Raia was a virtuoso of libertinage.
Her eroticism was phenomenal: her J physical desire seemed to be oozing out of her small being. In her presence one could experience a physically perceptible emanation.
The air around her was saturated with the fluorescence of her body.
Once you came closer to her, crossing this boundary, it seemed as if you found yourself amidst the currencies that made your head go round, your heart beat fiercely, and your breath gasp with a sole desire—a desire for the body of that small, miniature libertine.” This passage from Iurii Smolych’s Intymna spovid’ (An Intimate Confession, 1948) is one of the rare live testimonies about the mysterious poetess Raisa Troianker, the author of two collections of Ukrainian poetry, one Russian collection, and a number of verse and prose compositions that have been irretrievably lost.1Raia, diminutive of Raisa, arrived in Kharkiv in the mid-1920s; she moved to Leningrad five years later, leaving behind many good friends—most of whom, unlike Smolych, did not survive the 1930s, penned no memoirs, had their private archives destroyed by the NKVD, and left zero testimony about her. To further complicate the matter, her books of poetry were never reprinted and ended up in rare book or archival collections. Troianker seems to have been doomed to oblivion. According to the meager available sources, however, she was not unpopular in the Ukrainian literary milieu. Apparently she was the first Jewish poet to craft Ukrainian literary images of the shtetl and its traditional inhabitants, but it was her erotic poetry celebrating the emancipated female body that made her the talk of the town. When the communist censorship was finally lifted, a prominent Soviet literary critic proudly called Troianker “a Ukrainian Sappho,” hinting at the centrality of eroticism and feminine ego in her poetry and neglecting that the
“Ukrainian Sappho” had been born in a shtetl, was of Jewish origin, and engaged in love affairs with male, not female, literati. Recently a few postmodernist and feminist articles on Troianker have appeared in Ukrainian periodicals.
Yet by and large Raia Troianker remains a terra incognita. Only the recent discovery of part of Troianker’s family archive, which moved from Kharkiv to Leningrad to Murmansk to Moscow to Berlin, sheds light on the life circumstances of perhaps the first Ukrainian female poet of Jewish descent.Troianker’s life is best imagined as a narrative of a middle-level indigenous female who began to write and speak her body, striving to achieve self-emancipa- tion.2 Her fate and literary career exemplified a fascination with Ukrainian culture and an abrupt attempt to construe a new postrevolutionary Ukrainian Jew. Troianker’s shifts from Jewish to Ukrainian-Jewish to Ukrainian to the imperial Russian testify to her identity quest, shaped to a great extent by her personal and external circumstances. In the 1930s, when the Kremlin wiped out Ukrainian national revival, Troianker had to adapt her Ukrainian-Jewish self-identification to what both political and cultural historians would call a neocolonial environment. For a very brief period between 1925 and 1930, Troianker attempted to synthesize Ukrainian and Jewish themes while also pondering her shtetl, erotic, and urban experiences. Paradoxically, she started her career as a Ukrainian poet, imitating Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), who inspired, decolonized, and influenced her feminine poetic expression. And she ended up as a follower of Nikolai Gumilev (1886-1921), the Russian double of Rudyard Kipling, known for his imperialist anthems. This very transition, replicated by her shift from Ukrainian to Russian poetry writing, manifested the short-lived Ukrainian revival of the 1920s, in which Troianker performed a secondary yet remarkably peculiar role.