Reincarnations of the Bookbindery Shop

Pervomais’kyi’s emerged from what can be seen as his Irpen internal exile, not only with a four-volume collection of Heine in Ukrainian, but also with three of his own poetry collections, Uroky poezii (The Lessons of Poetry, 1968), Drevo piznannia (The Tree of Knowledge, 1971), and Vchora i zavtra (Yesterday and Tomorrow, 1974, posthumous).

The late Pervomais’kyi is a poet concerned with the phenomenology of po­etry. The parameters and attributes of poetry became objects of his intense po­etic reflection. Pervomais’kyi turned poetic signs, symbols, and metaphors of art and literature into living beings whose physical, if not biological, substance sub­jected them to the rules of nature and enabled them to live and die. “Life” came to signify for the poet the “text,” draft, original, or simply unwritten. Pervo­mais’kyi had walked a long way from his understanding of life as “the collective farm in Kherson Province” to his perception of “life” as “a noninvented novel” or even as a “draft” that cannot be rewritten.¹⁴²The live “letters” and the trust­worthy “paper” of his youth—those “cultural” metaphors from his book­bindery shop blotted out from the reprints of his works—resurfaced, now be­coming key metaphors in Pervomais’kyi’s poetic arsenal.

His new worldview changed his imagery. The attributes of the book, which in the 1920s Pervomais’kyi had depicted from the viewpoint of the binder, came to be replaced with the attributes of creative writing perceived by the poet and ar­ticulated by means of poetry.

Pervomais’kyi replaced traditional imagery with the metaphors of creativity even in such a canonic genre as the fairy tale. He did not tell a story about a poor girl and a prince looking for her; rather, he told a tale about a tale that ran away from the poet and went wandering through the fields and forests. The poet’s search for his beloved tale, a runaway piece of art, became a piece of art on its own.¹⁴⁴ Life acquired sense as soon as it was capable of becoming poetry. Poetry transcended life and turned into life’s sole teleological purpose. At the same time, nature entered the poetic realm as an immanent cultural experience. Po­etry tended not only to comprehend the world of nature but also to validate it aesthetically. Life provided poetry with imagery, and poetry furnished life with meaning. What was a poet’s grief, says Pervomais’kyi sadly observing early snows, “will become a verse, a poem.” Since poetry became coterminous with life, there could be no bad but only dead poetry. The poem “Mertva knyha” (A Dead Book, 1971), for instance, ironically equated reading such poetry with an imagined burial of what was once a decent poet.¹⁴⁵

Yet Pervomais’kyi’s new aesthetics had very little to do with hermetic self­seclusion, reductionism, postsymbolism, or escapism.

As if over a minefield

You walk at night on the edge of a line

And in the middle of the word—an acute pain,

And the hand becomes paralyzed and stops.

Inspired by a premonition and pain

And by your faith in the healing power of words

You are running the line, as if crossing a minefield

So that its fire would speedily consume you.¹⁴⁶

Pervomais’kyi turned to metaphors of art and culture because he viewed culture and art as doomed, shuffled, murdered, and posthumously neglected or mis­treated. Because his beautiful Ukrainian landscape lyrics were attacked for their lack of an ideological framework, the landscape poetry, as well as Ukrainian nature, joined the ranks of the victims that require empathy and mercy. His own experi­ence, as well as the experience of his closest friends and colleagues, only too well supported his new worldview. If the regime mistreated him, then in full accor­dance with his poetic principles and his bitter irony, he, Leonid Pervomais’kyi, the victimized Jew and much-criticized Ukrainian poet, deserved compassion. He seemed to be no better than his characters, such as Heine: like anybody else he was

prone to suffering, dreadful sickness, and death. Pervomais’kyi, a poet on the eve of physical extinction, emerged as his own new alter ego, with his idiosyncratic pre­monitions of senile ineptness, death, and oblivion.

Pervomais’kyi poignantly assumed that if the poet is mortal, then mortal is his ability poetically to convey thoughts and feelings. Pervomais’kyi confessed his vanishing ability to capture verbal signs:

If only the words would obey me

As the grass obeys the wind.... ¹⁴⁷

As he grew old and his poetic capacities betrayed him, he realized that the Faus­tian desire to still the fluidity of empirical reality by verbal means was no longer feasible. Bitterness overwhelmed him: “Come back, my doves, oh if only I could retain you, if you could remain with me here, on paper!”¹⁴⁸

Pervomais’kyi’s reflections on ars poetica, anything but “hermetic,” reveal his new attitude toward poetic sign and poetic writing. Pervomais’kyi reimagines po­etry as born from pain, grief, and distress. Human suffering becomes the main pre­requisite for the emerging poetical discourse. Phonetics, rhythm, prosody are vital but secondary. As if replicating Mandelshtam’s “Silentium” (“It has not been born yet. It is music and a word”), Pervomais’kyi views silence as an intrinsic element of poetry. Yet while Mandelshtam’s silence is the dumbness of the elements, the pri­mordial myth, a nonverbal music, and the utmost beauty, for Pervomais’kyi it is the result of oppression, victimization, and violence. Mandelshtam worships silence, aesthetically transforming it into the ultimate goal of verbal art. He seeks silence as “the crystal clear note which is inherently pristine.” Pervomais’kyi treats silence as dumbness; it envelops grief and conceals traces of violence; it is an imposed char­acteristic that has no reason to be worshipped.

Pervomais’kyi links silence to the birth pangs of art and perceives poetic art as an attempt to overcome silence. Poetry is a product of, and a remedy against, silence. As such, poetry is not necessarily liberation, although it does relieve pain. Poetry that is not born from silence and distress does not deserve our trust. The veracity of poetry—and its validity—is measured by the magnitude of per­sonal suffering, not by the nexus of sounds:

A poem starts not with a sound,

Although it must sound.

A poem starts with your silence,

When you can no more keep silent.

It starts not with a capital letter,

But with an enormous grief.

Then one can believe in it,

And only then you believe it.¹⁴⁹

Pervomais’kyi seems to argue that poetry is genuine when it originates from a surmounted grief, an overcome pain, or a shared suffering. Poetry (a feminine word in Ukrainian) herself is a victimized woman learning to speak and to ex­press herself. As soon as it is one’s intent, desire, or striving, something sought for but not yet achieved, it is coterminous with truth and therefore, trustworthy.

Pervomais’kyi became an intellectual poet, a poet-philosopher, and a poetic thinker, but not a mentor. The poet for him was never a guru; he was only a dis­ciple, constantly learning and doubting, and always on the move. The poet, therefore, merited his lofty name as long as he was seeking new forms and mean­ings. Poetry became a strict teacher who did not forgive the poet’s errors just as the metier of the sapper did not forgive his mistakes. In a letter to Leonid Vy- sheslavs’kyi, Pervomais’kyi noticed that his “poetic lessons” entailed only what he himself learned from poetry, not what he wanted to teach others.¹⁵⁰ Indeed, from one of his last verses, he himself emerges as an obedient and faithful disci­ple of poetry, who was continuously learning from it, as if from life:

For drinking and eating I’ve lost the knack. As if I never lived I am way off track. A failure, or maybe my time’s overdue. My lines

Are like those

Kids at school

Write askew.

Yes, I’ve lost the knack—but I will learn once more.... ¹⁵¹

Learning to live once again, whatever the person’s age and status, formed what Pervomais’kyi called “the lessons of poetry.” His was not only the readiness to self-improve but also an outcry for compassion: it seemed that a decrepit poet needed a lined notebook to begin learning how to write cursive script! It was no less ironic that Pervomais’kyi complained of the slippery reality and vanishing poetic capacity articulating his concepts in classic verse.

Pervomais’kyi inhabited his poetry with the figures of the victimized literati of various epochs and nations in their distress, on the brink of despair, on their deathbed, in prison, or facing execution. He introduced images of the agonized Franςois Villon, the poverty-stricken Du Fu, the deceased Mikhail Svetlov, and the excommunicated Spinoza. One of these characters was Cervantes, not ex­actly in his capacity as the author of the famous novel. Pervomais’kyi needed a historical Cervantes, not a literary one. Cervantes appeared in Pervomais’kyi’s poem as Cervantes the soldier, who, after the battle of Lepanto, was imprisoned by pirates and kept in Algerian captivity for five years (1575 - 80). There, in Alge­ria’s bagnos (prison-houses), the historical Cervantes became the aide to other soldiers and slaves, predominantly illiterate, who needed a scribe capable of writ­ing letters to those they hoped could ransom them.

Pervomais’kyi portrayed Cervantes the prisoner, a suffering and abandoned creature, also waiting for somebody who could raise his voice in his favor and put an end to his captivity. In his poem “Servantes v Alzhyri” (Cervantes in Algeria, 1968), Pervomais’kyi emphasizes the redeeming role of creative writing—capa­ble of liberating the serfs, emancipating the oppressed, and articulating the suf­ferings of the voiceless. However meager the result of the letters, petitions, and pleas written by Cervantes, he nevertheless succeeded in redeeming his fellow prisoners, although in an unusual manner:

You will not deceive them. Altogether and one by one

You will ransom them for a treasure you possess,

So that their sufferings, and pain, and your sympathy

Would come alive for us on a yellowed page.¹⁵²

Cervantes, according to and like Pervomais’kyi, identifies with the sufferings of the captives and redeems them through writing. He crafts his Don Quixote, a text-redeemer, through which he reaches out to the victims of injustice. An old yellowish book page acquires powerful divine potential, becomes the Messiah, and raises people from the dead. What Pervomais’kyi’s early characters rejected in The Beginning of Life and The Shetetl Ladeniu, in the late Pervomais’kyi reemerged with a new mission: immortalizing the voices of the voiceless, the abandoned, and the doomed. The only difference was that now poetry and poet and verbal signs and letters and books took the place of the victimized shtetl Jews trying to speak up and immortalize themselves in speech.