Beider also gathered Kulyk’s publications from dozens of American socialist and Ukrainian periodicals, found copies of Kulyk’s poetry that had survived purges of libraries and private collections, commissioned those who knew Kulyk in the 1920s and 1930s to write memoirs, and put together a two-volume collection of selected poetry, translations, and prose; a separate volume of memoirs; and his own book on Kulyk’s life and works.135 Of these, only the book of memoirs saw the light of the day, albeit mutilated by Soviet censorship. References to Kulyk’s efforts on behalf of Jews and his Ukrainian political sympathies were eliminated, and his nationally conscious Ukrainian memoirs were thoroughly purged.Yet Beider and Pervomais’kyi were unable to publish posthumous collection of Kulyk’s work. In 1966, Beider wrote Pervomais’kyi (who considered it a matter of honor to foster Kulyk’s return to Ukrainian belles lettres).136 In a letter of September 13, 1967, Pervomais’kyi praised Beider’s “heroic research efforts”
and encouraged him to pitch the book to Dnipro Publishers, one of the major Ukrainian publishing houses, for their series on Ukrainian writers. Pervo- mais’kyi helped Beider publish Kulyk’s letters to Maxim Gorky in Literaturna Ukraina and perhaps also in Radians’ke Iiteraturoznavstvo; formed a commission on Kulyk’s legacy in the Union of Ukrainian Writers; and campaigned to commemorate Kulyk through films, publications, and memorial plaques, as well as by naming a street, a library, and a steamship after him.
In summer 1968, critically ill, Pervomais’kyi shared his fascination with the results of Beider’s archival discoveries and guided Beider’s search for Kulyk’s autobiography, located somewhere in the huge military and party archives. In early fall, Beider submitted a prospectus for a multivolume collection of Kulyk’s writings that Pervomais’kyi’s high standards reduced to three volumes.Knowing that manuscripts were often confiscated and burned, Pervo- mais’kyi simultaneously convinced the management of the Literature and Art Archive, Museum of Ukraine, to establish a separate collection for Ivan Kulyk and asked Beider to submit the materials he had amassed. Beider worked productively: by 1969, the first two volumes of Kulyk’s collected works were sent to Dnipro, and Pervomais’kyi pushed Beider to expedite the third volume. Pervo- mais’kyi did his best to get his former mentor’s edition through the red tape of the Kyiv literary bureaucracy. His cautious comment that “the publishing situation has become very complicated” and “we should not give the publishers any grounds to accuse us of procrastination” is a transparent hint at the fact that some unnamed forces were making trouble and looking for a good pretext to block publication.
Pervomais’kyi was right to push Beider: the days of Petro Shelest were numbered, and changes in the Communist Party apparatus badly damaged Ukrainian literature. Beider had submitted two volumes of Kulyk’s works, with commentary, but as Pervomais’kyi wrote to him in a letter of September 24, 1970, work on the edition was moving very slowly. The principal editor noted in a conversation that Dnipro Publishers had not even begun the editorial process. In October, however, a dim light began to shine at the end of the tunnel: the chief editor ordered work to begin on the Kulyk edition, promising to send it to an outside reviewer as soon as possible and suggesting that the review of the some two thousand pages of manuscript would be completed by January 1971. Simultaneously, Beider worked on the volume of selected memoirs, a project that was supported in many different ways by Pervomais’kyi.
In January 1971, the review, most likely positive, supporting the publication of the edition was ready (if the review had been negative, Pervomais’kyi would have said so). Then Oles Hon- char (1918-95), one of the top authorities in Ukrainian Soviet literature, commissioned the Committee on Cinema to make a film on Kulyk. Pervomais’kyi himself reedited the volume of memoirs and in passing mentioned in his letter to Beider that Kulyk’s collected works had been sent to another reviewer. In Soviet bureaucratic language, such a move implied serious ideological obstacles to publication. To protect themselves, the publishers commissioned another review, expecting it to be positive.By late 1971 the publishers had demanded the elimination of the “ideologically dubious” third volume (containing Kulyk’s journalism supporting Ukrainian revivalism) and promised to include the two-volume edition in their publication plans for 1973; they repeated this promise the following year. But eventually Kulyk’s collection was dropped. In the early 1970s, a penniless Beider moved from Kam’ianets’-Podil’s’kyi to Leningrad, where he could not find any employment, and then to Birobidzhan, where he switched from Ukrainian journalism to Yiddish. When Pervomais’kyi passed away, the committee on Kulyk’s legacy became a phantom, and all plans to publish the edition of Kulyk’s work were dropped. Most likely Iurii Smolych, then head of the Union of Writers, prevented the publication of Kulyk’s selected writings—apparently taking ex post facto revenge, as Kulyk in the 1920s had prevented the publication of several of Smolych’s novels and his Uzh journal and had interceded with the authorities in Moscow to cancel the premiere of Smolych’s play “On the Other Side of the Heart.”137
Still, to some extent Kulyk was lucky. His reentry into Ukrainian literary scene occurred decades before that of his colleagues, for example, Khvyl’ovyi. Some of his texts managed to reach the readers in the 1960s.
By 1972, the decade-long Ukrainian cultural revival had been suppressed. The last attempt to reconcile communism and the Ukrainian idea resulted in mass arrests of the leading nationally minded public and literary figures, court hearings behind closed doors, ugly scenes of public recantation by some of the major harbingers of Ukrainian revivalism, and long prison sentences for those who resisted. After 1991, Ukrainian intellectuals abandoned their attempts to bring together revolutionary universalism, proletarian internationalism, and the Ukrainian national idea. And Ivan, alias Izrail Iudovych Kulyk, became altogether redundant.Conclusion
Kulyk’s anti-imperial stance informed his quest for a Ukrainian identity, his literary endeavors, his wide array of the images of the colonized and oppressed, and his discovery of Marxism. He crafted a fascinating synthesis of far-left proletarian internationalism and moderate class-based Ukrainian revivalism. In a sense, he sided with the rising Ukrainian national communism before it emerged as a state policy. His attempts to Ukrainianize ethnic, social, and cultural conflicts in Canada (Metis and Native American Indians) and the United States (African Americans), was unprecedented, as were his attempts to Ukrainianize himself. Whatever Kulyk said in the mid-1930s about the suicidal Mykola Khvyfovyi (a proponent of a European cultural orientation for Ukrainians) should not overshadow the fact that Kulyk was his double, although much more class oriented and conformist. Whatever his stalwart Marxist convictions and prominence in the Bolshevik establishment, Kulyk’s emphasis on Ukrainian identity had no place in the newly chauvinistic Soviet Marxism. And his omnipresent revolutionary utopianism became suspect once the Communist Party replaced its internationalist slogans with glorification of the construction of socialism in one country.
As long as Kulyk’s Ukrainian-speaking Marxism coincided with the party line, he remained a central figure and was safe.
But after the suppression of the Ukrainian national revival, Kulyk found himself conspicuously on the wrong— actually right—political fringe. At the same time, and particularly after the failure of the regime to foster a communist victory in Spain, Kulyk’s internationalism remained dangerously to the left of what had become the mainstream. Kulyk made a heroic effort to rectify his position. He stressed the preponderance of his Marxist over his artistic, Ukrainian national, and Jewish inclinations. He presented himself as a pure Marxist fighter for anticolonialist groups. Yet Stalinism had entirely altered the international anticolonial discourse—which now had to be Russocentric and Moscow-based. Kulyk’s Ukrainian anticolonialism had no chance, despite the almost complete suppression of its Jewish connotations and ideologically pristine class-based imagery. Kulyk’s case proves that a Ukrainian- Jewish identity based on Marxist principles was a political phantom. Yet a puzzle remains: among the Bolsheviks starring in Vynnychenko’s Between Two Powers, why was the only supporter of Ukraine—as well Sofia’s lover and unsuccessful redeemer—a Jew?