Subverting Leviathan

THE struggle for discursive CONTROL IN THE SOVIET UNION

There were strong messianic undercurrents in the revolutionary period of 1917-23. Siniavsky and Berdiaev are among those who have argued that an unacknowledged religious motivation, an inverted form of faith, fuelled the revolutionary zeal and commitment to apocalyptic change in many communists.

In 1922 the Ukrainian republic became a founding member of the Soviet Union. Although the period of imperial rule that had begun with Peter in 1721 had formally ended, it was clear to everyone that Moscow had not relinquished its rule over the vast territory it had inherited. A belief in Russian hegemony continued to dictate policies and attitudes in formally independent republics. In the early twenties, Russian bolsheviks expected that the planned modernization of the Ukrainian republic, led by local “national bolsheviks” under Moscow’s tutelage, would create a state socialist in spirit, one that was national only “in form.” Most leaders in Moscow and many Russians in Ukraine assumed that Ukrainians would willingly assimilate to what they con­sidered the superior, more progressive Russian culture. This would lead to cultural convergence and, ultimately, to homogeneity in the form of a “pan-Russian” identity. However, the creation of a national republic and its successes in Ukrainianizing the state, the schools, and the indigenous working class boosted the national movement.⁷ The Ukrainian nation-building process was aided enormously by the insti­tutionalization of the Ukrainian language and state, in spite of the fact that concerted efforts were made “to integrate the populist mythol­ogemes and icons into Soviet mythology.”⁸ The mid- and late-twenties were characterized by a struggle between Russian centralizing and hegemonist views, on the one hand, and the growing assertiveness of national republics and their indigenous cultures on the other.

In viewing the Revolution of 1917-20 as a complete historical rupture, one obscures the continuities in power relations, ideology, and culture that continued to shape life under the new regime. Poorly concealed behind slogans like the “friendship of nations” and the “alliance of workers and peasants” lay expressions of the doctrine of coercive Russification, which still governed many aspects of postrevo­lutionary society. An early example can be seen in the “struggle of two cultures” theory, which was proclaimed by party leaders in Ukraine in the early twenties. It held that the Russian culture was the superior, urban culture and would, in a Darwinian contest of cultural strength, gradually absorb Ukrainian culture. Although the theory was officially condemned at the twelfth party congress in 1923, the attitude it reflected continued to dominate among Russian party leaders and the rank and file.⁹ In 1923, within the Communist Party of Ukraine, Ukrainians in fact constituted only the third largest ethnic group (after Russians and Jews). The influence and role of Ukrainians in the party began to change only in 1925 when Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s hand-picked deputy, was sent to Ukraine to breathe life into the Ukrainianization policy, while simultaneously taking firm control of it.

The majority of Russian political leaders and cultural figures had been educated on disparaging or hostile attitudes toward Ukrainians. In the twenties, literary portrayals still frequently stereotyped Ukraini­ans as unsophisticated or brutal peasants subject to outbursts of violent and irrational nationalism. Mikhail Bulgakov’s Days of the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh, 1926), the most popular Russian play of the postrevolu­tionary years, and his novel The White Guards (Belaia gvardiia, 1925) are influential examples. They portray the Ukrainian nationalist move­ment during the Revolution either as an operatic display of national regalia behind which stood the German army (Hetman Skoropadsky’s government) or as the “peasant horde” so detested by the author (the troops loyal to Symon Petliura).

The image of a beleaguered cultured class carrying the white man’s burden in Kyiv is supported by an array of motifs: the upper-floor apartment that is described as a ship being deserted by rats, the clock that plays Boccherini’s minuet, the cream-coloured blinds, the singing of the tsarist national anthem and, from Anton Rubinstein’s opera, “The Demon,” based on Lermontov’s poem.

The demonization of the Ukrainian national movement by linking it to a barbaric peasantry is achieved in several ways. A brief scene is set in the headquarters of the First Cavalry Division. It portrays Colonel Bolbotun first interrogating a deserter and then verbally abusing and punching a bootmaker, possibly a Jew, who has been found near the camp with a basket-load of boots and is suspected of being a spy. The scene derives its strength partly from the contrast it presents with the more dignified behaviour of the White officers. This scene, however, is almost the only one in which the Ukrainian language is used. It is full of coarse expressions with an admixture of Russian words. The earlier version of 1925 also contained a scene in which three Ukrai­nian-speaking bandits rob the Turbins’ downstairs neighbours. It is suggested that the robbery is an expropriation by Petliura’s troops: one intruder wears the military cap of Petliura’s army, while the other is described as “wolf-like” in appearance. However, a literal demoniza­tion occurs in a scene that was eventually dropped from the first version. In it Aleksei is visited by a nightmarish devil-like character that recalls one of Dostoevsky’s self-projections. The vision is dressed in bad taste and wears a morning coat in the style of the 1870s. After bringing “greetings” from Dostoevsky, he speaks of the impoverished and dangerous peasantry for whom “human dignity is a superfluous burden.”¹⁴ The fact that this vision is an incarnation of the barbaric muzhyk is made clear at the end of the scene.

The production played a key role in rehabilitating the Whites, the protsarist military, and their slogan of a single, indivisible Russia. It was a box office success that played 987 times at the Moscow Art Theatre (MκhAτ) alone. In an amended version that contained the scene in which the downstairs neighbours, Vasilisa and Vanda, are robbed it was performed in 1927 in Riga, in 1928 in Berlin and Breslau, then later in Prague, London, Narva, Warsaw, and New York. Banned in the Soviet Union in February 1929, at the time of Stalin’s attack on Bukharin and the Right Opposition, it was restaged in Moscow on 18 February 1932, apparently at the request of Stalin himself, who liked the play and saw it fifteen times. It continued to play to sold- out audiences. Many viewers reported being deeply moved by the “discovery” that the Whites could indeed be honourable human beings and Russian patriots. At the same time, the play reinforced disdain for the Ukrainian national movement and peasantry, which, viewers could only conclude, was more alien to the new regime than the counterrevolutionary monarchists. The “humanization” of the counterrevolutionary White officer class was, ironically, coupled with the “dehumanization” of a recalcitrant Ukrainian population. It was no accident, of course, that the revival of the play coincided with the attack on the Ukrainian national movement and the peasantry during the collectivization and famine. Nikolai Ostrovsky’s propagandistic How the Steel Was Tempered (Kak zakalialas stal, 1932-34), which portrayed the fighters for independence as chauvinists and anti­semites with no redeeming features, was also canonized at this time. The book went through fifty editions before 1936. In subsequent years it was continually reprinted and used to indoctrinate secondary school youth.

Ukrainian writers protested both the one-sided portrayal of the national movement and the demeaning attitude to their language and cultural symbols. The protest, however, had no apparent effect on Stalin. Bulgakov’s play became the most debated theatrical event of the postrevolutionary decade, but its political message failed to charm many viewers. Walter Benjamin, who saw the play in Moscow on 14 December 1926, called it “an absolutely revolting provocation. Especially the last act, in which the white guards ‘convert’ to bolshe­vism, is as dramatically insipid as it is intellectually mendacious. The communist opposition to the production is justified and significant. Whether this final act was added on at the request of the censors, as Reich [Benjamin’s guide in Moscow] claims, or whether it was there all along has no bearing whatsoever on the assessment of the play. (The audience was noticeably different from the ones I had seen in the other two theatres. It was as if there were not a single communist present, not a black or blue tunic in sight.)”¹⁶

It is clear from Bulgakov’s other writings that he viewed the Ukrai­nian movement as the embodiment of chaos, violence and evil. His story “I Killed” (Ia ubil, 1926) is a scene from Kyiv in February 1919, when Petliura’s troops were losing control of the city and conducting pogroms. His stories “The Raid” (Nalet, 1923) and the unfinished “To a Secret Friend” (Tainomu drugu, 1929) relate the beating of a Jew by Cossacks. Bulgakov, however, went beyond a condemnation of atroci­ties committed by the nationalists. A contempt for what he perceived to be half-educated, wild, primitive, and inchoate seemed to lie at the root of his aversion to things Ukrainian. In “Kyiv-City” (Kiev-gorod, 1923), which was composed during a return to the city, probably to gather material for his novel and play, he expresses regret at the pass­ing of the world of his youth. He calls Kyiv the “mother of Russian cities,” a traditional imperial designation that elides its millennial his­tory into that of Russia. He reserves particular animosity for Petliura, who has disturbed the faith in a single Russian identity and, as in his play, he ends with a wish that the tsar-like (tsarstvennyi) city might rise again and “the memory of Petliura might perish.”¹⁷ The contempt for the half-baked is evident in his irritation at the appearance of hastily made street signs in Ukrainian, some of which are ungrammatical, although the cause of his infuriation at others appears to stem simply from his inability to understand them. Another new creation, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, whose priests are remark­ably active, drives him to distraction. He is appalled that the Ukrainian language is used in church services in St Sophia’s Cathedral while the Russian Orthodox serve their mass in a small nearby church festooned with ancient cobwebs. He spitefully suggests that the Ukrainians are praying for Petliura’s return - prayers, he insists, that God will not answer. The text shows a colonialist’s anger at the insolence of natives who demand visibility and linguistic and cultural rights in a republic that is, at least nominally, theirs. The visitor takes his revenge on the changes by comparing the city unfavourably with his new home, Moscow. The local population is less dynamic, the city lags two years behind the Union capital (“the nep is slowly rolling towards the periph­ery”), and Kyivites are cut off from the flow of information at the cen­tre. More than this, “their putrefying proximity to places which gave birth to various Tiutiunnyks [the name of a famous commander of the Ukrainian People’s Republic’s army] and, finally, their belief - born of igig - in the fragility of earthly things” allows them to place excessive faith in marketplace gossip.¹⁸ The sniping tone manages to suggest indirectly that the current political and cultural concessions to the national movement are not permanent.

The trauma of ιgιg remained with Bulgakov. His vision of a homog­enized and complete Russian culture with long-established norms was thrown into confusion by the appearance of a national movement whose existence he had not suspected and continued to deny. His writings on Ukraine can be seen as an attempt to put the genie back into the bottle by reintegrating events of the period into a dominant and satisfying cultural pattern. The fact that many readers have unquestioningly accepted the portrayal of the Ukrainian revolution as a senseless and brutal force testifies to the success of his writings. The play and, especially, his novel, which is still widely used to teach students about the events of the Revolution, adopt a strategy of rep­resentational containment by denying the subaltern the ability to speak in its own voice.

Maksim Gorky, upon his triumphant return to the USSR in 1g28, also made disparaging comments about the Ukrainian language when he “categorically opposed” the translation of his work and expressed amazement at the fact that efforts continued to transform the “dialect into a language.” He claimed that by doing so, Ukrainians were “oppressing the Russians [velikorossov] who had found themselves a minority in the region of the dialect.”¹⁹ Although confronted with this statement at the time by Ukrainian writers, Gorky never withdrew the comments and never apologized. The most celebrated and important figures in Russian literature, it seemed to many, held views similar to those of prerevolutionary chauvinists.

The growing assimilatory strength of urban Ukrainian society, how­ever, led to a loss of discursive control by proponents of Russian hegemony, a fact that was most clearly manifest in the Literary Discus­sion of 1925-28. In these years a sophisticated and innovative Ukrainian literature was being created, some of which took direct aim at the Russian attitudes. Mykola Kulish’s dramatic trilogy Myna Mazailo (1927), The People’s Malakhii (Narodnyi Malakhii, 1928), and Sonata Pathetique (1931) and Kost Burevy’s Pavlo Polubotok (1929)²⁰ all deal with the question of Russian hegemony and the legacy of imperial rule. Myna Mazailo and Sonata Pathetique were implicit responses to Bulgakov’s play. The first focuses on language politics; the second takes issue with Bulgakov’s interpretation of the Revolution, providing a different picture of the social genesis of the national movement and of events. Denied permission to be shown in Ukraine, it opened in Russian translation in Moscow on 20 December 1931 and, after having a quarter of the text cut, in Leningrad on 16 January 1932. The play was banned on 24 March 1932 after being denounced by an anony­mous critic in Pravda on 4 March 1932. The arrests of scores of Ukrainian writers began several weeks later, on 12-13 May 1932. Kulish himself was interrogated, tortured, and killed in 1937. Although the play was a success, it was poorly understood, and many viewers were disgruntled at not seeing the stereotypical portrayal of Ukrainians. Kulish’s intentions were, of course, to escape preexisting discursive parameters. His plays examined the complexity and variety of political, social, and psychological responses to the Revolution in Ukraine. In doing so, they challenged received ideas of the Ukrainian identity as simple, primordial, or inchoate. The banning of his plays is an example of how entry is restricted for texts that do not fit the stereotypical idea of the other and the field is left open for works that conform to already-existing patterns. Through a process of reduction, events are simplified, issues manipulated, and an acceptable identity for the other is formulated based on literary expectations and in conformity with political requirements.²¹

Hryhorii Kosynka’s “Faust” (Favst) is another significant work that demonstrates the desire to break through discursive limits. Written in 1923, the story, which remained unfinished, was published in 1942.²² It is particularly interesting because it depicts a nationally conscious peasant, in this way denying what for many Russian writers had been axiomatic in their portrayal of the village. Other characters imagine Koniushyna, the hero, to be naive and unenlightened, whereas in fact he is a shrewd, experienced, and committed partisan. His Faust-like appearance, dignified behaviour, and refusal to submit make a strong impression on other prisoners in the cell. The other characters rep­resent different ideological camps: Klientsov is a tsarist officer and Russian chauvinist; Iatskivsky a Polish nationalist who dreams of a Poland that would include its “historical” Ukrainian territories; Beiser a sadistic jailer; Kononchuk is another Ukrainian, who represents the illiterate, “blind” village. The conflict between the hero and Klientsov, who hates “independentists” and “bandits,” is a clash of irreconcilable enemies, but the opposition between Koniushyna and Kononchuk is the splitting of the same social type. Even their names are similar. As he is led away, the Faust (Koniushyna) gives Kononchuk his bread - a symbolic act of reaching out to the politically unconscious village.

The regime was highly sensitive to any mention of imperial conquest of foreign lands or of Russian mistreatment of Asian and native peoples. Just as the Russian author Leonid Leonov had to remove references to conquest from the Kalafat story in later editions of his Badgers: A Novel (Barsuki: Roman, 1924), Volodymyr Gzhytsky was similarly compelled to undertake several revisions of The Black Lake (Chorne ozero, 1929), a novel dealing with racist tsarist and Soviet attitudes toward the native people of the Altai region. Another group of works deals with a prob­lem Russian authors do not explore: the need to prove one’s “interna­tionalism” and gain acceptance with Russian communists. This is achieved by executing fellow Ukrainians in order to prove one’s loyalty, the equivalent to metaphorically killing the national within oneself. This painful reality of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary period is the subject of Borys Antonenko-Davydovych’s Death (Smert, 1928) and Mykola Khvylovy’s I (Romanticism) (Ia (Romantyka)).

When Stalin restored a large measure of discursive control in the late twenties and early thirties, this was accompanied by a reversal of the Ukrainianization policy and by massive political repression. Thou­sands of Ukrainian intellectuals in all walks of life (among them schol­ars, writers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, musicians, and actors) were arrested and executed. Many more, of course, were silenced through intimidation. The campaign of terror coincided with the col­lectivization of agriculture and the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine, which, scholars now agree, took the lives of some five million people.²³ At this time outspoken anticolonialist historians such as the Ukrainian Mykhailo Yavorsky or the Russian Mikhail Pokrovsky were condemned, and the official attitude toward national liberation struggles of the non­Russian peoples against Russia was radically revised. Russian imperial­ism, it was declared, had been the “lesser evil” for the nations con­quered by the empire; they could have fared far worse had they been incorporated into other states. Ukraine’s absorption by Russia, accord­ing to this formulation, was less of a disaster than absorption by Poland, Turkey, or Sweden would have been. The theory was first articulated in 1937 and received general recognition by 1951. It was subsequently modified and the claim advanced that conquest by Russia had been an “absolute good” that had brought untold benefits to non-Russian people.²⁴ From the thirties, therefore, the attitude toward tsarist empire building and Russification was gradually rehabilitated in his­torical writings, literature, and the cinema. At the same time the con­cept of patriotism was modified to glorify figures and events that had strengthened the Russian state and expanded its borders. Stalin’s famous toast of 24 May 1945, given at a reception in the Kremlin, signalled a complete return to the prerevolutionary idea of Russians as the leading people. He said, “I drink, above all, to the health of the Russian people, for it is the most outstanding nation of all the nations forming a part of the Soviet Union... I toast the health of the Russian nation not only because it is the leading people, but also because it possesses a clear mind, a steadfast character and patience.”²⁵ The con­cept was advanced of the Russian people as the “elder brother” who enjoyed seniority and was entitled to deference on the part of the “younger” Ukrainian people. The best Ukrainian writers, like Maksym Rylsky, were compelled to write poems not only glorifying the leading role of the Russian people but praising Stalin’s Kremlin toast.²⁶ These formulations provided the justification in the postwar years for fierce campaigns against writers who voiced even the mildest non-Russian patriotism or who failed to acknowledge the “leading role” of Russians sufficiently. Mykhailo Braichevsky, in his celebrated dissident publica­tion Annexation or Unification? (Pryiednannia chy vozziednannia? 1966), commented sardonically on the implication behind this theory, namely, that all oppressed nations throughout world history have strug­gled for independence, with the exception of the Ukrainian nation, which struggled passionately for “unification” with another nation and “against its own national independence.”²⁷

From the early thirties an attempt was made to develop a Soviet patriotism that would win the allegiance of all nationalities within the USSR. It was an attempt to transcend local nationalisms by speading the “imperial idea,” albeit in a Soviet incarnation. The idea was peri­odically challenged by non-Russian patriotisms (in the twenties and in the post-Stalin years, for example) and frequently displaced by or blended into Russian patriotism (as Stalin’s exaltation of the Russian nation demonstrates). The adoption of a more nationalistic and proimperial stance was, in the mid-twenties, greeted with enthusiasm by the accommodationist camp among emigre Russian nationalists (the Smenovekhovtsy). They declared their acceptance of the Soviet state on the grounds that the new regime was the legitimate heir to the empire’s expansionist policy, and they were often allowed to return. Some, like Aleksei Tolstoi, became prominent literary figures. It appeared to many observers at the time that Russian emigres, whether monarchists, Smenovekhovtsy, or Eurasianists, were welcome and could be repatriated as long as they voiced support for the unitary state and expansionism. By contrast, any association with the Ukrai­nian People’s Republic of 1917-19 or the voicing of demands for national self-determination was treated in many quarters as seditious.

RUSSIA refused: mykola khvylovy's POLEMICAL PAMPHLETS (i925-26)

In 1925-26 Mykola Khvylovy mounted a forceful challenge to the idea of Russian hegemony in a series of articles that have become known as the Polemical Pamphlets. He argued that the “Ukrainianization” policy of the indigenous national bolsheviks had run up against the expec­tations of the party majority, who wished to retain Russian linguistic and cultural dominance of the republic and were working to reverse the policy. The pamphlets were both a nationalizer’s protest and an expression of insecurity in the face of Russificatory demographic, linguistic, and cultural pressures. Khvylovy had already established his reputation as a leading postrevolutionary prose writer with the collec­tions Blue Etudes (Syni etiudy, 1923) and Autumn (Osin, 1924) when he initiated what became known as the Literary Discussion. Of his four pamphlet cycles, the first three were banned after their initial appear­ance in the twenties, and the fourth was not published until 1990. It was only in 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence, that the com­plete text of all three cycles appeared.²⁸

Comments on the Pamphlets by various critics and political figures in every decade since their original appearance provide ample exam­ples of reductive and one-sided readings. Much of the recent discus­sion has aimed at restoring them to an honoured place in the nationalist treasury of anticolonial manifestoes.²⁹ To a great extent they are an angry, anticolonial “writing back,” a challenge to empire and hegemony. Their examination, however, in the light of postcolo­nial theory, suggests other possible readings and helps to recover some of the boldness of thought and playfulness of argument that made them such exhilarating reading for contemporaries. Khvylovy bol­stered resistance to assimilationist ideology and answered disparagers of national movements within the USSR. However, it is, perhaps, the richness of nuance and the “problematic” aspect of his work that need recovering, because they reveal him as an ironic figure and a literary persona of considerable ideological complexity.

His persona has intrigued many critics and biographers, and his works have been interpreted in widely differing fashions. The task of exegesis is not made easier by the writer’s preoccupation with mystifi­cation, masks, and political illusions and delusions. The ultimate mes­sage of his stories in fact frequently comes down to an acceptance of the unfathomable in the human character, the conviction that life’s complexity cannot be reduced to the reassuring simplicities of slogans, and the intuition that the endlessly surprising dialectic of history will make fools of all.³⁰

A playfulness, a textual richness, and an internal tension has allowed the same Pamphlets and stories to be seen as Marxist calls to revolution­ary action and unambiguous parables warning of the communist evil. There are inconsistencies in the tone of the Pamphlets, which fluctuates between the positive and the ironic, the lyrical-affirmative, the cynical, and the self-flaggellatory. Much of the charm of reading the text lies, in fact, in following the mercurial changes of tone, the paradoxes, and the wit. The very ebb-and-flow of Khvylov’s ideas is built upon the play of continuity and discontinuity, tradition and rupture. Even his lan­guage, peppered with expressions and calques from the Russian, has long been a source of irritation to purists,³¹ although this aspect of his writing can be seen in positive terms, as a literary attempt to assimilate and exploit the macaronic Ukrainian-Russian argot called surzhyk, which is common among uneducated urban strata. This language is a product of a cultural border zone, one that constitutes a rich and, until most recently, almost unacknowledged resource for the investigation of a “carnivalized” and “hybrid” reality.

Occasionally a mistake in editing or a misquote has completely altered the meaning of a passage. In a crucial paragraph describing Moscow as the centre of universal philistinism, for example, a confu­sion of two words has occurred: “basis” and “oasis.” The correct read­ing of the key sentence appears to be: “Today the centre of all-Union Philistinism is Moscow, in which the proletarian factories, the Comin­tern and All-Union Communist Party figure as an oasis on the world scale.”³² Changing one letter (from “oasis” to “basis” in Hryhorii Kostiuk’s edition) identifies the factories and communist organs not as the exception but the root of philistinism, making it possible to extract an entirely different meaning.³³ Such ambiguities have long made the author’s intellectual commitments disputable. His affinity with conservative thinkers like Mykola Zerov and his defence of the great books of European culture coexist with a radical political maxi­malism. This pungent combination has moved several critics to com­ment on the contradictory emotions that stirred the author.³⁴

Key terms like “culture,” “Europe,” and “Asiatic Renaissance” are unstable concepts. Are we to understand culture as great books and great thinkers or as all the arts of representation and communications? His image of “Europe” seems at times to be the great books and thinkers idea, at other times something closer to the second definition of culture. Defenders of Khvylovy include Hryhorii Kostiuk and Iurii Sherekh in the forties and James Mace, whose recent article argues for a “profoundly thought-out, mature system of philosophical views.”³⁵ These authors have argued, for example, that Khvylovy’s key ideas (to imitate Europe, to develop a Ukrainian culture independent of Russia, and to adhere to the world cultural revolution that he termed the “Asiatic Renaissance”) were interrelated, compatible, and consistent. The interpretations that have been advanced in order to demonstrate consistency of thought, however, have not been convinc­ing. Khvylovy’s thinking is stimulating and suggestive but full of incon­sistencies and discontinuities.

Many of his metaphors and important symbols can be developed in opposite directions: Asia can be backwardness but also radical change and revival; Europe can be a spent force and the oppression of tradition, but it can also be cultural richness and the greatness of tradition; Ukraine is a backwater, but it also has pent-up cultural potential. Khvylovy’s invocation of history’s great catalytic figures, such as Luther, Peter the Great, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, and Lenin, can similarly be read in two ways. At times he offers unequivocal praise for history’s imperial midwives, at others his thought moves in the oppo­site direction - toward a sympathy for their victims and a condemna­tion of violent change. Throughout his work there appears to be a contradiction between the urge to accept, even embrace, revolutionary violence and the humane desire to reject it. The treatment of leading intellectual figures in Russian culture (Belinsky, Pisarev, Tolstoi, Dos­toevsky, Mikhailovsky, Gorky) is characterized by a similar tension between attraction and repulsion. He is concerned with the role of intellectuals in history. Do they have the right to speak for the masses? To what extent do they represent progressive movements? They con­struct narratives of liberation, but whom do they really represent and what do they oppose? If icons of Russian radical thought like Belinsky and Gorky express the view that there is no Ukrainian literature or identity, what should be the position of a Ukrainian revolutionary toward them? Khvylovy uses a quotation from Belinsky to open the final chapter of his third pamphlet cycle, “Apologists of Scribbling” (Apolohety pysaryzmu). It reads: “If the Russians can boast a few poetical talents, they owe this above all to the proximity of their history to the history of Europe and to those elements of life assimilated from Europe. As for the Little Russians, it is ridiculous to even think that something might develop from their poetry. One could set it (Little Russian poetry) in motion only if the best, noblest sector of the Little Russian population gave up the French quadrille and began dancing the tropak and hopak once again.” Khvylovy makes the following obser­vation: “With this eloquent and piquant quotation we do not at all intend to accuse Belinsky of chauvinism; we wish to underline the extent to which hatred of Ukrainian poetry saturates that literature which our Muscovites advise us to learn from. This does not at all mean that we dislike this literature; it means that we are organically incapable of educating ourselves on it. Besides, we are joking; we did not cite this passage for this reason either.”³⁶ The reader must consider what exactly Khvylovy is saying. Is he accusing Russian writers of chauvinism, expressing admiration for Russian literature, or suggest­ing that this literature is vitiated by hatred of his nation? The evasive­ness suggests that the issues raised were too painful and dangerous to be broached in any manner other than obliquely. In this final chapter of the Pamphlets to be allowed publication in his lifetime, the author began an analysis of Russian chauvinism and messianism and contin­ued it in his fourth cycle, “Ukraine or Little Russia?” which could only be circulated privately.

The most common interpretation of Khvylovy is that he represented what Dmytro Dontsov called a cri de caur against the Russian Empire.³⁷ Observers have seen his orientation to Europe’s past and Asia’s future as anti-imperial reflexes, conscious attempts to imagine Ukraine out­side the sphere of Russian dominance. This view has been presented as an ultimate explanation, a key to his system. According to it, the project of cultural nationalization was to be aided by the examples of the West and East, and the republic’s Russified urban population would be encouraged to “reidentify” with a resurgent Ukrainian cul­ture. Although the Ukrainianization of education, the administrative bureaucracy, and industry had to continue, a psychological reorienta­tion of individuals was urgently required.

Khvylovy’s anti-Russianness, although axiomatic for many readers, is more problematic than is often admitted. The phrase most frequently attributed to him, “Away from Moscow!” was never used by him. It first appeared in Stalin’s letter of 26 April 1926 and was the latter’s distil­lation of Khvylovy’s views. The Ukrainian writer’s actual words were, “by which of the world’s literatures should we set our course? On no account by the Russian. This is definite and unconditional. Our political union must not be confused with literature. Ukrainian poetry must flee as quickly as possible from Russian literature and its styles.”³⁸ The context confirms that Khvylovy was focusing on the need to assert a cultural identity that had been saturated by the notion of Russian hege­mony. That identity had now to be reasserted and revitalized in liter­ature and the arts. The writer, in short, was arguing for a new kind of cultural product that would reject and transcend the imagery of cul­tural colonialism. The main point was a new aesthetic and a remod­elled cultural life. At the same time he was admitting a typical postcolonial malaise - the difficulty of escaping imperial structures of thought and feeling for writers and artists whose education had been thoroughly shaped by them.

The creative problem is frequently elided into the political by com­mentators. From Khvylovy’s earliest appearance in print, however, it was the former that consumed him. The Pamphlets began as a public exploration of a personal and national self-representation, making explicit the dilemmas implicit in his fiction. Like most of his contem­poraries, Khvylovy was educated on nineteenth-century Russian litera­ture, debates between Westernizers and Slavophiles, discussions of “superfluous” and “new” men, and populism and Marxism. In his most anti-Russian diatribe, the suppressed “Ukraine or Little Russia?” writ­ten in 1926, he says: “Russian literature was for us a ray of light in a dark kingdom. We knew how to cry over The Storm, how to dream in Literary Musings, how to sense the “laughing sea” in the “green-eyed Malva’s” pupils, knew how to recognize the depths of Dostoevsky’s psychoanalyses, to sense the breadth of War and Peace and to shudder when the night watchman’s clapper sounded in The Cherry Orchard⁹’’⁹ We know Russian literature and, on its behalf, feel painfully insulted that bureaucrats are today defending it.”⁴⁰ In the same way as Salman Rushdie admits ambivalence toward Kipling or Edward Said toward Conrad, Khvylovy reveals both nostalgia for a formative cultural influ­ence and a desire to move beyond it.

The rejection of Russian literature’s tutorship therefore needs to be set against the writer’s reverence for it and recognition of its potency. Even the structure of Khvylovy’s imaginative universe is markedly Russian in inspiration. He develops major themes in Russian literature: the intellectual and the masses, revolution and tradition, the call (echoing Chaadayev and Belinsky) for brilliant minds to get the nation thinking. The form of the argument, an encoding of social, political, and cultural issues in character analysis, is a method assimilated from nineteenth-century Russian critics. Khvylovy’s real name was, of course, Fitilov. He was the son of a Russian schoolmaster and was steeped in this tradition. Nineteenth-century Russian classics were his touch­stones. Even in his final despondency, in the moments before his suicide, it was Pushkin’s “Demons” (Besy) that he played on the guitar to his friends.

Patterns of thought and feeling assimilated from Russian writers also pervade his fiction. Critics have drawn attention to the influence of the Serapion brotherhood and Andrei Bely on his imagery and thought. Another insufficiently acknowledged but deeply felt influ­ence was Dostoevsky. The Russian writer’s pitting of egos against alter egos and dialogic exploration of ideas had a deep influence on his Ukrainian admirer. Two of Khvylovy’s most discussed fictional charac­ters, both from Woodsnipes (Valdshnepy, 1926), recall Dostoevsky. They are Dmytro Karamazov, a Ukrainian who suffers a Russian sickness, and Ahlaia, a Russian who, in rejecting her homeland, has become a fanatical Ukrainian. The mysterious “Muscovite” Ahlaia is identified as the descendant of an illustrious ancestor, who, the reader is led to think, might have been a cossack leader. The novel dramatizes the Ukrainian consciousness at war with itself, struggling to clarify its identity and place in history. The debate between Dmytro and Ahlaia is a dialogic investigation of the schizophrenic Ukrainian identity. This novel, Khyvlovy’s most explicit fictional treatment of the Russian- Ukrainian conflict, was written at the same time as the last two cycles of his Pamphlets and echoes its arguments. Although the novel’s con­cluding section was printed, the entire print run was destroyed, and no copy has ever been found, a circumstance that allows for a perma­nently “open” ending and for the advancement of a variety of inter­pretations. Whatever the conclusion was (most speculations lean toward the victory of the determined, passionate Ahlaia) it is clear that the work expresses the same anxiety of influence and fear of creative impotence that Khvylovy had voiced in his Pamphlets.⁴ A similar struc­ture of characterization that contrasts a sceptic with a believer occurs in other stories. In most, however, the utopian idealists die with their dreams unrealized, as is the case, for example, in one of his best stories, “Blue November” (Synii lystopad), where the idealist’s death ends the relationship and leaves in doubt the political issue that has divided the couple.

Woodsnipes is an answer to Dostoevsky’s emotional nationalism. In Dostoevsky’s Idiot Prince Myshkin arrives from abroad to find his country in a decayed condition. He attempts to propagate a new collective feeling, a communion of the national imagination emanci­pated from corrupting Western influences. Khvylovy’s Ahlaia also arrives in Ukraine with an invigorating, unificatory message. She is an apostle of courage and daring who wishes her countrymen to turn their backs on subordination and freely develop their own identity. In Dostoevsky’s novel Nastasia Filipovna had written to Aglaia that “an abstract love of mankind almost always boils down to a love of one’s own self.” Commenting on this passage, Thomas Masaryk argues that humanism was “neither supra-national nor anti-national” but could only in practice be expressed “through labour on behalf of one’s own people.”⁴² Dostoevsky “would have been right” if he had expressed his humanism in terms of a love of Russia, but for him the moral idea is precursor to the national. His Russia is “Holy Russia” and the Russian people a “God-folk.” In Dostoevsky’s view Russia alone is holy, its people alone hold the key to salvation. In Masaryk’s view, “Messianism and universalism are transformed into Russian imperialism.”⁴³ At the time of writing The Idiot, Dostoevsky made some of his most fanatical statements concerning the moral elevation of the Russian spirit, the messianic destiny of this “great nation,” and its infinite superiority to all others. Much of this was incorporated into Prince Myshkin’s harangue at the engagement party in the final chapters of the book.⁴⁴ Dostoevsky’s ideology confused the ethical-universal (the idea that Russia would install a Christian rule of goodness and justice on earth) with the egoistic-imperialistic (which argued for the extension of Russian political power).⁴⁵

The Ahlaia of Woodsnipes represents a reaction against this messianic and mystical ideology in its contemporary communist/Russian nation­alist symbiosis. She not only understands it clearly but recognizes the need to counter it with an equally potent ideology. In its place she offers a mirror image in the form of a messianic faith in a resurgent Ukraine as a well-spring of liberationist ideals and anti-imperialist struggle. Ahlaia’s views are not, of course, necessarily to be identified with Khvylovy, but they resemble ideas that he expressed in his polem­ical writings at this time and that have been attributed to him by radical nationalists and leading intellectuals of the interwar nationalist generation, in particular by Dmytro Dontsov and Ievhen Malaniuk.

Today’s Sumska oblast, where Khvylovy was raised, is part of the core Ukrainian territory that has interfaced with Russia for centuries, a land with no natural boundaries that has always met and resisted the influ­ence of its Northern neighbour. The geography of this region plays an important role in the writer’s works, mixing evocative historical mem­ories (the burial mounds of soldiers killed in the battle of Poltava) and suggestions of an inscrutable identity (an “Asiatic” land of murmuring pine forests). This imagery constructs Ukraine as a land of sweeping vistas stretching to the North and East, an exposed plain in the path of migrating armies. The geography is an appropriate backdrop to his dominant concern, the struggle to remember one’s history and shape one’s identity in the face of past conquests, to reinvent oneself as a modern nation. Khvylovy can, in short, be seen in terms similar to the way Homi Bhabha has described Fanon’s divide between black skin and white masks, not as “a neat division” but as “a doubling, dissembling image of being in at least two places at once.. It is not the Colonialist Self or the Colonised Other, but the disturbing distance in between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness.”⁴⁶ The other within oneself and oneself within the other was Khvylovy’s disturbing theme.

Khvylovy’s works were important in articulating a twentieth-century Ukrainian identity. In his Pamphlets and Woodsnipes he draws attention to psychological and cultural issues of importance to Ukrainian nation­builders, away from the disparagement of local nationalism to its theorization as indispensable for the decolonizing project. He employs a standard tactic of anti-imperial writing by reevaluating the empire­nation opposition in favour of the second term: Ukrainian literature is portrayed as closer to Europe⁴⁷ and Russian as incurably infected with the bascilli of imperialism.⁴⁸ He is careful to stress his rejection of Russia’s colonial myths, its degenerate contemporary condition, but not all its cultural accomplishments. His advice to flee from Russian literature is the refusal of a literature formed by and implicated in imperialism, a literature that was blocking the emergence of an anti­imperial consciousness. The culprit is the Russian intellectual tradi­tion, but Ukrainians are deeply implicated in its creation.

Although his works were less successful in catalyzing the crucial Russian-Ukrainian dialogue that had to occur, they were, nonetheless, addressed in some measure to the Russian public and to Russified Ukrainians. “Ukraine or Little Russia?” is as much a commentary on Russian problems and obsessions, an exploration of imperial sick­nesses as it is a commentary on the Ukrainian colonial mentality. The writer himself was in many ways a product of Russian literature, famil­iar with its insights and aware of its blindnesses. He challenged Russian liberals and revolutionaries to break with their regressive imperial history, which was perverting their consciousness: “In contemporary Russian ethnographic romanticism such an idealization of past Razins and Pugachevs fuses with a sense of Russian “imperial” patriotism and obscures dreams concerning the future. It is incapable of going beyond this. The great Russian literature has reached its limits and has halted at the crossroads.”⁴⁹

The colonial myths embedded in classical Ukrainian literature were equally to be shunned. The optimistic philosophy inherited from the Enlightenment by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers like Skovoroda and Kvitka, their conviction that the way things are is necessarily the way they should be, might have been adequate for an age that believed firmly in the people’s survival, but it had become a dangerously complacent attitude in the twenties. It is criticized by Khvylovy in his story “Ivan Ivanovych,” which portrays a postrevolution­ary Candide convinced that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” This attack on quietism and complacency is another common postcolonial reflex.

It led to accusations of anti-Ukrainianness. The strongest of these accusations concern his criticism of the national populist tradition and Shevchenko. It was Khvylovy’s view that Ukrainian writers should create a new poetics and take responsibility for developing a new self­image. He criticized Shevchenko for overemphasizing the nation’s victimization and underestimating the importance of self-assertive activity. This was a call to break with the stereotype of the helpless victim. His attacks on quietism were stimulated by a sense of cultural weakness, a lurking fear that the cultural construction of the twenties might stall and fail. After all, if in the modern world nations and national cultures can be constructed and deconstructed, power is vital to their survival. The vitality of the ethnos in which Skovoroda and Kvitka believed is not eternal. It is a force that acts blindly, often misguidedly, and requires intellectuals to shape, guide, and provide it with an identity. Without them it has difficulty withstanding the pres­sures of foreign hegemonies.

Here, perhaps, lies the explanation for Khvylovy’s definition of himself and his revolutionary generation as “Romantic” and of his style as “Active Romanticism.” Fearing the persistence and resilience of cultural colonialism, he demanded its displacement. Literature was to administer the shock required to shake people out of their ideological conditioning by overturning the crippling colonial myths. Khvylovy’s stated task was to inspire young people to think about the question of representation in literature and the arts. To do so, he attempted to develop a public debate on imperial/colonial relations. The Pamphlets and the fiction stimulated interest in the issue and in the short-lived journals he founded, Vaplite (1927) and Literary Market (Literaturnyi iarmarok, 1929). They excelled in the deconstruction of both colonial and anticolonial myths and provided a liberating self-confidence, a playful, ironic writing now associated with a postcolonial perspective, in which the writer recombines mythologies in order to redefine contemporary consciousness.

SUBVERSIVE stories:

VIKTOR DOMONTOVYC H ’ S EARLY NOVELS

Viktor Petrov graduated from the University of Kyiv in 1918 and became a prominent scholar in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences created by the Ukrainian People’s Republic and continued by the Soviet regime. For the next twenty years he filled many important positions in the academy, among them secretary of the Historical Dictionary Commission and director of the Ethnographic Commission. Until he stopped publishing in the thirties, he was also known in literary circles as Viktor Domontovych, a prose writer and member of the neoclassicist circle around Mykola Zerov. During the Second World War, after the academy had been moved to the Urals, he suddenly reappeared in occupied Kharkiv, where he worked for the German Propagandastaffel editing the journal Ukrainian Seeding (Ukrainskyi zasiv). After the evacuation of Kharkiv he retreated with the German front. In the postwar years, which witnessed a burst of literary activity in the camps that housed displaced persons, he once again became a productive writer and, by virtue of his intellectual stature and organizational abilities, played a leading role in the formation of the emigre Ukrai­nian literary organization mur. Iurii Sherekh called him “one of the greatest, if not the greatest intellectual figures in the emigration.”⁵⁰ On 18 April 1949 he suddenly and inexplicably disappeared, resur­facing just as mysteriously in 1956 in Kyiv as the senior staff member at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Archaeology and as its director of scientific archives. In the years that followed he wrote scores of articles on ethnography, excavated Trypillean and Proto-Slavic settle­ments, and investigated ancient burial mounds and Scythian arti- facts,⁵¹ but he no longer worked as a creative writer. In 1965 the public learned that he had been honoured with a medal for his achievements as a Soviet spy. He died in 1969. The involvement with the Soviet secret police remains a controversial and unexplained issue. Shevelov has denied this possibility, maintaining that Petrov was probably kid­napped, imprisoned, and only allowed to return to active scholarly life in the post-Stalin thaw.⁵²

Domontovych was known for a deep scepticism and a penchant for irony and mystification. These characteristics appeared to be the prod­uct of hostility toward the Soviet state, technological society, and the avant-garde, aversions that had to be concealed and therefore appeared in veiled fictional form in the twenties. According to this interpretation, the erudite and sophisticated author stood outside the fanaticisms of his day, seeking to quietly puncture and deflate them.⁵³ However, in the immediate postwar years in Germany Petrov was also known as a literary historian (who signed his articles, V. Petrov) and a philosopher (who used the pseudonym V. Ber). There is nothing tentative about Petrov-Ber, who argues:

there is only one history, not many: it is impossible for literature to have its separate history, painting its own, philosophy, the natural sciences, etc., each their own. Just as there cannot be many histories, there are not and cannot be many historical periodizations in each sphere. It is therefore impossible for literature to have one periodization and for politics or art to have another. There is only one history and therefore only one historical periodization. Lit­erature does not exist alone. It exists in its dependance on a given historical epoch, carries all the signs of the given historical age and changes with the age.⁵⁴

In vigorous polemics with other academics Petrov-Ber put forward the new teaching on the unified mentality of an age. A corollary to this thesis was the belief in periodic spiritual-artistic revolutions - radical paradigm shifts that fundamentally redefine all aspects of a culture. The scholar saw the contemporary period as undergoing such a shift and denounced the previous generation’s outdated populism: “Histor­ically, the twenties and thirties had to complete the move from ethno­graphic-populist positions to national ones... The people consolidated themselves into a nation. Ethnographic provincialism was transformed into an organic whole of national action.”⁵⁵ His “revolutionary” gener­ation had completed the shift to a national awareness and nation­building action. They had no time for conciliation: “Our predecessors spoke of development and progress. For us the word evolution has already lost its taste. We speak not of progress, but of catastrophe and crisis, of negation and not of agreement. In the early twenties, the most pressing problem was drawing a distinction between two currents: the populist and the anti-populist.”⁵⁶

The quotations reveal a determined, impatient modernizer and nationalist who was demanding a radical reshaping of culture in line with national political requirements - something Ukrainian modern­ists had insisted upon since the turn of the century and had champi­oned, particularly in the prewar journal Ukrainian Home (Ukrainska khata).⁵⁷ The militant, uncompromising tone of these quotations, however, and their conflation of art and politics also recall formalist views of revolutionary change in the artistic sphere and the avant- garde’s idea of a total aesthetico-political project.⁵⁸ There is a clue here to the decoding of Domontovych’s fiction, in which the radically new clashes with the old. The new art-politics in his fiction calls for mastering nature and altering all aspects of social and cultural life.⁵⁹ The conflicts between and within the characters of Domontovych’s fiction reflect this discourse of the twenties concerning modernizing change. A particular focus of the novels is the clash between avant- gardism and neoclassicism.^6o They both reject the legacy of populism and pre-1914 Ukrainian modernism. Populism is despised for its didacticism and apotheosis of the narod, modernism for its subjectiv­ism, cult of feeling, and lack of intellectual rigour. Avant-gardism and neoclassicism each project a new type of consciousness. The avant- garde, represented by the futurists and constructivists, develops icon­oclastic forms that capture their vision of a dynamic, urban, techno­cratic modernity.⁶¹ Neoclassicism, on the other hand, counterposes a cool scepticism to the revolutionary fervour.

This conflict serves as a structuring principle in Domontovych’s two early, acclaimed novels, Girl with Teddybear (Divchynka z vedmedykom, 1928) and Doctor Seraphicus (Doktor Serafikus, 1947) and in the programmatic story “Eckerhardt and Gozzi,” written in 1925 for a planned but never-published anthology of neoclassicist writings. All these works date from the twenties, although Doctor Seraphicus was only published in Munich in 1947 and bears the marks of some later revisions. They deal with the inevitably tragic fate of the characters who adopt the avant-garde’s response to modernity, whose strivings for the new are frustrated by biology (innate and hereditary factors) and tradition (historically sanctioned attitudes and behaviour). The “avant- garde” characters reject the authority of European classics, are pas­sionately committed to social and spiritual transformation, and explore new forms of sexual relationships. The counterposition is presented by the “neoclassicist” characters, whose behaviour is informed by an awareness of the European literary tradition, scepti­cism toward the possibility of revolutionary change, and demureness and self-control in matters of the heart.

In Girl with a Teddy Bear a bookish young scientist is appointed tutor to two young daughters of a successful industrial planner, one of the new Soviet men. The teacher, Ipolit Mykhailovych Varetsky, becomes infatuated with the younger girl, Zyna, and their worlds collide. He is blinkered, emotionally naive, and to a large extent still tradition­bound. She, at the age of sixteen, has already assimilated the ideas of the futurists concerning the need to destroy the old art and morality and proceeds to put into practice her ideas of sexual liberation and personal freedom, with devastating results.

Zyna represents an attitude to life and a manner of conduct that is widely shared. Stefan Khominsky, a parody of the futurist poet and a spirit of the time, is her acquaintance. But the radical morality of these young people is part of an entire social atmosphere. Older men who are involved in developing the technological society are also affected. They include Ipolit Mykhailovych, Panas Hryhorovych, and Semen Kuzmenko - all parodic portraits of the optimistic captains of industry and heroes of the construction novels of their day, who herald the new and throw out the old. The Achilles’ heel of all these “new” people is a lack of cultural breadth and a limited understanding of human nature - especially of their own emotional lives. Zyna, the youngest product of this brave new world, is therefore mimicking an accepted, indeed mandatory, style, and applying its theoretical premises in her personal life.

The reductio ad absurdum of the new religion of reason and the unsentimental, utilitarian morality is represented by the figure of Mykola Butsky. Having fallen on hard times, he has been reduced to selling matchboxes on the street. Eventually he murders his wife, but before carrying out the killing, he discusses it for several weeks with passers-by. It is clear that he considers the act a “logical” solution to his predicament: his motivation is a “rational” desire to relieve suffering. This episode is closely related to Ipolit Mykhailovych’s thoughts con­cerning Machiavelli and the need to plan social behaviour. Discussing terror in Machiavelli, the hero muses: “Love is not always soft and gentle; sometimes it is cruel and severe. And often in an act that at first sight appears brutal and monstrous one can observe the lofty impulse of a spirit devoted to love.”⁶² Shevelov has written of the importance of this episode for an understanding of the text, which in his view is a study of “uncontrolled human behaviour and the contra­diction between intention and action.”⁶³ He also suggests that Dom- ontovych foresaw the terror of the 1930s carried out in the name of humanity’s future happiness: “Domontovych not only affirmed the irrational nature of man and the impossibility of establishing the kingdom of reason. He went further. He stated that those propagating the idea of reason’s domination were themselves irrational.”⁶⁴

The moral experiments of Zyna and Mykola Butsky are linked to the dominant art-politics of the twenties. Girl with Teddy Bear is a critique of a generation that is in the grip of a myopic, heedlessly aggressive determination to reshape society and human nature in the name of a new, supposedly rational order. The writer’s concerns, however, reach beyond the immediate postrevolutionary situation. His books raise wider issues that stem from the encounter with modernity: the consequences for society of a loss of faith in religion, the transfer­ence of this faith to reason and progress, the fear that at the root of all human conduct there might lie a fundamental irrationality.⁶⁵

The prewar generation of Ukrainian modernism is presented as offering an inadequate alternative to the new reality of the twentieth century, especially to the “irrational” faith in reason. It can suggest only an escape into a symbolist dream-world, represented by Maria Ivanivna, or into the philologist’s paradoxes, represented by Vasyl Hryb, who produces a cynical, oxymoronic wisdom. The only real opposition to the new politics and aesthetic of rupture comes from Zyna’s sister, Lesia, who represents the neoclassicist model of restraint, “all within the canonical exactness of iambic tetrameter and classical versification”.⁶⁶ She behaves with dignity and stoical resignation, accepting the time-honoured role of wife and mother. In one exchange with her sister, Lesia expresses admiration for Goethe’s Iphigenia. Characteristically, her younger sister Zyna passionately dis­avows tragic victim-heroines like Goethe’s Iphigenia and Margarita. She expresses a determination to shape life to her will.

Zyna and Ipolit end in tragedy because of a fatal blindness. Ipolit Mykhailovych, by trusting to reason alone, fails to grasp his own love for Zyna or to understand her motives and ends by driving her to more willful and, finally, catastrophic acts. She escapes to Berlin, where he is unable to find her. In the end not his powers of observation or deduction but his subconscious mind reveals to him in a dream that the woman he witnessed shooting her companion in a Berlin night club was, in fact, Zyna. The hero observed but was unable to see until it was too late. Both Ipolit Mykhailovych and Zyna are products of the new world and its project of a functional, “rational” alternative to the old. Lesia, on the other hand, represents the timeless lessons of moderation and harmony. She does not “belong to today,” she is “beyond time and place,” her today is a “repeated yesterday.”⁶⁷

The older Ipolit Mykhailovych Varetsky, however, still finds himself attracted to the old symbolist aesthetic of pre-1g14 modernism. His trip to the beach with Maria Ivanivna contains an epiphany, a mystical moment in which the unity of all things is sensed: “Solitude, silence, sun, sand, willow bushes. You can lie on the beach for hours motion­lessly looking at the azure of the sky. Your sight disappears into infinity. In the endless azure time loses itself, consciousness, “the ego,” every­thing that was and will be.”⁶⁸ In these contemplative moments Varetsky recaptures the attitudes and sentiments of his youth that were formed by the transcendental yearnings of the symbolists and other authors of the prewar modernist period. This makes him partly a transitional figure, a man still under the spell of the subjective dream-spinning of this ineffectual generation. To this old aesthetic, the new futurist­constructivist generation has counterposed the destruction of all art, illusion, and mysticism in the name of lucidity. Varetsky calls Zyna “too intelligent to attach importance and significance to values that the previous generation had considered rules, principles, norms and mor­als. For Zyna there was nothing forbidden... With lucid consciousness she observed herself, Lesia, myself, her feelings, the environment, people, objects, events, ideas, and facts. She liked to proclaim thoughts that loudly and incongruously contradicted the quiet atmosphere of the Tykhmenev household. She spoke as though she wanted to destroy everything others considered untouchable and sacred.”^6g

The adolescent Zyna expects that revolt will lead to passion and will usher in a new consciousness and a spiritual emancipation: “She thought that love would be something bigger than loving, that love would turn to ashes the ashes of days and weeks of routine, that in love the azure dream of an unknown future would blossom.”⁷⁰ This, however, does not occur. Instead, she destroys herself. In words that prefigure Maiakovsky’s suicide note by seven years, Zyna composes her final communication: “We sought improbable truths. We did not find them. Life broke us.”⁷¹

The plot of Doctor Seraphicus follows a similar pattern. The dry pedantic hero, Vasyl Khrysanfovych Komakha, who is known to his friends as Seraphicus, teaches reflexology (a form of behaviourism) and the scientific organization of labour (Taylorism and assembly-line management techniques). His study of abstractions and the general principles of group behaviour has done nothing to prepare him for contact with psychological complexities. Naive concerning his own emotions and incapable of understanding those of others, he is the victim of an experiment in free love by the beautiful Ver Elsner. She, like Zyna in the previous novel, is part of an avant-garde milieu that also includes her friend Korvyn, the constructivist painter, whose abstract forms represent plastic analogies to Seraphicus' abstract prin­ciples of behavioural and organizational science.

Seraphicus feels a strong urge to father a child. He hears the call of biology but cannot answer it through normal sexual relations. His sterile rationalism suggests the idea of giving birth “by the most ratio­nal method, namely by avoiding the participation in this matter of a woman.”⁷² Another disastrous experiment, this time in love “without strings,” is initiated by Ver. Like all experiments in Domontovych's world, this one receives rational elaborations and is the result of willfulness. Komakha does not accept the impossibility of childbirth without women nor Ver the impossibility of a purely sexual relation­ship, if they so will. Both experiments fail because some laws and constants in human nature have been overlooked. Seraphicus does not conceive and Ver makes Komakha fall in love with her. Nature takes her revenge on both characters.

The cubist portrait of Komakha-Seraphicus emphasises the abstract, the product of rational experimentation: “Komakha had a dispropor­tionately large head with a protruding forehead, and on his broad muscular nose, instead of glasses, he had complex lenses which refracted the light into geometrical flashes - triangles, cubes, squares. The geometricised light seemed to transform itself into mathematical schemes. His heavy lenses appeared to serve not for seeing the world and people, but for experimenting with light.”⁷³ The rationalist aes­thetic and morality meet resistance and failure everywhere. Tetiana Berens, like Maria Ivanivna in the first book, is a member of the prerevolutionary symbolist-modernist generation. She rejects the con­structivist Korvyn because she seeks marriage and a family. Taisa Pavlivna, who like Lesia in the first novel represents the ideals of moderation and harmonious development, leaves Komakha. The five- year-old Irtsia, who is charmingly spontaneous and frank, also serves as a contrast to Komakha's alienation.

There is also a brief sketch of an earlier, perhaps homosexual, relationship with Korvyn.⁷⁴ The importance of this episode lies in its connection with a time when “infatuation, tenderness and devotion” were the fashion, when ineffable, “azure” dreams were dominant. “There are such absent, fantastic, ephemeral moods, which are never realized, which in reality do not exist. They are no more than expec­tations, bright sunny expectations that somewhere in the world there is another, different, better life.”⁷⁵ This statement could refer to the symbolist-modernist youth of both Komakha and Korvyn, but it is strongly suggestive of the first year of the revolution, a time of enthu­siasm when hopes for an independent Ukrainian state were at their height. It is a mood most famously reflected in Pavlo Tychyna’s bril­liant collection of poems entitled Sunny Clarinets (Soniashni kliarnety, 1918). The Komakha-Korvyn relationship appears to have coincided with this atmosphere of social elation captured by Ukraine’s greatest symbolist poet.

As in the first novel, the denouement is preceded by a journey, which this time it is to Mohyliv and which underscores the hero’s complete estrangement from his surroundings. He has boarded the wrong train and thinks he is in Kamianets. The humorous discussion with the sullen cab-driver, who is prepared to drive the customer anywhere and to go along with his whims, hides another meaning. The cab driver offers to travel “left, right or forward,” however he is instructed, but is adamant that there never was a street named Petro- hradska and that no street in the city by that name has recently been renamed Leninhradska. Political leaders, this appears to suggest, can change street names, construct and deconstruct history and morality, but these are surface phenomena. Beneath there remains a firmly unchanging reality - something the simple cab driver understands. Like politicians who are in the grip of self-deluding ideologies, Koma- kha-Seraphicus has superimposed a false geography and itinerary on a real city. Unable to admit his mistake and afraid of losing face, he is relieved to return to his room in Kyiv and resolves not to venture out again. There is an obvious warning here against the machine age (the train carries him off to an unexpected place) and the danger of abstract constructs. As though to emphasise these points, the episode is immediately followed by Ver’s disastrous experiment in free love.

The clash between neoclassicism and avant-gardism over the issue of modernity was not without paradoxes. As has been shown, the scholar-philosopher Petrov-Ber, like the futurists and constructivists depicted in Domontovych’s fiction, was himself attracted to abstract forms. An intransigent structuralist, during the polemics of the forties in Germany he could write: “we establish the laws of poetics not by researching the material, natural or external environment from which a work arises, not the country’s climate, the society and biography of a writer, but only the given work, its internal structure. Its internal structure, which grows out of itself, defines the work’s essence, its char­acteristic features. Form has an independent existence. Matter, as such, does not exist; there are only forms of matter.”⁷⁶ Structure revealed the meaning of an individual work, the character of a period or an epoch. This idea of a complex pattern linking form, style, and epoch had been assimilated from Heinrich Wolfflin’s Renaissance und Barock (1888) and Die Klassische Kunst (1899) and from the teachings of Rus­sian formalists. An elegant historiographic scheme was used by Petrov- Ber to “emplot history,” frame events and explain individual behaviour. It dominates his writings on literary and intellectual history.⁷⁷

Was not the totalizing view of style Petrov-Ber proposed also the dogmatic imposition of an abstract scheme on life’s multiplicity? Would it not necessarily require a standardization in order that the criteria of typification be met? Domontovych’s own novels push the historiographic argument with pedantic insistence - a fact noticed by critics, who have spoken of sections that sound like essays inserted into the text⁷⁸ and who have described the “collision around feelings” as reminiscent of “an algebraic problem.”⁷⁹ Why would the scholar Petrov-Ber, who adamantly defended the necessity of philosophical abstractions and revolutionary, modernizing change, allow his alter ego, the writer Domontovych, to produce fiction that apparently undermined these convictions? There appear to be two answers. First, Domontovych’s argument is not with reason as such but with its excesses, its reduction to mathematical concepts, its exclusion of what­ever in material reality could not be translated into a language of formulas. It was this kind of consciousness, he felt, that ran the risk of simply detecting everywhere one and the same pattern. This was a problem the writer would have known from Kant’s discussion of the relationship between the noumenal and the phenomenal. The schemes and experiments of Domontovych’s characters spring from minds that are disconnected from experience or can draw only on a narrow emotional, lived experience. Second, Domontovych was con­cerned with the implications for human freedom of any radical social engineering. He could see that the demystificatory and emancipatory projects of “revolutionary literature” posed fundamental problems: the crisis of legitimacy that followed the loss of faith in humanist or post­Enlightenment values and the moral dilemmas posed by the exercise of power.⁸⁰

For all the potential dangers of schematism, the analysis of character through conflicting period styles in his novels is engaging because the author allows for a subtle layering of traits. For example, Ver Elsner’s intellectual evolution is shown as moving from populism, through symbolism-modernism and futurism-constructivism to a final denial of the value and significance of art. The chapter in which this is oulined could stand on its own as an essay on the evolution of literary styles from 1910 to 1930. It also represents character as a construct of several historical periods. A similar analysis based on period styles serves as the methodology for an “in-depth” characterization of Seraphicus, Korvyn, and Tetiana Berens in Doctor Seraphicus and for Zyna, Stefan Khomynsky, and Maria Ivanivna in Girl with a Teddy-Bear.

A more nuanced characterization is also achieved through the accu­mulation of nicknames and aliases. Ipolit Mykhailovych Komakha is also known as Seraphicus and referred to by the narrator several times as mastodon (mastodont), a reference to his size that also suggests a pun on the author’s own name, Domontovych. The need to rename and redefine Komakha is felt by Irtsia, who calls him “pups” (a small doll). Korvyn, who denies the previous generation’s cult of feelings (“We disregard feelings,” he says of his contemporaries), as though rejecting his own past, calls Komakha “a gnome, a homuncule, a paper doll.”⁸¹ This play with naming produces a shifting, multifaceted impression, a counterpart to the earlier cubist physical description.

Another layering of features is achieved through literary allusion. References to Goethe’s heroines and Machiavelli are important cases, but there are many more. Hans Christian Andersen’s “Nightingale and Rose,” Gogol’s Marriage, and Cervantes’ Don (Quixote, as well as Savon­arola, Thomas Campion, Seneka, and Plato are among the literary works and historical figures that serve in Girl with Teddybear as devices of allusive characterization and veiled plot commentary. Many refer­ences are to classical and Renaissance texts. The intertextual game can be read as a defence of the European humanist tradition then under attack from radicals: the neoclassicist sees permanence beneath the surface of change, the irony of repeated literary patterns and archetypes surfacing in the contemporary revolt against tradition. At the same time, it signals the author’s anxiety over the death of the subject in a modern world of broken images and self-reflections. In the wake of the collapse of belief in progress and the values of humanism, the new subject can be constructed only from fragments.⁸²

Domontovych’s characterization to a certain degree complicates and subverts the schematism of Petrov-Ber. The novelist appears to be working out the implications for human character of theoretical pre­mises advanced by the historian and philosopher while at the same time suggesting that there are limitations of theory and that contra­dictory drives are present in human conduct.

The books raise the moral issue of the legitimate use of power. What right does the new have to destroy the aesthetic and the worldview of the old? If a character’s identity is bound up with a paradigm, then

to destroy it is to do violence to the individual. Perhaps people are better off with their illusions? Ipolit Mykhailovych at one point says: “But having destroyed this illusion, what did I achieve? Did I feel some relief? Did I recapture peace and my former spiritual balance? No! Well, then? Would it not have been better to continue living in antic­ipation of this impossible meeting, which until now had governed my actions?”⁸³ The price of modernity for the main protagonists - Varetsky, Zyna, Komakha, Elsner - is shown to be cultural dislocation and rootlessness. Cut adrift spiritually, denied access to tradition and the literary classics, their understanding of human nature is impover­ished. This message makes the two novels subversive of the politics of human engineering self-confidently advocated by Russian utopian thinkers from Chernyshevsky to the revolutionaries of the twenties. It required little imagination on the part of readers to detect a critique of cultural homogenization and the forced marches to progress that had been a feature of Russian imperial history. The imperial state had felt the impact of forced experiments in social planning since Peter‘s time. In this context the eternal cab-driver represents sullen popular resistance. His aimless and unnecessary wandering might also be seen as an ironic comment on Gogol’s famous ending to Dead Souls, in which “Rus” is portrayed as a troika careering into an unknown future. The Ukrainian intelligentsia that is captive to these schemes, the writer appears to suggest, is estranged from social realities, in the same way as Komakha is from the Mohyliv cab driver.

The need to construct a totalizing view of the world is natural. It is the five-year-old Irtsia’s instinctive desire. Her world-picture relies on an idiosyncratic logic that assimilates any unexpected facts into a complete picture. She believes that Komakha is the father of insects (komakha means insect) and constructs a theory that he travels far into the distance to become tiny, then climbs into ant holes. The narrator comments: “The logical structure of the expressed thought was impec­cable. Everything unnecessary had been eliminated, leaving a single mental construct that held nothing superfluous or extraneous.”⁸⁴ This desire to produce a mental construct that would be fully explanatory leads to the suppression of disconcerting facts. Irtsia’s thinking is linked to that of Komakha-Seraphicus, the futurist-constructivists, imperial monologues, and all monistic, totalizing systems. Irtsia, how­ever, is a child who might be expected to learn distinctions between fantasy and fact later in life. Her conceptualizations, however eccen­tric, are harmless because they remain in the realm of fantasy. In the adult world, fantasies can become dangerous illusions, rigidified dogmas that direct personal behaviour and political practice. Domon- tovych sensed the frightening consequences that could result when immature minds move to implement totalizing theories, when a dis­cussion of concepts becomes an “engineering” of people. The author’s novels pose the question of how to prevent potential disasters. He implicitly suggests a solution in the study of the humanities. A knowl­edge of history and literature, by developing an imaginative identifi­cation with another time and mentality, can reduce fanaticism.

For readers in the twenties, the image of a fountain, a source of knowledge, would have conjured up Mykola Zerov’s defence, in Ad Fontes (Do dzherel), of the European literary and philosophical heri­tage. He argued: “let us not avoid ancient or even feudal Europe. Let us not fear that it will contaminate us. (Who knows, perhaps it is better for a proletarian to be infected with the class determinants of the Western European bourgeois than with the pusillanimity of a Russian “repentant nobleman.”) We must get to know the sources of European culture and we must make them our own. We must know them, or else we shall always be provincials. To Khvyl ovy’s ‘Quo vadis?’ let us answer: ad fontes, to the original sources, to the roots.”⁸⁵ The image of a fountain occurs in both the opening lines of Doctor Seraphicus and at the end of chapter 2. The play of sunlight on its jets casts endlessly varied kaleidoscopic patterns on the surface of the water. Like all people, Komakha-Seraphicus and Irtsia delight in watching these and searching in them for patterns and reflections. The fountain can be taken as a metaphor for art: a pleasurable relaxation, a contemplation of changing forms, a play of perceptions, and a modeling of the world. By implication, those who are incapable of enjoying the fountain are potentially condemned to a disastrous inflexibility. In rejecting the role of art as purposeful play, in limiting themselves to one rationalist style of thought and simultaneously effacing the boundary between art and life, the radical moderns have shifted the arena of experimen­tation from art onto life, with dangerous consequences.

Domontovych, an erudite man with catholic interests, felt hostile to nineteenth-century populism and was drawn to the analytical, demys- tificatory experiments of contemporary cubists, futurists, and construc­tivists. At the same time, however, his Hobbesian fear of irrationality in human behaviour caused him to adopt a sceptical stance toward the results of violent and radical upheavals. His plots, therefore, reveal an understanding of the fascination exerted by the new but also serve as warnings against its siren-calls. One may discover in this dilemma a paradigm for Domontovych’s implicit personal problem. Varetsky and Komakha, the dry, bookish scholar-thinkers, represent Domontovych the intellectual. Zyna and Elsner represent the attractive radical aes­thetic. The hero’s love, seduction, and recoil may have represented Domontovych’s own involuntary fascination and entanglement with their ideas. The neoclassicist writer Domontovych, who has been described as “the most enigmatic Ukrainian classic of the twentieth century,”⁸⁶ was, perhaps, closer in temperament and taste to the aes­thetic of rupture that he mocks than he was prepared to admit. Like the radicals, he was ready to accept the role of history’s midwife in order to usher in the new, but he was aware that in doing so he undermined his neoclassicist scepticism and stoicism. Sensing such a dichotomy, critics have in various ways suggested that the writer exhib­its a blend of the incompatible: “neoclassicism” and “expressionism,” in Sherekh’s terms, “abstraction,” and “concretization,” in Iurii Kor­but’s, a relativism or “intellectual vagabondage” in Pavlychko’s.⁸⁷ His fictions give evidence simultaneously of an attraction to the new and an apprehension of its dangers. The ultimate message appears to be that neither self-comforting dreams, nor voluntarism, nor the fantastic projects of scientific planners should be unthinkingly embraced. Dom- ontovych’s delicately balanced, evasive texts demonstrate the tempta­tions of the great experiment and gently subvert them.

NATIONAL S E LF-C R IT I Q UE : IEVHEN Malaniuk

Reflections on the failed struggle for independent statehood domi­nated the thinking of nationalists in the interwar years and during the years immediately following the Second World War. Dmytro Dontsov and Ievhen Malaniuk, the most prominent intellectuals in the emigre nationalist movement in the twenties and thirties, focused much of their attention on the reasons for the defeat, particularly on the psychological unpreparedness of the people for a national liberation struggle. As Oksana Zabuzhko has observed, the philosophical ques­tion “Who are we?” which had dominated the national debate in the nineteenth century, shifted to “What makes us worse than others?” and, finally, to the practical question “What should we do?”⁸⁸ Much of what Zabuzhko calls the “philosophical potential” accumulated in the discourse of the previous century went unused. The interwar nationalist generation was often anti-intellectual and heavily focused on militant action. Dontsov, in his Foundations of Our Politics (Pidstavy nashoi polityky, 1921), in the articles he wrote for the Literary-Scientific Herald (Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk), and in his revanchist Nationalism of 1924, argued that in order to capture the imagination of the broad masses, the national idea had to be presented in simple, glorificatory terms. In the twenties and thirties, overlaid as it was by centuries of imperial propaganda, it existed in social psychology as an obscure, unflattering idea. Dontsov, along with Malaniuk, the leading poet of the emigration and a brilliant essayist, effected the most enduring reimaging of Ukraine at this time and radically redirected the dis­course on empire.

Self-criticism, as we have seen, was not an uncommon feature of the national debate. Franko had described Ukrainians as dominated by “pettiness, narrow egoism, insincerity and pompousness... a ponder­ous race, unrefined, sentimental, lacking in calibre and will-power, quite inept at political life on its own rubbish-heap.”⁸⁹ Panteleimon Kulish had famously castigated his people as a “Nation without direc­tion, without, honour or respect,” calling them “barbarians” who boasted of their fierce nature, while neglecting cultural life.⁹⁰ The same tone was adopted by Petro Karmansky and Mykola Khvylovy. The first raged at the disrespect for education among his compatriots and the second at their inertness and timidity. But the image of Ukraine forged by Ievhen Malaniuk, a former officer in the army of the defeated Ukrainian People’s Republic, was a still crueller and more shocking form of national self-analysis. He suggested in some poems that the chimera of Ukraine was a beautiful but lifeless illusion, a witch drinking the blood of her own children:

So you lie in dreamy impotence, But when night comes, like a witch You spread your bat-wings. And while the owls screech in the orchards,

And frogs croak languidly in marshes, The darkness whispers and the Dnieper groans in sleep, You fly, terrible and dishevelled, to the sabbath, To drink the blood of your bastard children.⁹¹

In other poems he saw Ukraine as a slave girl who “loved oppression” and gave birth to bastards and traitors, as the whore of khans, tsars, and sultans. Sometimes he personified the country as a cowardly male whose revolting character is the product of generations of colonial rule, as in “Fragment” (Uryvok):

And the ages passed, all in the same yoke, Nourishing the cripple and the slave.

Treacherous, crafty, ignorant and ignoble,

In the putrid rotting of a dead spirit

He lovingly fashioned himself a spider’s heart:

Small, shrivelled, cowardly and angry,

Hating and jealous of greatness, Submissive and lowly at the khan’s feet.

That’s how you left the defenceless land And in flight stuck a spear in the earth.

That’s how you exchanged the iron order of the state

For the rapacious whistle of the enemy whip.

And you sold your prince to be executed And went dully with the herd into captivity.⁹²

Malaniuk cursed his country’s weakness, lamenting the lack of “bronze” and “iron” in its character - qualities required for military strength and successful state-building.

Remarkable in Malaniuk’s poetry is the degree to which it employs the traditional colonial imagery of Ukraine in both Polish and Russian writings, while transforming it into an anticolonial narrative. The poet ascribes the lack of national consciousness and state-building skills among his countrymen to a crippled psyche that has resulted from decades of oppression. He condemns the empire as an artificial cre­ation of a “mad demiurge” that has given birth to a perverted, lifeless culture of “rotten utopias” and has robbed his country of its name, identity, and character.⁹³ However, it is the reworked imagery of Ukraine as an intractable steppe borderland that holds centre stage. Not so much an arena of heroic action or a place of historic memories, it is a space that “drinks one’s energy” and then reverts to a will-less flatland that can be trampled by foreign hordes. It is described as the “cossack prairies,” which still have to be brought under control by the indigenous nation. In this way Malaniuk makes Ukrainians the agents of the colonizing process, extending to them the rights both of con­quest and cultivation, while lamenting their inability to complete either process.

Malaniuk’s ideal Ukraine is a “steppe Hellas,” a country that has absorbed the influences of ancient Greece and Byzantium and synthe­sized them into a unique culture. He attributes to her a philosophical calm, an aesthetic of simplicity and grace, and a striving to unite the ethical and aesthetic. What is lacking in this attractive civilization is precisely the warrior ethos that the country once possessed, as the history of Kyivan Rus and the cossack state testify.

The poetic contributions to the discourse of empire were comple­mented by a series of essays composed over a period of almost fifty years.⁹⁴ They clarify the message that Ukrainian history and the national character are the product of two different mentalities: the Scythian- Hellenic and the Viking-Roman. In several historiosophical studies, of which “Sketches from the History of Our Culture” (1954) is the most ambitious, Malaniuk urges that the persistent inability to unite the two mentalities into a fully functional civilization has been the country’s great tragedy. Like his poetry, Malaniuk’s essays examine the incom­plete national consciousness of his countrymen and condemn the Rus­sian empire’s state-building strategy, which, in his mind, has always aimed consciously at destroying the Ukrainian national identity. The two main issues - the colonized Ukrainian psyche and the colonizing state - come together in his idea of malorosianstvo or “Littlerussianness.”

In Malaniuk’s thought, the concept of Littlerussianness is a form of unwelcome, forced hybridity, a “national hermaphroditism,” an iden­tity that has been demanded of his compatriots whenever they have sought acceptance within the empire. Malaniuk makes it clear that this identity was not in the beginning a product of ignorance or restricted to the peasantry and the uneducated but was consciously assumed by the upper classes. The Ukrainians in Peter’s court were the first creators of the “political and national renegadism, and the progenitors of the later most fatal and most characteristic product of the empire, the so-called all-Russian intelligentsia.”⁹⁵ The later impe­rial literature and art allowed for the use of Ukrainian ethnographic elements but denied any opportunity for their digestion and structur­ing by the nationally conscious psyche. As a result they were only allowed to be shown in combination with other elements. They were made available as cultural goods representative of the empire as a whole but never permitted consideration as part of a national narra­tive. Writers and artists from Ukraine were similarly denied national recognition. Malaniuk lists many figures but pays particular attention to Gogol, whom he treats as paradigmatic. Gogol’s “Portrait” is for Malaniuk one of the best studies in literature of the maloros mentality. He interpreted the story as describing a transition to an entirely different, hostile civilization, resulting in a “moral death,” a “rupturing of an organic whole and simultaneously a mechanical dissolution into an amorphous, contourless ‘Russia.’” The story is, in short, a descrip­tion of the effects of “cultural-national suicide,” the most terrible Faustian version of “selling of one’s soul to the devil.”⁹⁶

At the root of Malaniuk’s attitude is a sense of culture as nationally (sometimes he uses the term “racially”) and territorially based. There­fore, he considers cosmopolitan phenomena, such as those generated by international modernism, as sterile, excessively intellectual, dena­tionalized forms of art. The paradigmatic figures here are Archipenko and Stravinsky, whose recombination of Ukrainian traditions and ele­ments into accessible international forms were, to his mind, abstract, cerebral, and unsuccessful experiments. The “loss” of such talents to Ukrainian culture was inevitable as long as the only choice available to writers and artists was provincial obscurity, on the one hand, and imperial, or international, recognition, on the other.

The policy of the empire had deliberately encouraged the artificial mixing of incompatible cultures into a single “all-Russian” one. While imputing superiority to products of this “imperial” culture, it had sys­tematically described “local” ones as second-rate. In time, the maloros mentality had acquired additional elements: a sense of inferiority char­acterized by a loss of historical memory and a feeling of national inse­curity and self-doubt. In Malaniuk’s military imagery and highly politicized view of culture, the maloros attitude was an “a priori and total capitulation,” a capitulation that “preceded the battle.”⁹⁷ The sickness of Littlerussianness was, in his view, of central importance to Ukrainian political and cultural history. It would be cured eventually by the cre­ation of a “sovereign national spirit” that would accompany statehood.

As the preeminent nationalist poet of the twenties and thirties, Malaniuk put his muse to the task of forging a new national psychol­ogy. Rejecting traditional lyricism and vague symbolism, he stressed technique, reason, construction, and will. According to Viktor Petrov, his verse represented the “rejection of the tradition of the village and ethnographism in favour of the modern city, planned by Le Corbusier. Instead of cherry orchards and the homestead - glass, concrete and the steel of the laboratory.”⁹⁸ His disciplined, structured forms were conscious attempts to steel the will and prepare the intellect for the rigours of combat. As a critic, he brought a similar focus and discipline to the analysis of what he considered the crucial problems that had plagued Ukrainian politics and history. Ukraine, in his view, was still to a significant degree composed of “blind, elemental forces” that were moving forward but as yet still did not constitute a “fully formed entity.” His purpose, according to one critic, was to give these forces that were unconsciously groping forward “a head.”⁹⁹ His description of Littlerussianness therefore encapsulates a rejection of the views of Kostomarov and Drahomanov and marks a departure from much of the nineteenth-century discourse of empire.

Some of Malaniuk’s most original essays describe the unnatural and deformed “all-Russian” culture that has been “saturated in the spirit of Russian state doctrine” and that has harmed Russians themselves.¹⁰⁰ In this he anticipates recent comments by both Russian writers and West­ern historians like Geoffrey Hoskings, who have argued that the Rus­sian empire left Russians themselves with a poorly developed sense of their national (as opposed to imperial) identity.¹⁰¹ In contrast to many Russian commentators, however, the questions Malaniuk poses focus squarely on the attitude of Russians to non-Russians. They are now familiar questions in colonial discourse: How was such a high degree of violence internalised by the Russian people? How is the struggle with the violent, colonial mentality (which, echoing Khvylovy, Mala- niuk terms “psychological Russia”) to be conducted? Malaniuk’s answer to these questions recalls Herzen’s comments of 1863. He indicates that the need to maintain dominion over so many nations, races, and cultures and over such a large area necessitated employing an enor­mous police apparatus, a mass of informers, a huge army, and state terrorism.¹⁰² In the cultural realm, the imperial policy was intrusive in ways that British, French, and other imperial policies were not. “Rome,” he writes, “never interfered in matters of the spirit, never tram­pled with its boots on people’s souls.”¹⁰³ Malaniuk points to the com­bination of state terrorism (“genocide, mass execution, and destruction of populations”) with the imposition of the empire’s “gods” (“its culture and language”) as features that have defined the empire’s treatment of its borderlands. It is a point of view shared by Ivan Dziuba in his important dissident tract Internationalism or Russification? (1965), in which he insists that one of tsarist colonialism’s distinctive features lay in going beyond “the imposition of a colonial administration and... economic exploitation” to “full assimilation, into a social digestion of the conquered countries.”¹⁰⁴ Malaniuk analyzed the engineering of a new imperial cultural entity (which became in the twentieth century a Soviet Russian cultural identity) in several essays: “The End of Russian Literature” (1923), “Petersburg as a Literary-Historical Theme” (1931), “Creativity and Nationality” (1935), “On the Problem of Bol­shevism” (1956), “One-and-Indivisibleness” (1964), and “The South and Russian Literature” (1964).

In “The End of Russian Literature” he describes nineteenth-century Russian messianism and predicts the collapse along national lines of the “all-Russian” literature, which he called “the imperialist Russian esperanto.” This literature and culture, the product of a misguided attempt to produce a composite nation from a variety of peoples and cultures, would, in his view, not withstand the test of history. As various nations, including the Russian nation, emerged from the amalgam, the languages and literatures of each would gradually differentiate them­selves. Malaniuk saw the Literary Discussion of 1925-28 in Soviet Ukraine as evidence of the continued struggle against Russian colo­nialism and the maloros mentality, albeit under the guise of Marxist slogans. He welcomed Khvylovy’s writings as an attempt to establish the “psychological independence” that was a prerequisite for an anti­colonial politics.¹⁰⁵ Over the next decades he observed with satisfaction that Khvylovy’s was only the first of many expressions of national pro­test from within the Soviet context.

POET OF dissent: VASYL STUS

The literature produced after the Second World War by emigre writers who now found themselves outside the communist bloc frequently depicted the degenerate nature of the Soviet state and its anti-Ukrainian policies. These themes recur in the work of major emigre figures like Ievhen Malaniuk, Teodosii Osmachka, Ulas Samchuk, and Ivan Bahriany, and in Iurii Klen’s epic Ashes of Empire (Popil imperii, 1944-46) and Vasyl Barka’s Yellow Prince (Zhovtyi kniaz, 1962).¹⁰⁶ The latter is a powerful novel devoted to the famine of 1932-33, which the author himself lived through. Barka shows that the famine was not an isolated, tragic accident but a premeditated event made possible by the regime’s anti-Ukrainian and anti-peasant attitudes. Troops stationed at the Ukrainian-Russian border prevented the population from leaving and confiscated grain. Barka’s depiction of events has been confirmed by others.¹⁰⁷ In the sixties the state’s repressive policies and concen­tration camps also became the theme of a proscribed oppositionist, or “dissident,” literature that was written within Soviet Ukraine but published abroad and that radically challenged Soviet political ortho­doxy and accepted discursive limits. It is generally much less well recognized that much of the literature that did get printed in Soviet publications in the postwar years was also frequently treated with suspicion and denounced by ideological watchdogs.¹⁰⁸ In the late sixties and early seventies ideological transgressions were increasingly punished with incarceration. Writers frequently conformed, gave up literature, or wrote without hope of publication. By the midseventies scores of oppositionist authors like Mykhailo Osadchy, Ievhen Sverstiuk, and Ivan Svitlychny had been arrested. Their writings from that point on became records of life in prison camps. Many “dissident” writers met with the large numbers of Ukrainians who had been imprisoned in the camps after the Second World War and learned of the experi­ences of this earlier generation of oppositionists.¹⁰⁹

In mainstream, or “sanctioned,” writing the hackneyed message of an indissoluble cultural and political unity of Russia and Ukraine was still ritualistically invoked. In its closing segment one of the best postwar novels, Hryhorii Tiutiunnyk’s Whirlwind (Vyr, 1959-62) invokes a “Rus” fatherland as the supreme object of devotion and self­sacrifice. Roman Ilchenko’s The Cossack Clan Shall Have No End, Or Mamai and Another Woman (Kozatskomu rodu nema perevodu, abo zh Mamai i chuzha molodytsia, 1958), although stylistically nonconform­ist and an initiator of magic realism, nonetheless devotes a great deal of space to the historical friendship of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. Another major achievement of the late Soviet period, Pavlo Zahrebelny’s I, Bohdan (Ia, Bohdan, 1985), an artistically successful study of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, reworks politically acceptable history by describing the superiority of the Russian state and nation over the Ukrainian and sees the union with Muscovy as an expression of the people’s will.¹¹⁰ In these and similar works, writers frequently claimed a dual Ukrainian and Soviet “citizenship” in a way that has been described by Yekelchyk as reminiscent of the period of 1800-40, during which writers made a public identification with both the Rus­sian state and their local patried¹ One of the most controversial novels of the post-Stalin era was Oles Honchar’s Cathedral (Sobor, 1968), which was widely interpreted as a timely plea for ecological sanity and national rights. It stimulated a spirited “dissident” essay by Ievhen Sverstiuk that circulated widely in the underground press.¹¹² The couching of demands for Ukrainian rights within a dual, loyalist frame­work also characterized the position of the most famous dissident text of the postwar period, Ivan Dziuba’s Internationalism or Russification? which was written in connection with the arrest of Ukrainian intellec­tuals in 1965 and, although never allowed publication in the Soviet Union, circulated widely. Dziuba drew on Marxist-Leninist classics and the bolshevik congresses of the early 1920s to demonstrate how cur­rent policies had departed from earlier promises to respect national rights. He described the contemporary Soviet historians and theoreti­cians as heirs of Sergei Solovev, Mikhail Katkov, and Vasilii Shulgin.¹¹³ The confusion, whether intentional or unintentional, of the USSR with “Russia one and indivisible” had, according to him, “been absorbed into the bloodstream of many people.”¹¹⁴

Russian dissidents, like the nineteenth-century radical opposition­ists, were divided in their attitude toward Ukrainian demands for recognition of their political and cultural identity. Some, like Vladimir Bukovsky, Andrei Amalrik, and Andrei Siniavsky were relatively sym­pathetic, while Elena Bonner openly welcomed Ukraine’s indepen­dence. Others, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were hostile. He advocated Russia’s retention of Central and Eastern Ukraine, which he consid­ered “Russian provinces” that Ukraine had “grabbed.”¹¹⁵ He defined Russia as a “combination of many nations - large, medium-sized and small,” who shared a sophisticated Russian cultural-linguistic medium and a “tradition of religious tolerance.” The Ukrainian language, he felt, “will have to be raised to international standards and usage,” a task that “would require over 100 years.”¹¹⁶ Perhaps most revealing of a traditional colonial viewpoint was Solzhenitsyn’s denial of any chau­vinism among Russians: “But if we speak about the rampage of militant chauvinism, then it exists - and in bloody form - in several republics of the former USSR, but certainly not in Russia. And if one were to count all the instances of violence perpetrated on nationalist grounds and in local wars - all of them took place outside Russia and were not perpetrated by Russians.”¹¹⁷

Leading emigre Russians have also echoed nineteenth-century dis­paragements of Ukraine’s cultural life and political aspirations. Nabokov, in his publication of 1944, was supercilious in his comments on Gogol: “He almost became a writer of Ukrainian folklore tales and ‘colourful romances.’ We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then he would have been lost. When I want a good nightmare I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume of Dikanka and Mirgorod stuff about ghosts haunting the banks of the Dnieper, burlesque Jews and dashing Cossacks.”¹¹⁸ Joseph Brodsky reportedly read a scurrilous poem enti­tled “On the Independence of Ukraine” to students at Queen’s Col­lege, New York, which ended with the following advice to “khokhols”: “only when you die... will you wheeze lines from Aleksandr [Pushkin], and not the lies of Taras [Shevchenko].”¹¹⁹ The causes of such hostility no doubt have a great deal to do with the trauma of decolonization. Dominant powers, as has frequently been observed, rationalize the practice of keeping smaller countries within their spheres of influence and react negatively to those countries’ attempts at escaping this sphere. Sneering at small nations, at “Balkanization” and helpless natives is a common response. One has the distinct impression that these attitudes treat with disdain the early nineteenth-century view of Ukraine as an exotic peasant paradise, while finding nothing to put in its place. The covertly supercilious attitude has a long tradition in literary relations. It recalls, for example, the following nil admirari description by Sergei Aksakov in 1850 on the occasion of Gogol’s forty- first birthday party:

The three Ukrainians [troe khokhlov, meaning Gogol, Maksymovych, and Bodiansky] were delightful. They sang without music and Gogol read to me some dumy of the Ukrainian [khokhlatskogo] Homer. Gogol recited and the others merely gesticulated and whooped, in front of Khomiakov and Sophia [Aksakov’s wife], although the presence of the latter obviously annoyed Gogol and, as soon as she left, the earlier grimaces and hand gestures reappeared. I, Khomiakov and Solovev enjoyed this expression of nationality, but without much sympathy. Solovev’s smile betrayed contempt, Khomiakov’s laughter a kindhearted mockery, and I was amused to observe them like some Chuvashes or Cheremisses... and nothing more.¹²⁰

Counterposed to this view stands Maiakovsky’s attitude, as expressed in the poem “A Debt to Ukraine” (Dolg Ukraine, 1926), in which the writer laments the fact that Russians know Ukrainian culture only in its kitsch form and, consequently, have little respect for it. Maiakovsky’s, however, is a rare expression of self-criticism.¹²¹

Dziuba’s book had an enormous effect on many young contempo­raries, some of whom were prepared to step outside the loyalist frame­work and publicly challenge the regime. Vasyl Stus’s poetry, which portrayed the USSR as a gigantic concentration camp, is a compelling instance of a literature that refused to come to an accommodation with the authorities and that could exist only in underground circles. Since his death in prison in 1985 he has become a martyr for the national cause. His biography and poetry both give evidence of a powerful personality that resisted manipulation by the dominant ide­ology. Iurii Pokalchuk recalls that he was uncompromising by nature, and his national commitment was a leading factor in the formation of this intractability.¹²² “I was not prepared,” he wrote in his prison notebooks, “to bow my head. Behind me stood Ukraine, my oppressed people, whose honour I must uphold unto my death.”¹²³

The regime arrested and imprisoned Stus twice. In an attempt to break his spirit the most difficult conditions were created: he was forced to work in mines, was denied medical aid, and spent an entire year in solitary confinement. The authorities attempted to prevent him from writing, confiscating letters, papers, and a manuscript of over three hundred poems called “Birds of Spirit” (Ptakhy dushi). These events are movingly described in his prison notebook.¹²⁴ Stus’ poetry did, however, make its way from prison. It was read on Radio Liberty broadcasts from the West, copied, and distributed illegally. The poet became a symbol of national resistance, and the transfer of his body for reburial in Kyiv in 1989 became, as did the transfer of Shevchenko’s body over a century earlier, the occasion for national mourning and cultural self-affirmation.

A key to understanding Stus’s identity can be found in a long essay he wrote on Pavlo Tychyna, the greatest Ukrainian poet of the revo­lutionary years.¹²⁵ Tychyna’s biography overshadowed Stus’s like a nemesis, a deeply ingrained history lesson, and a parable of the Soviet writer’s fate. Stus interpreted Tychyna’s evolution as a progressive fall from the brilliance of Clarinets of the Sun (Soniashni klarnety, 1918) and Instead of Sonnets and Octaves (Zamist sonetiv i oktav, 1920), which were written in an unmistakable personal voice, to the living death that accompanied his canonization as a state bard. He was rapidly transformed into a lifeless mask, a permanently grinning corpse inca­pable of uttering a living sound. A pathological, physical fear had frozen Tychyna’s spirit in the late twenties, making him into a pathetic marionette. The essay demonstrates that Stus sometimes feared that all his contemporaries were becoming Tychynas and searched for a way of himself avoiding the humiliating destiny that appeared to await most Ukrainian intellectuals. They were compelled, he wrote, to become either Mazepas or Kochubeis, to restrict themselves to a display of local patriotism or to embrace a “Russian internationalism.” Both these options Stus condemned as treason to the nation. Deprived of their history, culture, and spirit, Ukrainian writers in the Soviet Union were only allowed to fashion versions of the conformist “younger brother” complex.¹²⁶

Stus, like others of the generation of the sixties, saw poetry’s purpose in the search for the individual self, not in recording the collective will or servicing the requirements of state education or propaganda. He foregrounded the tragic fate of the individual consciousness. The role of the poet was to defend and affirm personal experience in the face of the state’s overwhelming power to shape thought and feeling. To view the poet as a “voice” or “spokesman” (whether for the people, the nation, or the state) was always a levelling, a temptation to which Tychyna, among others, had succumbed. Stus struggled, therefore, to articulate an authentic consciousness and inner voice, to find and project himself: life, he asserts in one of his poems, is not the “overcoming of distances” (dolannia mezh) but the “acquisition of habits” (navykannia) and “a filling up with yourself” (samoiu soboiu/napovnennia).¹²⁷

Tychyna’s fate, the reduction of one of the great twentieth-century talents to a “court jester,” his transformation from a singer of the national revolution in 1917 to a masochistic ridiculer of nationalists, a denier, as Stus saw it, of his own self, was the supreme example of violence’s ability to pervert the psyche. For subaltern peoples the artic­ulation of the personal and the national-cultural were inextricably linked. Tychyna was only an intensified version, a vivid illustration, of what happened when one of these identities was denied. Like Malaniuk before him, Stus, in rejecting and protesting against the Tychyna com­plex, was expressing a desperate anger against the lobotomization of his countrymen, which he detected everywhere around himself. The contemporary Ukrainian inteligent, he wrote, is “95 percent official functionary and 5 percent patriot.”¹²⁸

The poet’s notion of the authentic self drew, in the first place, on the philosophy of existentialism, in which the generation of the late fifties and sixties was steeped. The influence of existentialism is evident in the obstinate focus on the concrete details of daily existence, often the only things that appear truly knowable and real. The world of Stus’s poetry is a microcosm composed of repeated images: walls, bars, pine trees, sunsets. A second element in his struggle for authenticity was the espousal of high modernism. Tamara Hundorova has asserted that in Stus’ poetry modernism’s rejection of mass civilization fused with a countercultural protest against canonicity. High modernism became a way of opposing socialist realism and its hackneyed, populist forms: “Stus and others in fact created a kind of laboratory of thought and language in which mechanical ideological reductionism, ‘object­less’ thought, and the deformation of language itself was rooted out of a national and social consciousness forged by a colonial past and the new totalitarianism of socialist dictatorship.”¹²⁹

The concept of modernism as a difficult, hermetic, and “unpopular” form provided a way of writing against the devalued cliches and falsehoods of “popular” Soviet culture. The poet felt he had to create in the face of the degenerate mass civilization that surrounded and intruded upon him at every step. In his “Prison Notebooks” he wrote: “It is frightening to feel without a country, without a people.” He felt he had to create them himself out of his “own pained heart.”¹³⁰ He expresses the feeling that Ukraine’s best writers and scholars are not known and, for this reason, the intelligentsia’s patriotism is shallow. In the following historiographic excursus, which strongly recalls Mala- niuk, he suggests a reason for the national intellectual’s quietude:

I am thinking about the millennium of Christianity in Ukraine. The Byzantine- Muscovite rite was, I believe, the first mistake, which attached us, the most Eastern part of Europe, to the East. Our individualistic, Western spirit, con­stricted by a despotic Byzantine Orthodoxy never succeeded in freeing itself from this duality of spirit, a duality that created in time the complex of hypocrisy. It appears that the passeistic spirit of Orthodoxy fell like a heavy stone on the young, immature national spirit, led to a feminine quality becoming the attribute of our spirituality. The iron discipline of Tatar Mongols impregnated the Russian spirit adding aggressiveness and a pyramidal struc­ture. The Ukrainian spirit never broke out from under the heavy stone of passeistic faith. Perhaps this is one reason for our national tragedy.¹³¹

Stus’s relationship to Russian writers and culture was nuanced. He considered Russians, on the one hand, to have been the beneficiaries of passivity among the peoples they colonized, since this passivity had cleared the way for their aggressive designs. On the other hand, when he examined Russian writers, he celebrated evidence of independent thought and spirit. He calls naive a letter of 24 September 1820 written by Pushkin in which the latter says: “Yermolov filled it [the Caucasus] with his name and his beneficent spirit. The savage Circas­sians are frightened: their ancient boldness is disappearing. The roads are gradually becoming safer, the long convoys unnecessary. One can expect that this conquered land, which has so far brought no substan­tial benefit to Russia, will soon bring us into a close and safe trading relationship with the Persians and will not present an obstacle in future wars; and, perhaps, Napoleon’s whimsical plan to conquer India will be realized by us.”¹³² Even so, he admires the fact that Push­kin put his whole complex and contradictory personality into his verse, because the “aristocratic-castish” arrogance and self-confidence can be seen as a positive value: it allowed the development of a code of honour resistant to tyranny.¹³³ Although the Ukrainian poet con­siders all Russian culture to be deeply marked by the imperial history of “slavery and merciless exploitation,” he accepts that the striving for a full and active response to life in such poets as Pushkin was a valu­able compensatory influence that “saved human beings from sinking into their time, into the daily grind.”¹³⁴

Stus’s modernist rejection of mass culture, his intellectualism and countercultural stance, leads him to disappoint readers who come with populist expectations. His writings can, of course, be compared to previous anticolonial protests. There is the familiar acceptance, even expectation, of martyrdom, the same principled posture, the anger directed at the oppressor, the agonizing over the nation’s fate - all of which recall Shevchenko, Malaniuk, and other imprisonned writers of the gulag. If, as has been said, Ukrainian literature can be divided into three categories - the published, the proscribed, and the prison writ­ings - Stus’s poetry, which frequently paraphrases, sometimes almost quotes directly, from the work of persecuted precursors, brings the “genre” of prison poetry to a culmination.¹³⁵ His work appears to survey and summarize an entire anticolonial struggle, to gather up other biographies, and to communicate with figures from past gener­ations. However, in spite of, or perhaps because of, an awareness of this tradition, Stus shuns expected rhetorical devices, sentiments, and forms. There is no Manichaean universe that counterposes victim to oppressor. There is little in the way of an optimistic, faith-affirming message, of inspiring visions or comforting counternarratives. There are not even many denunciations of the regime’s supporters. The poet has few illusions. Whereas previous generations of Soviet writers, par­ticularly Tychyna’s postrevolutionary generation, might have been con­fused by the contradictory masks assumed by Soviet reality, this is not the case for Stus. Clearsighted, determined, and contemptuous, he dismisses Soviet ideology as a sham so discredited that discussion is rendered unnecessary. The regime musters no defenders, no believers, no troubadours, and today’s Tychyna is not a threatening opponent but a pathetic, haunting ghost of a figure. Hence Stus feels no need to mobilize opinion; the public that reads poetry is already convinced of the degeneracy of the regime.

Stus’s narrator holds his conversation with other poets (Shevchenko, Tychyna, Zerov, Svidzinsky), other figures who have in one way or another all passed through similar Golgothas, and with an implied reader who is aware of the national tradition. He constructs a poetic world out of the existential detail that surrounds him (the trees, the evening horizons of the Mordovia and Kolyma concentration camps) and intertextual references. These are, however, only a setting, a microcosm connected to a macrocosm. Marko Pavlyshyn has pointed out how the microcosm of prison interiors draws on the imagery of the square, vertical, or rigid forms like prison bars and candles, while the macrocosm of the universe with its planets in motion is symbolized by the circle or ellipse.¹³⁶ The zone of the gulag is merely a more restricted version of a larger zone, which encompasses the whole Soviet Union and, beyond this, all human experience. Stus’s gulag is, in the end, an existential, mythic “zone” of enslavement in which all individuals strive for self-discovery and labour to fill existence with their own authentic selves. In the same way, the “native land” for which the poet pines can also be seen as representing all “homelands.” Although the details of concrete experiences are ever-present, there is always in Stus’s poetry a sense of this metaphysical dimension.

This hermetic imagery is matched by a difficult, “heavy” diction, something again that distinguishes him from the “popular,” “demo­cratic” writer. Shevelov has remarked that the very structure of Stus’s verse seems to forbid any surrender to song-like rhythms, as though it “called upon the reader to avoid becoming a sentimental snail.”¹³⁷ The poet’s verse is close to the intonations of conversational speech, makes use of enjambements, midline pauses, and imperfect and inobtrusive rhymes in order to dispell any regular or easy rhythmic pattern. It searches out unusual verbs and avoids overworking the epithet. The result is an ascetic verse, laconic and clipped, held together by “inter­nal rhyme, thought and sound.”¹³⁸ It is a highly condensed, crystallized art that achieves its effects through unexpected metaphors and mon­tage and that asks the reader to make unexpected connections between images. This is not conventional civic poetry. In an early crit­ical article entitled “Let Us Be Sincere” (1965), Stus, in fact, rejected the idea of poetry as the versification of political sentiment. In his opinion only the crystallization of a “synthetic” experience, one that engaged the entire adult mind, deserved the name of poetry: “The power of poetry lies in its preservation of the undissolved concreteness of surrounding reality, which has its own beauty, wisdom and ethics.”¹³⁹

The same article also made explicit Stus’s antipopulism. In it he admits to disliking Kotliarevsky’s Eneida (Aeneid) and Kvitka and other nineteenth-century Ukrainian classics that, to his mind, lacked the intellectual environment to become truly great.¹⁴⁰ Above all he dislikes their timidity, their tendency to glance nervously over their shoulders at the public or at the authorities. He prefers bold, radical, outspoken figures like Marina Tsvetaeva and Olena Teliha who openly express their contempt for philistines and live through tragic circumstances with dignity. In one article he quotes Tsvetaeva’s words that all poets are “Jews,” that is to say, that they refuse the “common life, common joys, common heaven” in favour of “their own, separate, individual ones.”¹⁴¹ It is the strength of countercultural desires and the boldness of thought that he most admires. He also sees these qualities in the early Maiakovsky and Pasternak. All poets, in his opinion, must be cultural - but not necessarily political - revolutionaries. Like Malaniuk, Stus expresses a particularly violent contempt not only for a creolized and cheapened Ukrainian culture but for consumers of this culture who accept its second-rate status as inevitable and who are at the same time prepared to discard it and adopt the “higher” Russian one. The construction of a “difficult” poetry is itself a kind of struggle for self­respect, a break with the internalized inferiority complex that is the result of cultural colonization.

Stus, therefore, summarizes many aspects of Ukraine’s anticolonial struggle, even as he looks toward a post-Soviet reality where the indi­vidual is not required to fulfil the role of tribune or become immersed in a cause and may accept the lessons and enrichments offered by other cultures - even those of former imperial masters. The imperial culture, after all, provides instructive examples for the poet who must discover an intimate personal voice. Toward the end of his life Stus ironised that he was, in fact, a free man, that no one could make him do what he did not wish to do, because, like Skovoroda, he had found himself.¹⁴² If the realm of personal freedom is located outside narra­tives designed by others, then it must be found in narratives of one’s own making. The integrity with which the poet pursued this insight has won him admirers in the post-Soviet generation who recognize him as a forerunner. His poetry can be read as a reaching beyond the anticolonial paradigm toward a sensibility free of the dependencies and inferiority complexes of opposition.

Inevitably, however, he suffers subjection to the political. Described as anticolonial by necessity and postcolonial by desire, Stus is a writer who projects an identity beyond the framework of the anticolonial struggle but who must continually identify himself with it.¹⁴³ In his Internationalism or Russification? Dziuba had also urged that the path to the universal lay through the national. One “belonged to humanity” only through “one’s own nation,” he wrote, and if that nation was in a critical situation, its existence and future at stake, it would be “shame­ful to abandon it.”¹⁴⁴ Stus accepts that there is no short-circuiting the national on the way to spiritual salvation. In several ways, therefore, he can be seen as an anticolonial writer on the cusp of the postcolonial.

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