“A Rootless Cosmopolitan”

Once the Soviet army entered Kyiv, Pervomais’kyi came home only to find his prewar archive annihilated, his apartment emptied, his books burnt, and his pi­ano appropriated by his neighbors.

In the late 1940s, Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign shocked Soviet Jews, long considered among the most loyal national minorities in the Soviet Union. Re­cent views do not treat the campaign as directed against Jews qua Jews. Scholars argue that it targeted one of many Soviet ethnic groups, which after the estab­lishment of the State of Israel in 1948 suddenly morphed into another “Diaspora nationality.”¹⁰² But what might reshape our understanding of political history can hardly alter cultural history, in this case the response of the victims to, and their perception of, the 1948 - 49 campaign—which swiftly engulfed Pervo­mais’kyi. Sava Holovanivs’kyi and most of the memoirists writing in the era of Shcherbyts’kyi and Brezhnev wrote vaguely of the “malevolent” situation in which Pervomais’kyi found himself or the “unjustified criticism” directed against the poet.¹⁰³

In fact, the campaign slowly mounted toward a state-sponsored pogrom. In 1948, reporting to the Kremlin a successful implementation of the party decla­ration with respect to the Russian journals Zvezda and Leningrad, the Ukrainian party leadership incited Jewish writers against Ukrainians. Sava Holovanivs’kyi allowed himself to be bullied into the campaign against the creme de la creme of Ukrainian poets, whom the regime’s sycophants accused of Ukrainian national­ism. In his shameful presentation at a meeting of Belorussian writers in Minsk on December 24, 1948, Holovanivs’kyi made the most vicious accusations against Maxim Ryl’s’kyi, a key figure from the “executed renaissance” who miraculously survived the purges of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the 1930s.¹⁰⁴ The next year Holovanivs’kyi, Pervomais’kyi, and other Ukrainian-Jewish lite­rati found themselves at the epicenter of the witch hunt against “rootless cos­mopolitans,” Stalin’s euphemism for the Jews. At that point the Kremlin suc­cessfully enticed several influential Ukrainian writers to attack the Jewish ones.

To neutralize the Jewish cultural leadership on the eve of his antisemitic campaign, Stalin gave the order to murder Solomon Mikhoels (1890-1948), the first chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater (GOSSET). Yiddish writers in Ukraine, Pervo­mais’kyi’s neighbors from the Rolit house, had little doubt that the death of Mikhoels was part of a well-conceived scheme. Shortly thereafter the leading of­ficials of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, most of them outstanding Yiddish writers and poets, were arrested and accused of espionage on behalf of various foreign intelligence services. Terror settled into the Soviet Jewish neighborhood for an indefinite period. For those Jews who were not arrested, the right of pas­sage required public repentance for one’s guilt for “kowtowing to the West” and “negligence toward the socialist motherland.” Unlike most of his colleagues, Pervomais’kyi refused to do so. He flatly denied the accusations against him, sto­ically endured the attacks, and rejected the opportunity of a “court of honor.”

Although the two poets left only vague allusions to the time of persecutions, some revealing details appeared in a secret report, “The response of the Kyiv in­telligentsia to the dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and arrests of Jewish nationalists” that the minister of state security (MGB) Lieutenant General Savchenko submitted to Nikita Khrushchev, then the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Among the variety of suspicious reactions of Kievan writers to the arrest of the Soviet Jewish lead­ership, as reported by the poet Andrii Malyshko (1912-70), was this one: “The neighbors saw through the window how the poet Pervomais’kyi, having learned about the arrests of Gofshteyn and especially Fefer, grabbed his head with his hands and stroked his head against a table in his room. Then he poured vodka from the bottle and drank entire glasses one by one: the scoundrel that he was, he was trembling for his own life.”¹⁰⁵

According to Sergei Parkhomovsky, Malyshko’s testimony is unreliable: Per- vomais’kyi lived on the fifth floor, his neighbors could not see him through the window in any possible way, and he did not confess to Malyshko over a bottle of brandy.¹⁰⁶ Would Pervomais’kyi have drunk less if only one of them, say, Gof- shteyn, had been arrested? Perhaps Malyshko’s calumny and its prompt accep­tance by the minister of state security demonstrate that the authorities and their puppets in the Union of Writers perceived Pervomais’kyi as an idiosyncratic “rootless cosmopolitan.” In Malyshko’s eyes, he was no Ukrainian poet but still Illia Shliomovych Hurevych, a Jewish parasite on the pristine body of Ukrainian belles lettres or a malignant tumor to be cut off, as Iurii Smolych suggested at the writers’ plenum, referring to the “cosmopolitans” in general.

The first attack against Pervomais’kyi came as a result of the servile response of the Ukrainian authorities to the Communist Party decree “On One Group of Theatrical Critics,” targeting by and large those literati who were of Jewish origin.¹⁰⁷ Deploying the language of violence created in Moscow, Liubomyr Dmyterko (1911-85), one of the top bureaucrats in the Union of the Ukrainian Soviet Writers and a volunteer stool pigeon, appeared on the tribune of the Sec­ond Plenum of the Union of the Ukrainian Soviet Writers with hideous accusa­tions against Ukrainian critics now publicly exposed as Jews and social parasites. Dmyterko’s patriotic hammer fell on the heads of such rootless cosmopolitans as Gan (Kagan), Martych (Finkelstein), Zhadanov (Lifshyts), and others. For those who doubted their treacherous dual identity, Dmyterko conveniently pro­vided their real names in brackets following their Ukrainian pen names. Al­though Dmyterko spared Pervomais’kyi this kind of personal disclosure, he still placed him among other rootless cosmopolitans, such as Abram Gozenpud, a Ukrainian musicologist, also accused of “kowtowing to the West.”

Analyzing Pervomais’kyi’s presentation “Lesia Ukrainka and Modernity” at the 1946 session of the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Dmyterko emphasized that “like Gozenpud and others, on each and every page of his report Leonid Pervomais’kyi confirms that the only criterion of the value of Lesia Ukrainka is her place in world literature, her links with the world literature. The names of Heine, George Sand, Beecher-Stowe, Des- bordes-Valmore, Browning and other male and female foreigners are incessantly blinking in front of our eyes.”¹⁰⁸ That is to say, demonstrating Lesia’s place in the Western literary canon, Pervomais’kyi, as it were, attempted to introduce harmful concepts into Soviet literature.

It is hardly possible to identify Dmyterko’s literary secretaries who helped him to indict Pervomais’kyi for pro-Zionist sympathies, a dreadful crime in the wake of the trial against the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, some of whose members had faced similar accusations. Dmyterko did not seem to be particu­larly familiar with Pervomais’kyi’s early writings and hence was scarcely capable of concocting on his own the elaborate and murderous literary analysis with which he appeared at the plenum. Yet what followed in his report was based on an inquisitorial reading of Pervomais’kyi’s contemporary wartime poetry as com­pared with his earlier writings on Jewish themes.

It turned out that in his book Soldats’ki pisni (Soldiers’ Songs) Perov- mais’kyi, then a war correspondent with Soviet troops in Romania, penned a poem depicting a lyric hero “whose memory was covered with snows on his road to distant Sinaia.” Dmyterko rightly suggested that Pervomais’kyi’s context pre­supposed the small town in Romania. But the imagery of the poem, he claimed, rejected that simpleminded reading. The poem runs as follows:

What was it, a face or a voice?

Or a sudden cry from the darkness?

A cloudy sky like a knife or a wing

Split, and you appeared.

How could you come, powerless?

It’s so far, gloomy, and dark.

Look at soldiers’ graves—

Is mine one among them?

I am alive, here, behind the snows,

And the winds blow out my steps,

Three thousand miles between us,

And maybe three thousand years.¹⁰⁹

Dmyterko compares the metaphors and imagery of this poem to Pervomais’kyi’s story “Bl’oknot blukan’” (A Notebook of Wanderings), in which an old Jewish woman from Priluky leaves Ukraine for Palestine, since nothing but graves con­nect her to her native land.

Having traced parallels between the “graves” in Pervomais’kyi’s story and the “graves” in his wartime poem, Dmyterko moves to conclusions that resonate as an outward verdict. Pervomais’kyi, he argues, associates the Romanian town of Sinaia with Mount Sinai, “on which, according to the legend, three thousand years ago Moses proclaimed his law.” He does not continue the comparison but makes clear—with good reasons—that the unknown voice in Pervomais’kyi’s poem is the voice of the old Jewish lady and that Pervomais’kyi finally comes to care about the graves. “Three thousand years” are those separating Moses, the lawgiver, and Pervomais’kyi. Moreover, according to Dmyterko, who again quotes the poem, Pervomais’kyi presents his biblical allusions in the finale of the poem as “the only thing that I had and I have.” How could Pervomais’kyi, a So­viet poet, exclaims Dmyterko indignantly, allow himself to write something like that?

The resolution of the plenum firmly placed Pervomais’kyi with other Ukrai­nian writers and critics of Jewish origin. He was found guilty of “decadent mo­tifs” and of “rootless” and “antipatriotic” cosmopolitanism.¹¹¹ A campaign against him in the press followed, albeit measures by the security organs did not, apparently because Mykola Rudenko (1920-2004), the renowned dissident of the 1970s and in 1949 head of the Communist Party committee within the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, refused to submit a “negative” recommendation on him. This was perhaps one of the manifestations of the cunning politics of the authorities, who intended to humiliate but not destroy the poet. Pervomais’kyi found himself in a state of suspense aggravated not only by the disappearance of the Yiddish literati, some of whom were among his friends and whose fate re­mained unknown, but also by the response of his colleagues in the Union of Writers.

Dmyterko’s report at the plenum of the Union of the Ukrainian Writers stirred insidious emotions among the participants. Some praised the public at­tacks against Pervomais’kyi, Martych, and Holovanivs’kyi and scolded Ryl’s’kyi and Bazhan for their too moderate criticism of those “rootless cosmopolitans.” According to information obtained by the MGB, even the most moderate writ­ers admitted after the plenum that they had participated in a frank and useful discussion. Pervomais’kyi immediately grasped the origins of the campaign. The head of the state security apparatus noted that after the plenum the poet was re­ported to have made it clear that the critique against him was state orchestrated: “Today—myself and Holovasnivs’kyi, tomorrow—others. Things are going smoothly, they are well oiled.”¹¹²

What his accusers could not accomplish in a single attack they managed to achieve in a protracted siege. Persecutions against Pervomais’kyi lasted for years, taking the form of articles in the press, accusations at the meetings of the Union of Writers, anonymous letters, and a controlled wave of state-sponsored popular indignation that exposed his purportedly subversive activities. Pervomais’kyi was depressed and switched to Yiddish when talking to his Jewish interlocutors. L. Drob’iazko recalled how he once met with Bela Kipnis, the wife of the Yiddish writer Itsik Kipnis, near the Rolit building. Bela Kipnis remarked: “Pervo­mais’kyi is having a hard time. He began talking to me today in Yiddish.” The memoirist explained, “When Pervomais’kyi was going through another round of complications with the authorities, he deliberately switched to Yiddish in daily life.”¹¹³

Perhaps around that time Volodymyr Sosiura, a friend from his youth and a neighbor, penned an epigram poem in which Pervomais’kyi appeared sad and unwelcoming, as if the pain of “the tragedy of the Jewish people” had been painted on his face.¹¹⁴ Against all odds, Pervomais’kyi continued to pen his satirical epigrams, first and foremost against Dmyterko and his clique, but there were moments when epigrams failed to sustain his ability to resist the vio- lence.¹¹5

A couple of months after Stalin’s death, Pervomais’kyi made sure that his at­titude to the atrocities of the regime and his empathy for the victims was put in black and white. With the country still in turmoil after Stalin’s death, the thaw barely begun, and paralyzing fear still the rule, one finds Pervomais’kyi’s 1953 poetic experiment suicidal. At the time nobody dared speak against Stalin or doubt his immortal decisions. Against this backdrop, Pervomais’kyi seems to have been one of the very few writers in the Soviet Union publicly dismissing Stalin’s authority and celebrating the rehabilitation of the ten Kremlin doctors. To be sure, Pervomais’kyi resorted to Aesopian language and to an unusual genre—children’s poetry—yet his words acquired far-reaching, if not rebel­lious overtones.

In the November 1953 issue of Literaturna hazeta, Pervomais’kyi published a couple of children’s poems, one of which had the following lines: “What should I do to remain healthy? I must always listen to what the doctors say!”¹¹⁶ Nine months after the “doctors’ plot” and Stalin’s sudden death, this was a risky state­ment. If one agrees with this reading of the poem as allegory, one must admit that it implied, among other things, that Stalin died because he did not listen to his doctors, and that doctors deserve nothing but admiration and gratitude. Sig­nificantly, Pervomais’kyi singled the doctors out not as Jews but rather as victims of persecution and torture: because the victimized had a chance to familiarize themselves with the regime better than anybody else, they embody the utmost truth about the regime and one should hearken to them particularly, since they know the political diagnosis. This reading does not seem too improbable in view of Pervomais’kyi’s later nonviolent counterattacks against his staunch enemies.