The Adventures of Yisroel Kulyk

Ivan Iulianovych Kulyk was born Yisroel ben Yehuda Kulyk (Ukr.: Izrail Iu- dovych; Rus.: Izrail Iudelevich) in the town of Shpola on the southern edge of Kiev Province, on January 13, 1897, to an observant Jewish family.

Zakhar Voloshenko, the Kulyks’ neighbor, wrote in 1959 the following de­scription of Krutyi Lane 2, where the Kulyks lived:

“Number two” is owned by Mrs. Krokhmaliuk, “madam Krokhmaliuk” or, in private colloquial conversation, “Krokhmaliuchka.” Three houses: two with tin roofs, one with a straw roof. There are lessees in the houses. Each house has two apartments. Some of the residents sublease a “corner with food” to a single indi­vidual. The houses are packed. The residents lived with Krokhmaliuchka for a long time, for ten years and more. Among these old residents were the Kulyks and the Berensons. The Kulyks, the “old Kulyk” whose name was Yudl, was a calm and respectable man. He was a teacher in a Jewish Talmud-Torah school.

This portrayal of the Kulyks as a religious Jewish family is supported by Nadiia Surovtsova (1896 -1985), a prominent Ukrainian feminist activist in the 1910s and later a prisoner in the Gulag, who remembered Uman of the turn of the century. Here is Surovtsova:

I had to reject this publicly, and surprisingly even the hostile part of the audi­ence trusted me when I reassured them that I knew Kulyk as a young lad in Uman, from where he came and where we met at the beginning of 1917 while engaged in the first revolutionary social work. I did not tell them any more than that—that he, Ivan Kulyk, was Izrail Iudovych Kulyk, the son of a teacher- melamed of the Uman Jewish School, the Talmud-Torah on Pushkin Street, where in the green garden of a two-story brick building I had often seen Jewish children sitting and shaking and memorizing unintelligible Jewish texts. He rented a room from the widow Krakhmaliuk on Krutoi Lane, which in 1959 was named after him.⁴

Thus Kulyk’s Jewish childhood in inseparable from Uman, a town looming large in Jewish and Ukrainian popular imagination.

A trade center that still preserved some traces of its eighteenth- and nine­teenth-century grandeur, by the early twentieth century Uman had turned into a godforsaken shtetl with some 31,016 inhabitants, of whom 17,945 were Jews. Like the Kulyks, most Uman Jews lived from hand to mouth. When the Kulyks moved there, the local Jews traded in the Old Market, surrounded by Jewish inns and shabby synagogues.

Kulyk liked the Ukrainian Uman more than the Jewish one. The Ukrainian Uman was the town where the leaders of the popular rebellions against Polish magnates, such as Maksym Zalizniak and Ivan Honta, had victoriously defeated Uman’s Polish garrison and captured the town. The Jewish Uman, however, re­membered the massacres of Jews—the brutality of which exceeded the literary capacities of the contemporary chroniclers. While the peasant popular revolts were canonized in the annals of the Ukrainian struggle for national indepen­dence, the East European Jewish communities commemorated the Uman mas­sacre in a special liturgical dirge, a parchment copy of which in the late 1890s was still kept in the town’s Big Synagogue and cherished as a relic.⁵

The young Yisroel Kulyk did not like those traditional Jews with earlocks and worn-out caftans who frequented the synagogues around the Old Market. Neither was he interested in the pious Hasidim, hundreds of whom arrived in Uman from throughout the Pale of Jewish Settlement on pilgrimage to the mir­acle-working grave of Rabbi Nachman from Bratslav (1772-1810). Indeed, Ku- lyk could hardly have known that Uman was the birthplace of Hirsh Gurvich, a founder of one of the first enlightened Jewish schools in Russia who, after the closure of his institution (which irritated local obscurants), ended up teaching Oriental languages at Cambridge University.

Kulyk associated his childhood and youth with a local site, called “the mira­cle of Uman”: the Sofia Park, known as the Sofiivka, a huge English-style park designed by the Polish military engineer Ludwig Metzel, with a summer palace; centuries-old oaks, lakes, and artificial cataracts; cozy park bridges; islands with Greek rotundas, grottos, and fountains; and Italian-made Greek statues dotting its most distant corners. The park was a late eighteenth-century whim of the Pol­ish magnate and town owner Count Potocki, who commissioned it to please his lover and second wife, Sofia, and spent some two million silver rubles on its con­struction. Finished by 1802, the park was confiscated in the mid-1830s following the 1830 Polish uprising and transferred to the patrimony of the Russian tsarina, who established the Central School of Gardening on the grounds. Visited and admired by Nicholas I and Alexander II, Sofiivka galvanized Kulyk and his fel- lows.⁶ In the park, they studied Greek mythology, stole apples from the tsarina’s garden, bathed in the fountains, and play-acted Cossacks in the woods.

The Sofiivka embodied a miracle and a mystery. In a long autobiographical poem dedicated to the park, Kulyk writes:

We also looked for the Haidamaks’

Treasures, buried in the Sofiivka,

And each of us was petrified,

When a branch cracked suddenly.⁷

Indeed, here in Sofiivka, Kulyk staged his first encounter with his alter ego, Va- syl’, a Ukrainian peasant boy who had to work for a Jewish master to provide for his family. Perhaps it was Sofiivka that made the young Kulyk think about the other side of its irresistible attractiveness.

The Sofia Park! My dear and unknown!

You drove me crazy when I was a child:

Cursed, you grew up from the quirk of a lord.

Beloved, you grew up on the callouses of serfs.

In Sofiivka, Kulyk befriended local Ukrainian boys and learned colloquial Ukrai­nian. There was no other place where he could have learned Ukrainian: modern­ization in the Russian vein had taken a heavy toll on Uman Jews. Classes at the local elementary school that Kulyk attended were taught exclusively in the im­perial Russian, and the local private Talmud-Torah Jewish schools and tradi­tional hadarim (Jewish elementary schools) were obligated to use Russian as the state language instead of the deprecated “jargon” known as Yiddish. For the Jews, and not only for the Jews, Russian was the language of the state bureau­cracy and high imperial culture, Ukrainian was colonial and backward. Whereas some Uman Jews spoke enough Ukrainian to negotiate at the market or com­municate with peasants, acculturating into the Ukrainian milieu was for them tantamount to becoming rustic illiterate peasants. Even Uman’s Ukrainian intelligentsia spoke Russian at home. Indeed, the Sofiivka-based “immersion” language course was a key lesson for Kulyk, yet he did not mention this in his Ukrainian-language poetic memoirs. It was more important to emphasize his encounter with peasant children, the grandchildren of Ukrainian serfs. Class for him stood high above language. Yet it is evident that Ukrainian was his only medium: the Ukrainian village did not speak Russian.

Yisroel grew up a precocious and talented child. At four, he taught himself to read, draw, and compose verse. He impressed his friends when he managed to acquire books about Sherlock Holmes, Nat Pinkerton, and Nick Carter even though he had no pocket money. Later he got his hands on Gogol, Gorky, Ko­rolenko, Kuprin, and Sienkiewicz. Yisroel was reported to have read books aloud.

The eight-year-old Kulyk immersed himself in another breathtaking game called the Russian Revolution. When Kulyk’s older brother Yosef was arrested for revolutionary activity and taken to a local prison, Yisroel studied the inmates’ secret language, brought clandestine notes to the prisoners, and was even al­lowed into the cell.⁹This episode entered Kulyk’s Russian short story “Zhen’ka- pochtalion” (Gene, the Mailman) and his Ukrainian poem “Sofiivka.” Kulyk wrote:

I worked passionately and briskly,

In romanticism I found sense.

I knew: a note with a stone is a “flier,”

And a “pumpkin” is a letter glued in bread.¹⁰

To be sure, Kulyk found much sense in revolutionary romanticism. After finish­ing elementary school, his interest in art and poetry turned serious. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, he began composing verse in Russian. The ethnographic fervor that in the 1900s ignited the imagination of many fin de siecle intellectu­als, including the famous Russian-Jewish and Yiddish writer Shloyme Ansky (1863-1920), captured the mind of the thirteen-year-old Kulyk, too. Yet there was a difference. Whereas the Petersburg Russian-Jewish intelligentsia’s inter­ests stretched as far as the vanishing old Jewish shtetl, Kulyk turned to the Ukrainian village.

Given Kulyk’s Russian-language upbringing—and Voloshenko recollects that the Kulyks spoke Russian “without any accent”—it is striking that his intel­lectual curiosity acquired such a graphic Ukrainian character at such an early stage. But this is precisely what happened. A Yiddish- and Russian-speaking Jew, Kulyk went from one Ukrainian village to another copying ornaments on clay stoves and on painted Easter eggs (pysanky), sketching window woodcuts, and recording tales and folksongs, above all Ukrainian kolomyiky, shchedrivky, and koliadky—ritual Eastern Orthodox and pagan folk songs performed on various festive occasions.¹¹ From the very outset, Ukrainian preferences pushed every­thing else aside in Kulyk’s identity, something that did not go unnoticed in the Ukrainian press. The Kiev newspaper Rada published a brief notice informing its readers that “the artist and ethnographer Kulyk made a presentation at a meeting of the Uman branch of the Kyiv Society for the Preservation of Monu­ments, reading from his collection of koliadky and custom songs and presenting examples of ornaments from Ukrainian huts.”¹² Indeed, the newspaper’s edi­tors, who had published among other things the poetry of Hryts’ko Kernerenko, did not know about the Jewish origins of this young Ukrainian ethnographer. Since this was the first record of Kulyk’s engagement with Ukrainian culture, particularly with Ukrainian folklore—which would grow into a lifelong com- mitment—I should at least briefly reflect on the origins of this interest.

Consider for a moment Kulyk’s well-known Ukrainian-sounding pen name, “Rolenko,” which he was using as an alias as early as the 1910s. As family legend has it, his little sister Esther (Esfir Kulyk) could not pronounce Yisroel or Srul (the diminutive in Yiddish for Israel) and dubbed him Rolia or Rolik.¹³ Some­times Kulyk added the Ukrainian suffix “-enko” to the root “rol” and signed his writings with the Ukrainian-sounding “Rolenko.” On other occasions he turned it into an exotic Italian-sounding pen name “Rolinato,” as for instance among his Uman theater colleagues and American friends. Indeed, the “rol” from Rolik or Yisroel, pronounced in Yiddish “Isro’l,” explains Rolenkoand even Rolinato, but obscures “Vasyl’.” Why did Kulyk use the Ukrainian penname Vasyl' and not, say, Stepan or Ivan—or, even better, Taras? “Taras Rolenko” sounds genuinely Ukrainian! YetVasyl' Rolenko was the pen name that Kulyk loved and used most. He wrote in Sofiivka: “I would not say: ‘Vasyl’ is me, Vasyl’ is we’: maybe Vasyl’ is only one of us.”¹⁴

Kulyk did not invent his pen name; he borrowed it. Among the hundreds of Ukrainian literati active between the 1880s and 1920s, there was another “one of us,” perhaps the only real Vasyl’ Rolenko. In 1893, four years before Yisroel Ku- lyk was born, a certain Vasyl’ Rolenko translated the historical novel Het’man Mazepa by Franciszek Ravita (Rawita-Gawroiiski, 1846 -1930) from Polish into Ukrainian and published both versions as a literary supplement to the L’viv newspaper Dilo and in a separate book edition. Polish and Russian literature and historiography were conspicuously negative toward Mazepa, who was viewed as a traitor and rebel against Peter the Great, but Rawita-Gawroiiski’s novel portrayed him as a Ukrainian national hero and deplored his belated political awakening. Among other characters the novel featured a certain Srul, whose re­pugnant image fit well with Polish antisemitic stereotypes. A cunning and hypo­critical merchant, Srul was instructed by the Poles (Liakhy) to lure one of Mazepa’s supporters into a trap. The Cossacks revealed Srul’s treacherous in­tentions, detained him, and hanged him for treason.¹⁵

It is more than likely that the entrepreneurial reader Kulyk found, among other things, Rawita-Gawroiiski’s Het’man Mazepa in Vasyl’ Rolenko’s transla­tion. He probably realized, first, that fighting for Ukrainian independence was a noble and dangerous option; second, that in the Ukrainian and perhaps Polish imagination Srul—Yisrael, Kulyk’s namesake—was a quintessential Jew who disapproved of Ukrainian national strivings and supported Poland; and third, that if he wanted to rewrite the Jewish image in Ukrainian cultural memory, it would be a good idea to associate himself with a novel that was sympathetic to­ward the Ukrainian fight for independence. To assume the pen name “Ivan Mazepa”—viewed as a traitor to the pan-Slavic cause—would have been too risky and pretentious; to call himself Vasyl’ Rolenko was not.¹⁶ In this way Ku- lyk associated himself with an outdated yet strongly anticolonialist Ukrainophile Polish novel. Perhaps he also identified with the anticolonialist function of a cul­tural mediator—the Ukrainian translator—particularly important if one takes into account Kulyk’s non-Ukrainian origin.

Be that as it may, Kulyk’s excitement about folk art and his own artistic tal­ents brought him in the early 1910s to the Odessa Art Institute, where he stayed only for a year and a half: a dearth of financial resources disrupted his studies and forced him to return home. Back in Uman, to make some money and help the family, Kulyk worked as an assistant scenery painter for the itinerant Su- khodol’skyi theater. Here Kulyk adopted one of his Italian-sounding pen names, Rolinato, to emphasize not only his Ukrainian but also his international identity, as Italians were associated with theater and art. The local Uman newspaper, Provintsial’nyi golos (The Provincial Voice) wrote that “the new scenery for the performances was made by the artist Rolinato,” who was seventeen at that time.¹⁷ Significantly, the plays for which Kulyk designed the scenery were about the glorious Cossack past and featured picturesque military battles of the seven­teenth-century Het’man Petro Doroshenko.

Penniless and with no prospects, and perhaps following the regular migra­tion pattern that characterized East European Jews on the eve of World War I, in 1914 Kulyk emigrated to America—among the ι,250,000 other Jews crossing the Atlantic from the 1880s to the 1920s. The goldene medine (golden land), as it was dubbed by Yiddish-speaking immigrants, was hardly welcoming. What Ku- lyk saw was a far cry from the America of Fennimore Cooper or Mayne Reid. As he recalled in his autobiographical novel Pryhody Vasylia Rolenka (The Adven­tures ofVasyl’ Rolenko, 1929), America was not a country of bellicose Indians, cozy wigwams, and vast prairies. On the contrary, after landing at Ellis Island and engaging in conversation with a cynical fellow traveler, who had already learned what America was all about, Kulyk was surprised: “What a strange coun­try is this America: near the Statue of Liberty there is a prison; people do not live in houses; there are no Indians around (why do they lie about them in books?); instead there are those ‘fakers,’ and ‘scabs’ (there is nothing about them in Mayne Reid), and one can work here and still die of hunger.”¹⁸ Kulyk’s en­counter with the grassroots reality was even less romantic. His distant relatives took advantage of his greenhorn gullibility. To become independent and earn his living, Kulyk worked in Pennsylvania, at the center of the coal-mining industry that U.S. workers knew as the realm of the Lehigh Valley and Company, head­quartered in Wilkes-Barre. Physically feeble, he was employed as a “door-boy,” the one who sat on the last truck and closed the doors behind the mules dragging the cars to and from the mines.

Kulyk’s personal experience with genuine American miners cast a red shadow on his political worldview. In America, Kulyk reemerged as an atheist, a cosmopolitan, and a Marxist. He met organizers of trade unions, became friends with American socialists, started to write for Novyi mir (New World), and in 1914 became a member of the American branch of the Russian American Social­ists. His colleagues in Novyi mir editorial board introduced him to Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), whose leftist socialist views and an obsession with the international proletarian revolution galvanized Kulyk and informed his nascent Marxist Weltanschauung. His Russian-language publications demonstrate that Kulyk was trying to integrate his Jewish and Ukrainian interests with a new Marxist class consciousness.

Almost fifteen years later, Kulyk turned his Jewish emigre experience into the story of a Ukrainian’s encounter with rapacious capitalism in America, and he depicted his Ukrainian experience along class-struggle lines. Kulyk revisited his American years by fusing his impressions of Kafka’s Amerika—which had come out two years before the publication of his Adventures—and his own in­sights into Das Kapital. His Adventures of Vasyl Rolenko presents the main char­acter as another Karl Rossman who comes to talk about American society not in terms of the metaphysics of exile/redemption but in terms of surplus value and class struggle.¹⁹ Kulyk rewrote both Kafka and himself. Like Amerika and unlike such renowned emigre novels as Mary Antin’s Promised Land, Kulyk starts his story aboard a ship approaching the U.S. coast. Like Karl Rossman, Vasyl’ Rolenko is a privileged emigre coming to stay with a relative, in his case, with an established Ukrainian-speaking American middling capitalist. Also like Karl Rossman, Vasyl’ Rolenko undergoes a thorough acculturation under the guid­ance of his caring uncle, who makes Vasyl’ change his Ukrainian skirt for Ameri­can clothes and who no longer presents himself as “Uncle Mykhailo” but as “Mr. Michael-Rol.” The adventures of both characters, Vasyl’ Rolenko and Karl Rossman, are construed according to the exile pattern: once they find a niche for themselves, both are mercilessly banished. Finally, Vasyl’ Rolenko’s intellectual curiosity matches Karl Rossman’s: both are trying to comprehend the environ­ment in which they find themselves.

But here the affinities end. Unlike Karl Rossman’s, Vasyl’ Kulyk’s naivete evaporates once he better familiarizes himself with America. What appears to be a mystery for Kafka’s urban-raised character is transparent for Kulyk’s village- raised Vasyl’. In his uncle’s sweatshop he discovers not only economic advan­tages but also the inhuman meaning of the division of labor. He learns how the bosses teach their workers to chew gum in order to suppress “unnecessary thoughts” about social injustice. He visits a local Russian Orthodox church, en­counters the commercialization and theatrics of modernized religion, and turns into an atheist. Put in prison for having run away from his boss (the uncle), he cunningly escapes a police trap devised to trigger repressions against socialist- minded workers. While sweating in the Pennsylvania mines, he observes the cor­ruption of trade unions that claimed to defend the workers but in fact selfishly negotiated for their own interests as the “workers’ aristocracy.”

Unlike the denationalized Karl Rossman, Kulyk’s Vasyl’ manifests genuine attachment to things Ukrainian. He regrets the loss of his Ukrainian self once his folk skirt is thrown away; he is saddened by the shallow Americanization and assimilation of his uncle, who had forgotten his brother’s (Vasyl^,,s father) name; he notes the absence of a socialist workers’ press in the Ukrainian language; he enjoys the opportunity to compose proclamations for the workers and miners in Ukrainian; and he mocks American ignorance about Ukraine and Ukrainians by making the police address him as “Vasyl’ Rolenko, a Ruthenian.”²⁰ Ultimately, the Final Judgment of the apocalyptic Great Oklahoma Theater at the very end of Kafka’s Amerika is paralleled by the quotidian police trial against socialist strikers at the very end of Kulyk’s Adventures. Indeed, Vasyl’ Rolenko knows where his great theater is: he moves to Canada, a more Ukrainian-looking coun­try, to be among party comrades fighting for the emancipation of the interna­tional proletariat.

Indeed, the awakening of the “real” Vasyl’ Rolenko, alias Ivan Kulyk, oc­curred once he started to write for the American socialist press, first in Russian then in Russian and Ukrainian. Among dozens of Russian journalistic submis­sions Kulyk penned between 1915 and 1917, three poetic ones deserve special attention. All three appeared in March 1915. The first, “Pamiati Tarasa Shev­chenko” (To the Memory ofTaras Shevchenko), is a combination of rattling rev­olutionary cliches and dull romantic rhymes. The second, “Po zavetu Khrista” (According to the Testament of Jesus) is an imitation of a folk ballad and tells the story of a Russian Orthodox worker who dared arrange his marriage during the fast before Easter. And the third, “Novoe svetilo Izrailia” (A New Luminary in Israel) mocks the author of a Russian emigre newspaper who had called for soli­darity with the suffering of Jews. These three themes are telling: Kulyk seems to have crafted a blueprint for his forthcoming journalism, social concerns, and po­litical predilections. He certainly makes a point in one of his earliest publica­tions: despite his Russian medium, he linked his revolutionary pathos, his anti­colonialist protest, and his vision of his native land to Shevchenko, not to Pushkin or Sholem Aleichem.

For Kulyk, Shevchenko’s poetry is permeated with the freedom of the blue steppes, the roaring of the wide Dnieper, the independence of the Zaporizhzhia Cossacks, and the rebellious claim “High time [to rebel]!” Kulyk’s poem is a re­ply to Shevchenko’s “Zapovit” (Testament): he does not claim Shevchenko’s legacy but certainly claims Shevchenko’s revolutionary ethics. The second poem points out Kulyk’s decisive rupture with institutionalized religion and religious beliefs. If the imaginary Vasyl’ Kulyk arrives in America with a reliquary on his bosom, here Kulyk tears it off and throws it in the dust: he wishes to have noth­ing in common with the corrupt church, which had entirely lost its sense of so­cial justice. Finally, he crafts his identity as a belligerent Marxist by thoroughly removing the traces of his Jewishness. He satirizes the Russian newspaper Emi­grant because it expressed indignation with all those who, like Kulyk’s Novyi mir, saw no difference between the oppressed people of various backgrounds and who seemed to have forgotten about the sufferings of East European Jews. Kulyk refutes this fake nationally bound humanism and claims to adhere to those for whom there is “neither Russian nor Jew.” To “remember” the sufferings of East European Jews at the expense of the sufferings of American miners is for him utterly immoral. Kulyk even began neutralizing his Jewish autobiography by purging from his newly written stories anything related to the Jewish environ­ment in which he grew up.²¹

Building up a Marxist identity required that Kulyk revise his sense of national belonging. In one of his essays for the Ukrainian worker’s press in America, Kulyk inserted the phrase “we, the internationalists.”²² Apparently his newly invented Marxist intellectual framework had enough room for his Ukrainian and Jewish, as well as Indian, African-American, and Russian sympa­thies. Perhaps his internationalism was the product of Bukharin’s vision of revo­lution: since the whole world was destined to become socialist, Kulyk could af­ford to refer to specific national sympathies only in terms of the class struggle. He had to reimagine himself as a Marxist Ukrainian and a Marxist Jew: the con­cept of the oppressed class fighting for emancipation against the colonizer was productive and helped him achieve a synthesis of various elements of his cultural background. In his research essay on Ukrainian emigre folklore, Kulyk cited songs on the pitiful fate of Ukrainians who had to leave their own country, where they had been oppressed by “Jews, Poles, landlords, and attorneys.” Scandalized by his discovery of what seemed a deep-rooted Ukrainian antisemitism, Kulyk resorts to a Marxist exegesis: the bias he encountered proves “that a backward Galician peasant has not learned how to differentiate Jewish and Polish bour­geoisie from the proletarians, and therefore blames the people as a whole.”²³ To save the reputation of the Ukrainians, Kulyk traces the apparently antisemitic motifs in folklore back to the immature class consciousness of its tellers. He views Marxism as a solution to xenophobia, as much for Jews as for Ukrainians.

The making of class consciousness is the focus of his Russian-language short story “Staryi Leizer” (Old Leyzer). Its main character, the old shtetl Jew Leyzer (Yiddish diminutive of Eliezer or Lazar), grapples with the fact that his son Yosele is a socialist. For him, revolution and socialism are reprehensible non- Jewish occupations, “the cause of the goyim.” A God-fearing Jew should stay aloof. By accident, Leyzer learns about a police trap against the strikers and at­tempts to warn them. He recognizes a spy and a provocateur in the crowd, de­nounces him out loud (“Comrades, there is a spy down here!”), and is shot on the spot by the police.²⁴ His discovery of “comradeship,” a supranational truth tran­scending “us” and “them,” “Jews” and “goyim,” is the narrative denouement. Kulyk addresses Ukrainian antisemitism in his Ukrainian essay on emigre folk­lore and Jewish xenophobia in his Russian short story by pointing out the only ways to transcend the inherited national bias: internationalism, class struggle, revolutionary consciousness, and Marxism. Yet within his newly emerged prole­tarian internationalism he still professes his national sympathies, Ukrainian and Jewish among them. It is also evident that Kulyk had not yet chosen “his” lan­guage, particularly since in his Russian writings Kulyk sometimes allowed him­self to make scornful remarks about the Ukrainian accents of his interlocutors.²⁵

A devoted Marxist eager to partake in the emancipation of the world prole­tariat, Kulyk could no longer stay aloof from the upheavals overseas. Dragged into the whirl of February 1917 and anticipating the October Revolution, Kulyk returned to Russia via Japan, together with his new friend Nikolai Bukharin. He did not spend time in the capitals but went directly to Uman. Kulyk began to en­gage in grassroots welfare work, eventually igniting the Uman proletariat with revolutionary ideals and establishing the town soviet of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Soon he realized that the town of his childhood was too small to match his ambitions, so he moved to Kyiv and became the editor of the Proletars’ka dumka (Proletarian Thought) newspaper, an active Bolshevik, and a public speaker addressing soldiers in Ukrainian. As early as December 1917, he was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Ukrainian Soviets and befriended the future leaders of Ukrainian communism: Mykola Skryp- nyk (1872-1933), Volodymyr Zatons’kyi (1888-1938), and Iurii Kotsiubyns’kyi (1896-1937).²⁶

In the midst of the revolutionary turmoil, Kulyk organized a military de­tachment. Young Jewish communist men from families ruined or murdered during the war—Sioma Mal’chikov, Sioma Sirkis, Motia Sheinin, M. Aron- s’kyi—approached Kulyk and asked him to accept them into his newly estab­lished detachment.²⁷ Kulyk’s dazzling public presentations were such a success that a year later the vacillating Cossacks unanimously elected him commander of the first Red Cossack regiment, which eventually became instrumental in cap­turing a number of strategic localities in southern Ukraine, including Kre- menchuh.²⁸ The archives contain testimonies to Kulyk’s focal role in military events. For example, on the wave of the campaign, Kulyk sent a cable to Lenin (and a copy to Stalin and Chicherin): “The situation at the front. Borky [Rail­way] Station has been cleansed of the enemy. Bezpalovka Station has been occu­pied without resistance. The town of Slaviansk and Popel’naia Station to the east of Bakhmut have been taken in combat. Bakhmut is semi-encircled, Krolevets is encircled. We are moving to Bakhmut and Konotop, where we expect serious battles. [Head of the military department] Kulyk.”²⁹

Kulyk was not only an excellent military organizer: his fellow soldiers adored him, because in the most dramatic moments of the campaign he would tell funny stories and sing songs to them—in Ukrainian. Wounded twice, Kulyk had to withdraw from active service but continued his party career as the head of the Ukrainian People’s Commissariat of National Minorities (Narkomnats). As such, he was delegated by the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian government, was ar­rested in Kyiv by Hetman Skoropads’ki’s regime, and was condemned to death. He spent several months in prison where an old Russian army general taught him and other Bolsheviks the art of warfare. In 1919, as Vasyl’ Rolenko, he conducted underground revolutionary work in western Ukraine, then part of Poland. He was soon arrested again and spent almost a year in various Polish prisons in Lwow, Krakow, and Warsaw together with other Ukrainian socialists, but in 1920 he was ransomed by the Soviets.³⁰ Kulyk emerged from Polish prison not only as a revo­lutionary with the aura of a martyr but also as a Ukrainian poet, the author of the Moi kolomyiky (My Kolomyiky) collection that would be noticed by critics and recited from memory by readers, especially in western Ukraine.

The 1920s for Kulyk were the years of a vertiginous party career and inten­sive literary work. In 1921, he was appointed the first chairman of the Galicia revolutionary committee in then-Soviet Ternopil, where his down-to-earth management style won the sympathy of Ukrainian, Jewish, and Polish proletarian youth. In 1921-22 he headed the local party committee in Kam’ianets’- Podil’s’kyi, where he also edited the Chervona Pravda (The Red Truth) news­paper.³¹ The national-minded Hryhorii Kostiuk recalled Kulyk in Kam’ianets’- Podil’s’kyi of the 1920s as “a modest, thin man of a medium height with red or dark blond beard. His baritone resounded with conviction and sincerity. He spoke good Ukrainian betraying the knowledge of customs, beliefs, and many proverbs of the Ukrainian people (which I really liked a lot).”³² In 1924, he was dispatched to Montreal as the Ukrainian deputy consul on trade and emerged as a major voice of Soviet Ukraine in Canada and as the author of an essay-novel, Zapysky konsula (Notes of a Consul). In the mid-1920s, he helped create the Hart (Tempering) in Kharkiv, a nationwide literary group with a proletarian agenda, and established a branch of Hart among North American Ukrainian- language writers.³³ Back in the USSR, he settled in Kharkiv and in 1927 acted as deputy chairman of the People’s Commissariat on Foreign Affairs and was in­strumental in establishing the VUSPP (Vseukrains’ka spilka proletars’kykh pys’mennykiv, All-Ukrainian Union of Proletarian Writers). In the mid-1920s he warned against the monopolization of literature by a single proletarian trend and argued that proletarian writers should treat each and every literary trend with respect.³⁴

By the late 1920s, Kulyk was a prominent literary figure, the author of some ten volumes of poetry, poetry translations, and prose. He even penned a book of Marxist verse for children entitled Bruk i molotok (A Pavement and a Hammer), imbued with futuristic imagery and avant-guarde rhymes. Yet by that time he realized that “although the KP(b)U tried not to grant VUSPP complete monop­olistic authority over literature, it did make clear this was a special organi- zation.”³⁵ Kulyk began enthusiastically embodying the party’s directives in cultural life. Together with Ivan Mykytenko, Kulyk performed a key role in reor­ganizing Ukraine’s literary organizations along party lines, imposing a stricter control over what was considered Ukrainian cultural revival and helping dis­mantle futurists and other literary groups. His desire to be in the forefront—to do more and go far beyond the party directives—turned against him. Instead of supporting his friends and colleagues in what they saw as the defense of Ukrai­nian culture from shallow literary ideologists, he chose to reinforce the ideologi­cal front. As he was gaining power as a Bolshevik he was loosing his attraction as a harbinger of the Ukrainian revival and as a leftist Marxist.

Once the Union of Ukrainian Soviet Writers was established, Kulyk was elected its first chairman. In the 1930s he headed the Partvydav, the Communist Party’s main publishing house, which by 1935 controlled almost everything that was edited and published in Soviet Ukraine. He seems to have enjoyed influence, power, and fame, and the most influential Ukrainian public figures turned to him for help and sought his advice. At the top of his career Kulyk was a big boss in cultural life: not infrequently the presentation of a new play, the issuing of a new journal, or the publication of a new book depended solely on his decision.³⁶