The Imaginary Ukraine

Among Kernerenko’s first writings, the short story Pravdyva kazka (A Truthful Tale, 1890), published as a brochure when he was twenty-seven, testifies to the author’s early emerging concern with Ukrainian-Jewish relations.³³ This story deftly amalgamates the rhetoric of the Enlightenment, Shevchenkoesque ro­mantic imagery, imitation of Ukrainian folklore, populist illusions, and the re­cent pogrom narratives inundating the Russian and Russian-Jewish press in the early 1880s.

Kernerenko was deeply saddened by the Russian press’s attitudes toward the anti-Jewish violence. But instead of arguing against these views, Kernerenko de­cided that the opinions manifested in the Russian-language press in Ukraine did not reflect the thinking of “true” Ukrainians. Kernerenko believed that there were voices among Ukrainians, by and large stifled, that rejected the imperial propaganda and proclaimed solidarity with the Jews. To epitomize the “real” Ukrainian attitudes not marred by the imposed imperial perceptions, Kerne- renko construed a story of a truth-loving girl who became insane while vainly trying to protect the Jews, an image whose constituent elements Kernerenko borrowed from Shevchenko.

Shevchenko had tightly linked insanity—a key theme in nineteenth-century Russian and Ukrainian romanticism and populist literature—to the idea of so­cial justice. In his poem “Sova” (An Owl, 1844), a widow cherishes her only son but loses him as soon as he grows up and is conscripted into the Russian military.

Her search for her son turns into a quest for social justice; she travels the breadth and width of the Russian Empire and eventually becomes insane.³⁴ Insanity is the result of, and a response to, the imperial indifference to the fate of a suffering individual.

This theme cuts through several of Shevchenko’s texts. His Marina (“Ma­rina,” 1848), in her spontaneous revolt against the brutality and violence of a magnate, turns mad and sets the magnate’s estate on fire. “Marina” constitutes a parallel to Shevchenko’s long Russian-language poem “Slepaia” (A Blind Woman, 1842), in which Oksana, a blind woman’s daughter, replicates her mother’s tragic itinerary, becomes a victim of injustice, loses her mind, and dies in the flames of a fire that symbolizes her desire to see the final judgment fulfilled on Earth. On the contrary, Shevchenko’s female image in “Vid’ma” (A Witch, 1847), also an insane truth-lover, comes across some gypsies who cure her from insanity and turn her into a pious and honest herbal healer. A sincere believer in justice, she resists violence with caritas, returns to a man who ruined her life and the life of her children, and attends to him until his last minute.³⁵

It is not only female characters who are Shevchenko’s truth-seekers and jus­tice-lovers. In his “lurodyvyi” (God’s Fool, 1857), Shevchenko’s alter ego, a madman, curses the tsarist regime and its corrupt satraps; bemoans the absence in the Russian Empire of a legalistic ruler, a George Washington with “his new and just law”; blasphemes the Almighty’s indifference to people’s sufferings; and epitomizes both social justice and individual insanity. In “Oi, vyostriu to- varysha” (Oh, I Will Sculpt a Friend, 1848), Shevchenko’s lyrical hero travels through the country teaching elementary justice to Jews, Poles, and monks.

By the same token, Kernerenko’s protagonist, a Ukrainian girl named Do- makha (the name associated with house or witchery, or the noble Cossack past), is as dear to the narrator as his own “sister.” Kernerenko seems to have found a direct path to the hearts of his Ukrainian readers. He created a listener within the text, a little Ukrainian boy whose parents and brothers go to a wedding in a nearby village, leaving him with a nurse, an elderly Ukrainian lady, the embodi­ment of the people’s truth and wisdom. At night the boy cannot fall asleep and asks the nurse about a local village girl, the crazy Domakha, who had lost her mind and died—because, thinks the boy, the children in the village had mocked her. “No,” replies the nurse and starts her story.

In Kernerenko’s quite sophisticated, if not modernistic, tale, intertextuality performs a key function. Like the little boy hearkening to the nurse’s story and

eventually coming to identify with Domakha, so, too, the reader is supposed to believe Kernerenko’s narrative and sympathize with Domakha’s tragic fate. As it turns out, Domakha was a beautiful village girl who valued truth and justice above everything else. Yet her main character trait was put to test when some “evil people” enticed the villagers to beat the Jews. A pogrom swiftly ensued. Creating a direct Christian reference to ι Corinthians 6:7 (“Why not rather put up with injustice?”), Kernerenko emphasizes that Domakha could not put up with injustice, rushed to the center of the village, and tried to stop the pogrom. But she appealed in vain to the Christian conscience of the looters: the robbery and destruction of Jewish homes went on until the Jews were completely ruined. This outburst of violence was a major disgrace for Domakha.

The insane Domakha exemplifies what Cervantes called discreta locura, a clever madness. Like most of Shevchenko’s characters, Domakha in her solilo­quy preaches enlightened justice. Yet unlike most Shevchenko characters, she imagines herself a victimized Jew. Rushing to the center of the village, she bursts out, bewailing as a Jewess who lived through a pogrom: “Good folks, what have you done to me, why are you banishing me, why are you taking my belongings, am I not like anyone else, is there not one God for you and me, are we not living on the same earth?”³⁷

Domakha’s cry for human equality falls on deaf ears. Her fellow villagers mock her craziness, her mother grieves over her illness, and nobody, not even the doctors from the town-based psychiatric clinic (something closer to Vsevolod Garshin’s madmen than to Shevchenko), can cure her. The only “listener” who sympathizes with Domakha (except the nurse, the second narrator) is the boy, the reader/listener-in-the-text. A somewhat pathetic description of Domakha’s sickness and death finally convinces him that she was a wonderful girl and that her understanding of justice, for which “it was all the same, a Jew, or somebody else,” was true justice.³⁸The boy’s slowly emerging empathy toward Domakha, a “genuine truth-lover,” a Ukrainian female champion of Jewish rights, culmi­nates Kernereko’s narrative.

Apparently in the 1890s Kernerenko disrupted his efforts to portray Ukrai­nians who identified with Jewish victims of violence. He seems to have realized that Ukrainians might need Jewish support more than Jews needed that of the Ukrainians. Instead of developing the theme of Ukrainian sympathy toward Jews, Kernerenko began incorporating Ukrainian female voices into his poetry, demonstrating the Jewish poet’s sympathy toward Ukrainians. He construed Ukraine as but another Domakha, a colonial Ukrainian girl with all her “Orien­tal” attributes—naivete, charm, emotional sincerity, innocence, a natural long­ing for justice, and an inexplicable fear before the corrupt world around her.

The female image, a commonplace colonial victim of the Ukrainian litera­ture at the turn of the century, comes to dominate Kernerenko’s small world and to frame his poetic concerns. Women appear in his poetry as a classical singer, as a hard-working lady labeled a “whore” and “lazybones,” as a Turkish girl in love with a captive Cossack, as a bucolic village milkmaid, and as a gypsy. Yet all of them are portrayed as idiosyncratically Ukrainian. Jewish girls also enter Ker­nerenko’s poetry in the image of uncivilized and easily intimidated yet beautiful Ukrainian girls. Kernerenko’s sympathy toward subjugated, mistreated, and suffering women transcends the limits of his ethnic and cultural realm: in the poem Renehattsi (To a Female Renegade), he uses Pushkin’s “God grant that you may be loved so by another” to magnanimously address a Jewish woman who married out of her religion and converted. A preoccupation with the female makes Kernerenko ponder existential issues and compare them with the charac­teristic features of a changeable woman’s “nature.”³⁹

Kernerenko’s relations with his female Ukrainian characters are mostly pla­tonic, transformed into images of nature and nonsexual. He imagines his muse as a beautiful Ukrainian girl, shapely as a poplar, brisk as a butterfly, dressed for a village festive occasion with a wreath of field flowers. Her language is a bird’s lan­guage. In Kernerenko’s melodramatic verse, she comes to the poet early in the morning, as an angel, and sings her wonderful songs that the poet, now the hap­piest person in the world, hides deep in his heart:

As the bird’s song is her language

And she all is a bright light.

She is a Passion, she is Love,

She is a sinful temptation,

A hope, a Will and a Consciousness,

Are her nature and blood.

She is dressed in a vest,

In a woolen skirt, in nice boots,

A small blue-flower wreath

Wraps her black hair.

She comes to me as an angel

Early in the morning

And starts her nice songs

And again disappears in the blue.⁴⁰

Kernerenko listens to his muse’s imaginary songs, reacting to her advent as the Huliai-pole public to a visiting opera singer: by crying. He bemoans his only too platonic love of Ukraine, his unattainable romance with Ukraine, and his con­templative romanticism. Yet it is crucial to understand that he envisions his muse solely as a Ukrainian female image; only Ukraine inspires his uplifting creativity. His admiration for Ukrainian femininity—symbolizing poetry and inspira­tion—makes him withdraw into himself when his muses start to speak or sing.⁴¹

Now Kernerenko assumes the role of the invisible mediator who revives Ukrainian female voices by imitating populist Ukrainian poetry and Heinrich Heine’s romantic imagery. Kernerenko’s attempts to equate Ukraine with his muse and with a woman-poet might be seen either as a plea for the advent of a Ukrainian female poet or as a prayer obliquely addressed to Lesia Ukrainka; un­fortunately, we know nothing about Kernerenko’s attitudes to this contemporary Ukrainian poetess.

Kernerenko’s romantic proclivities gain momentum in his three long poems “Halia,” “Bozhevil’nyi” (Madman), and “Shchetynnyk” (The Bristle Ven­dor).⁴² All three capitalize on epigone romantic motifs, juxtaposing love, mad­ness, and death. The poem “Shchetynnyk” features a certain village dweller, Marta, whose faithful love to Hryts’ko results in an incurable disease and un­timely death. “Bozhevil’nyi” introduces village dweller Volodymyr, driven to in­sanity by a vision of a forest brook mermaid. But “Halia” provides the most elaborate romantic female image.

“Halia” is written in the alternating four-foot trochee and two-foot amphi­brach characteristic of the metrical system of Shevchenko’s long poems. The two principal characters, Halia and Petro, come from two different worlds. Halia is a volatile, joyous, passionate, talkative, freedom-loving, yet jealous gypsy girl from a gypsy encampment. Her features are reminiscent of Pushkin’s Zemfira (from his “The Gypsies”). Petro, Halia’s awkward lover, is a slow, taciturn, and morose village lad. He fakes gloom, trying to cover up his disloyalty to Halia. A bucolic river landscape frames their erotic encounter. Halia bends over backward to help dissipate Petro’s gloom, and Kernerenko resorts to the best of his poetic devices to demonstrate Halia’s natural flexibility. Her heated monologues and strange behavior sometimes make one question her sanity—as such, she repli­cates some of Shevchenko’s female characters—particularly when she takes her lover to the bridge, embraces him one final time, and throws him and then her­self into the waters.

Halia’s madness perfectly matches with her integrity: not without reason do the village dwellers who pull Halia and Petro from the waters admire Halia’s genuine “capacity to love.” A reference to the mermaids at the end of the poem revives Heine’s imagery of “Lorelei” and points to the romantic roots of Ker­nerenko’s poetry.⁴³ Furthermore, Kernerenko seems not to differentiate be­tween the “Ukrainian” gypsy Halia, his Ukrainian Muse, and his Ukrainian fe­male images: all are dressed in recognizable folklore attire and ornamented with idiosyncratic Ukrainian adornments. Although Kernerenko emerges from his pre-1900 poetry as an epigone of Ukrainian romanticism, he exemplifies an un­heard-of phenomenon: a Jew in love with Ukraine, for whom Ukrainian cultural integration begins with the appropriation of the legacy of Shevchenko and Ukrainian poetic folklore. The death of his male image at a woman’s hands is a high price for that love.