The 1956 Kyiv “Disputation”
It was Pervomais’kyi’s dual Ukrainian-Jewish identity that again came under fire in 1956, when Mykola Sheremet (1906-86), a prolific author of some fifty books of pseudo-patriotic Soviet verse bereft of literary value and a representative of dogmatic literary criticism, publicly attacked Pervomais’kyi.
The animosity between Pervomais’kyi and Sheremet went back to the times of the Blakytnyi House in Kharkiv, when Sheremet began writing the cheerful party-inspired and ideologically pristine poetry that even his close friends considered grapho- mania.117 Back then, making fun of Sheremet, Pervomais’kyi crafted a popular aphorism built on the absolute rhyme, unfortunately not conveyable in English translation: “Sheremet—poet?” (Is Sheremet a poet?). It was immediately picked up: those ready to make fun of Sheremet answered the question: “Ne poet—Sheremet!” (Sheremet isn’t a poet!). In addition, in his satirical poem “Smert’ liryky” (The Death of Lyrics), published on the front page of the influential Literaturna hazeta, Pervomais’kyi mocked Sheremet, among other Ukrainian poets, gathered at the deathbed of the sick Lyric who eventually passed away, the poets’ presence and support notwithstanding.118Sheremet did not hesitate to reply, appearing with his retort “Conversation with Sel’vins’kyi: A Reply to Pervomais’kyi” in the next issue of Literaturna hazeta. Instead of dueling Pervomais’kyi face-to-face, he preferred to hide behind the back of the Russian poet Il’ia Sel’vinskii (1899-1968), who, Sheremet argued in an imaginary conversation with the Russian poet, came to Ukraine to meet with Pervomais’kyi but instead came across Sheremet. The latter opened his eyes to Pervomais’kyi’s tasteless literary imitations so that by the end of the conversation Sel’vinskii decided to sue Pervomais’kyi for “plagiarism” and “piggish” behavior.119These two clashes did not exhaust the conflict between Pervomais’kyi and Sheremet: there is also some evidence that even in the 1930s Sheremet, the future pillar of socialist realism, intended to cleanse Ukrainian literature of the Jews.120
In the 1960s, Sheremet viciously attacked the young generation of literati, once again confirming his reputation as an ossified Stalinist, to borrow Ivan Svitlychnyi’s characterization.
Now Sheremet cast his charges against Pervomais’kyi in the mold of the antisemitic rhetoric of the late Stalin era. Although the reason for his attack is not known, Pervomais’kyi’s rebuff helps to reconstruct the context. Pervomais’kyi, Sheremet argued, was not a genuine Ukrainian. He could not be a good Ukrainian patriot. Ukrainian was not his native language. Every word he put on paper, he took from the dictionary. He was only a guest in “our Ukraine” and had to be repeatedly reminded that he “ate our Ukrainian bread.” Though Sheremet avoided explicitly antisemitic statements, the thrust of his allegation was transparent: Pervomais’kyi was an alien, a “rootless cosmopolitan” whose words and rhymes sounded Ukrainian but were bereft of Ukrainian substance; he had nothing in common with Ukraine, the Ukrainian people, or Ukrainian literature. He was an accomplished Jewish parasite whom genuine Ukrainians had mistakenly allowed to enjoy the bounty of Ukrainian nature and culture. Pervomais’kyi’s response was immediate. His eighteen-page poem “Khlib pana Sheremeta” (Mister Sheremet’s Bread), appearing the same year in two copies only, was considered so explicit that it was never made public in any format while Pervomais’kyi was alive and did not appear in print during the Gorbachev era or even during the first fourteen years of Ukrainian independence.121To answer Sheremet, Pervomais’kyi resorted to Heinrich Heine’s satirical metaphors and the alternating four- and three-syllable iambic stanza of his Germany: A Winter Tale.122 Pervomais’kyi also used Heine’s ironic perception of his Jewishness as a stylistic device. In addition, he drew heavily on Heine’s satirical poetic dialogues, such as the one between Rabbi Judah and Friar Jose, a Jewish rabbi and a Catholic preacher from medieval Barcelona, elaborated in Heine’s “Disputation.”123 “Mister Sheremet’s Bread” was informed by an imaginary dialogue between Sheremet and Pervomais’kyi, an antisemite and a Jew, both of whom claimed their genuine right to a place in Ukrainian literature.
Pervo- mais’kyi put aside the Aesopian allusions and called a spade a spade. His imaginary Sheremet pronounced his verdict: Pervomais’kyi had to be executed, his verse prohibited, and his museum portrait thrown into the water closet, for he had committed a capital crime: he had insolently eaten “Mister Sheremet’s bread:”The media should have known it
But nobody has read
That all my life I have eaten the bread
Of Mr. Sheremet.
He sent his eloquent request
Long ago, I pray,
For he has done his very best
Always to seize a day.
A guest appeared, was the claim,
The poet’s mask he had
And ate the bread in the Ukraine,
Of Mr. Sheremet.
A new decree we need, he said,
New one, do not forget,
To execute him for the bread
Of Mr. Sheremet.124
Pervomais’kyi did not hesitate to emphasize Sheremet’s antisemitic stance. He compared Sheremet to a town fool who had a bell hung around his neck to warn town dwellers of his approach. The imaginary Sheremet replied:
Why does he talk of “fool” and “bell”?
Where’s my poetic mead?
Isn’t it perhaps because he is— Perhaps—well, you name it!
Pervomais’kyi bracketed his comment in the next stanza, euphemistically pointing to Sheremet’s vociferous yet diplomatically “neutralized” antisemitism.
Quite unexpectedly, I have managed to convey the “hidden rhyme” of Sheremet’s attack in the last line, which might read as “Perhaps—well you name it!” or as “Perhaps—he is a Yid!” Yet Pervomais’kyi helps the reader reconstruct Sheremet’s sleazy rhetoric:
(This horrible, this nasty word
Is on his tongue tip.
Yet he, a diplomat of sort,
Commits a hidden nip.)
Pervomais’kyi’s self-vindication was rooted in the image of “the bread of the fatherland” and his theory of homeland. Motherland, argued Pervomais’kyi, is the land on which one toiled, that was soaked with one’s sweat, that accepted one’s dead parents, and whose fate one shared. His parents, the poet tells, were born in Ukraine, their sweat permeated the Ukrainian fields, yet they lived from hand to mouth and saw on their table nothing but bread and water. Their land—the Ukraine—and their bread, claims Pervomais’kyi, is what nurtured him.
It was his bread. He and his parents toiled the Ukrainian land and became Ukrainian peasants, the salt of the Ukrainian land. Pervomais’kyi metaphorically carried the bread of his parents in his soldier’s backpack through the four years of World War II. Moving from historical fact to ethical truth, Pervomais’kyi argued that while he was defending his victimized motherland, Sheremet (like Pervo- mais’kyi, a military correspondent on the front) was in the camp of Nazi invaders: not because he really was there, but because he always identified with the prosecution, the accusers, and the repressive regime. The war was the time when “your, Sheremet’s, colleagues came from hell to fight us.” Pervomais’kyi, a defender of Ukraine and her legitimate son, earns his Ukrainian bread. Therefore, “don’t you, Sheremet, dare touch my bread!”125Having explicitly associated Sheremet with the Nazis and implicitly with Stalin, Pervomais’kyi turned to another issue raised by his opponent, namely, Pervomais’kyi’s “spurious” Ukrainian language and his “unpatriotic” dual (Ukrainian-Jewish) identity. Paradoxically, Pervomais’kyi did not claim he was an authentic “Ukrainian nightingale.” He frankly acknowledged that he was just a rook, a metaphor one might want to read as “a Yiddish-speaking Jew” or simply an “alien.” But, continues the poet, he “was born a rook in a nightingale’s family.” He thanked God for this wonderful opportunity, for he managed to learn the “nightingale’s language” and to sing the “nightingale’s song” without really transforming his rook’s self. When he sang his song, argued Pervomais’kyi amusingly, even the roses, known for their sensitivity, did not realize that this was just a rook signing a nightingale’s song. Even more important, his song became so popular among nightingales that the rooks, in a long winter night, began translating it to the rooks’ language.126
Whatever the immediate empirical reality behind these allegories, it is evident that Pervomais’kyi did not pretend to be “purely a Ukrainian poet,” did not conceal his dual identity, and did not perceive his rook-nightingale symbiosis as detrimental to his poetic reputation.
Here Pervomais’kyi offered quite an unusual theory of human identity, language, and nationality. Neither birth nor one’s parents’ culture defined anything. Pervomais’kyi argued that “according to modern science” people inherited the ability to speak, but not a particular language. One could use one’s speaking ability to learn any language—for example, Ukrainian. Therefore, he and Sheremet were in the same boat: neither of them inherited Ukrainian but both learned it.127 The only way to assess the efficiency of their learning, according to Pervomais’kyi, was to compare his own Ukrainian poetry with Sheremet’s favorite genre, denunciation. Not without well- grounded ambition, Pervomais’kyi seems to claim that a Jew might become not only a Ukrainian poet; a Jew can also become the first among Ukrainian poets without compromising his ancestry. And those who deny this right (and ability) to a Jew should be considered Nazis.Pervomais’kyi’s poem “The Bread of Mister Sheremet” had no chance of being published either in the 1950s or in the 1960s: the text was too explosive. Yet Pervomais’kyi continued to write epigrams mocking his persecutors, for although personal attacks against him receded, they did not vanish. It would be a stretch to call his genre, including “The Bread of Mr. Sheremet,” a form of nonviolent protest, for some of his epigrams were both hilarious and murderous.
In 1962, antisemitic rhetoric was again the talk of the town and again some of the notorious participants of the anticosmopolitan campaign of 1949 came to the fore. To find out whether the state planned another anti-Jewish attack, Sava HolovanivsTyi wrote to Il’ia Ehrenburg: “I am sending you the excerpt from the newspaper Literaturna Ukraina for December 21, 1962. Here they published an interview with A. Malyshko, which, I think, might interest you. This scoundrel [prokhvost] celebrates the beginning of a new battle against ‘cosmopolitism,’ which has for him a special meaning, and he confirms that they had spoken particularly sharply about this issue during the recent meeting [perhaps at the Communist Party Central Committee Politburo—YPS].
This interview made me anxious, it is a frightening symptom and manifestation of the Kiev echo of what is said in Moscow.”128 There is little doubt that Pervomais’kyi was aware of this new wave of antisemitism.129 Yet one finds almost no reflection in Pervomais’kyi’s writings of the new political environment in the country.In the 1960s, deprived of his right to appear publicly and to publish his poetry in periodicals with large circulations, he secluded himself at his dacha in Ir- pen, a village near Kyiv. Self-seclusion granted Pervomais’kyi a respite from his colleagues and neighbors, who otherwise would have been looking for an excuse not to greet him in the streets or on the stairs of the Rolit. He turned into a hermit, calling himself “a provincial writer in Irpen exile.,,130The close friends who paid him visits on Sundays, such as the famous actress Natalia Uzhvii, recalled his darkened face. He spent more time in Irpen than in the capital.
The authorities seemed to have kept Pervomais’kyi in limbo: his writings were not outlawed and not endorsed. His fiftieth jubilee was ignored by the Union of Writers. None of the official festivities usually held on such occasions were arranged, and at the last moment the authorities cancelled Pervomais’kyi’s concert at Kyiv Shevchenko University. His friends managed to publish a number of essays in the Ukrainian press and Pervomais’kyi diligently compiled them in a folder, but even these sympathetic essays, perhaps due to careful censorship, presented him as an issue of the past.131 Pervomais’kyi turned to art criticism and published a number of essays on Ukrainian artists, manifesting his drift toward a theory of visual signs, if not a semiotics of creative writing.132 Secluded in his dacha, Pervomais’kyi took care of his sick wife and his orchard. Very few could expect his escape into oblivion would become the most fruitful period of his life.