The Poetry of Love and the Love of Poets

As with other aspects of her sensuous poetry, Troianker’s Ukrainian accultura­tion had a paramount somatic aspect. Her dialogue with Ukraine was an en­counter of two bodies: hers, contextualized within Jewish imagery, and his, strongly associated with Ukraine.

Troianker’s universe, small but colorful and intense is inconceivable without masculine images, usually in the form of a Ukrainian poet who saves or does not save her from erotic torment. For Troianker, a love affair with a male partner is inconceivable unless he is another “writing body,” namely, a poet:

Azure city in the autumn flood.

I am a simple and pensive girl.

You are a poet renowned in Ukraine

And you cannot love me.⁸⁸

In this case, Troianker’s unhampered eroticism is no less striking than her un­usual, dangerously charged, and politically subversive prepositional phrase “in Ukraine.” Throughout the Soviet period, Ukraine was referred to as a territory, not as an independent entity, hence the correct “on [the] Ukraine.” One of her critics in the 1920s scolded Troianker for this language error, considering it merely a grammatical one, yet this “error” seems to have been a deliberate choice on Troianker’s side.

Indeed, Troianker’s preposition struck a sensitive cord. A hot political issue in the 1920s, it has not lost its explosive connotations some eighty years later. Af­ter 1991, and particularly after the Orange Revolution of 2004, chauvinistic Rus­sian politicians were scandalized by the ubiquitous democratic mass media’s us­age of the notion “Ukraine” with the preposition “in” (in Ukraine), and insisted that “on” should be used instead, betraying their scornful attitude to what they considered a genuinely Russian colonial body.

Troianker staged the love affairs of her heroines against the scenery of the fall rural landscape, whose Ukrainian attributes are well recognizable. Troianker’s heroine is easily identifiable as Troianker’s alter ego and her landscapes are im­mediately recognizable as Podol, but identifying the prototype of Troianker’s masculine protagonists is a challenging task. In the following poem, for instance, Troianker depicts Onoprii Turhan, her husband. Yet the heroine addresses her partner with the name of Oleksa, perhaps hinting at Oleksa Vlyz’ko, a contempo­rary neoromantic Ukrainian poet and great admirer of Gumilev and Kipling and whose line became an epigraph to one of Troianker’s poems.⁸⁹ In addition, Troianker surrounded her characters with visual metaphors, as well as a tango­like rhythm, borrowed from the early poetry of Volodymyr Sosiura:⁹⁰

Leaves are falling, leaves are falling,

How nice are those leaves, yellow and golden.

The air smells sharply of November—

It came from the field, it moved though the valley.

My hand sticks into the leaf pile as into hair,

The hair of Oleksa, my love.

My golden fall, with me your leaves you share,

It will be easier for you to carry them.⁹¹

Here, as well as in many other of Troianker’s poems, the fall is associated with love, love with autumn yellow-golden colors, and the colors—obliquely medi­ated by the frame of reference created by Ukrainian poetry of the 1920s—with Ukraine. Troianker’s eroticism is not self-containing: she naturalizes eros, juxta­posing the time of love with the cycle of nature.

The central moment in the poem is her heroine’s dialogue with autumn, the moon, and the landscape. Troianker learns from them that the end of the season and the first frosts are rapidly approaching and her love affair will soon come to a halt. “I dovetail my seventeenth into my plaits,” admits Troianker and ad­dresses fall with the question, “and you, tender, how old are you?” To mark the Ukrainian national motif of the poem, Troianker resorts to an unusual designa­tion of November (padolyst). Unlike in western Ukrainian and the Ukrainian Diaspora language, it was not canonized in Soviet Ukrainian, which adopted Iystopad for November, and came to be associated with the “western,” “bour­geois” and “nationalistic.” Even ifTroianker uses the word only to connote the exotic, still she seems to lament not only the end of her love and of her beloved fall, but also the end of the old-fashioned language, which would die out as soon as fall comes to an end. Neither the Ukrainian fall nor her love would survive. The parallels Troianker traces here and elsewhere make one revisit the definition of her poetry as merely erotic. It would seem much more plausible to portray it as an attempt to merge eroticism with the universalized Ukrainian landscape po­etry.

For Troianker, the change of seasons becomes inseparably connected with major shifts in her life. The end of fall coincides with the heroine’s transforma­tion from a lover into a wife and mother and triggers the shift of colors. Love was yellow and orange, it was music and color. Now a new theme enters Troianker’s universe, the white snows that cover the past:

What are you singing, yellow mandolin,

Troubling my blood with memories?

I am now somebody else’s wife.

You have overcome your love.

Autumn, autumn in yellow adorned,

And my lips hot with fire

“This love is not the last for me

The final accord has not yet chimed.”

I will not kiss anymore

Your courageous and joyous forehead.

I am a wife, soon will be a mother—

And the snows have covered the past.⁹²

The new season moves Troianker from a rural to an urban environment but does not change the character of her passion.

Night is cold as a blade

But I am burning with fire.

Someone distant—as a shot in my bosom,

Someone distant whom I love.

He is a poet. In a noisy blue city

He has a wife and children.

He united his fervent heart

With the grief of his poems.⁹³

The love for a poet, primarily for a Ukrainian poet, becomes for Troianker the sine qua non of her erotic adventure. Even when Troianker’s fiance is just a cap­tain on board a ship cruising the Black Sea, she would make him into a poet, as if her love does not know other partners. This is Troianker on her night conversa­tion on board a ship:

You are a captain with a poet’s soul.

I told you about my grief,

My nature, gloomy like the Nord-Ost.

I called you “Bill”

Instead of a real, tender “Iura.”⁹⁴

The change of a regular and prosaic to a romantically accentuated name follows the metaphoric change of her partner’s occupation. Note that her sea voyage ro­mance frames the awakening of her poetic vocation. The masculine protagonist creates not only an erotic situation but also generates the awakening of the hero­ine’s creative effort. Thus for Troianker the masculine serves a conduit into the realm of poetry. Troianker’s literary inspiration requires a male poet whom she views as timid and powerless: it is she who empowers her male characters, trans­forming their feeble Iura into a corpulent romantic Bill. But the artistic aspect of her erotic curiosity remains unchanged: her love belonged only to a poet and a poet was synonymous with love; others should not even try to solicit her reci­procity. Perhaps to emphasize and simultaneously to neutralize this idea, Troianker invents an impossible situation: she brings together an image of her­self as a gifted poet and as a young mother taking care of her son.

This apparently trivial image presents a challenge. As is known, Troianker gave birth to a girl, Elena Turgan, who grew up in Leningrad and Murmansk and, in the postwar period became a Moscow-based journalist. Troianker never had a son. But in her “Vechir” (Evening) and a few other poems, she changes the gender of her child: the daughter turns into a son marked with carefully selected Ukrainian national symbols. This change deeply puzzled Mykola Kapustian- s’kyi (b. 1879), a Ukrainian military historian and art critic who received Troianker’s first book from her with a romantic dedication. Kapustians’kyi’s dense and sometimes undecipherable marginal notes betray his perfect knowl­edge of Troianker’s personal circumstances. Sometimes he also discloses the hints and pseudonyms in Troianker’s poetry by putting next to the correspond­ing lines the names of her husbands or lovers. Kapustians’kyi heavily marked his copy of the book with notes. Thus, on the page where the poem “Evening” ap­pears, next to Troianker’s line “My little boy has cried three times already” he left the following bracketed pencil note: “why a boy and not Olenka?” This mar­ginal remark attests to Troianker’s by-no-means-trivial attitude to gender.

A perspicacious critic, Kapustians’kyi pointed to something poetically sig­nificant for Troianker, albeit he was not able to interpret accurately what he had discovered. Troianker, as it were, poetically transgendered her child by pointing out the significance of the male body as a catalyst in the process of creative writ­ing. Just as her first erotic encounter took her, through pain and shame, to a dis­covery of her own self, here, too, the pain of a sick child and the shame of a young mother unable to suppress her artistic zeal bring her to a creative moment that, in turn, results in a poem about this transformation of pain and shame into po­etry. Thus transgendering becomes an inherent part ofTroianker’s emancipa­tion process. The body of the Other does not colonize her: on the contrary, she needs it only as an incentive that inspires her introspection, brings her to a new level of self-discovery, and enables her to capture this moment poetically.

Apparently Troianker’s heroine’s poetic talent cannot realize itself beyond a conflicting realm that constantly challenges her as a mother, a poet, and a pas­sionate and daring lover. Troianker is well aware that the responsibility to her child contradicts her volatile poetic genius, let alone vertiginous love affairs. Yet her talent has the upper hand over social conventions, leading her to the most de­sirable of all men and most talented of all poets, to Mephistopheles:

Hold on, Mephistopheles,

Hold on, Mephistopheles,

I may come at night and sell

My last blood-written stanzas,

My wisdom—transparent, like water in a glass.

Wait, Mephistopheles,

Your face is cruel,

And my cheeks are still rosy,

I will come at night and knock three times

And will sell my wisdom, and sell my talent.

Wait, Mephistopheles,

I am not white-haired Gretchen,

I am gusty and nervous,

I am a woman-poet.

I am looking for an unknown, an unspoken word,

I know the thirst of inspiration,

The flight of creative zest.

It’s easy to be a lover

Even a mother and a wife.

But how to unite this with the calling of creator?

The funeral silver-sounding snowflakes are flying,

I will come, Mephistopheles,

Wiping off the suffering from my face.⁹⁵

Here, in what can be considered one of her best verses, Troianker brings her body symbolism to its end: she discovers that her poetic talent—always in search of an “unknown, an unspoken word”—transcends the somatic. The “blood- written stanzas” narrate the body, yet the power of narration brings her far be­yond the somatic. The snowflakes anticipating death and immortality at the end of the poem contradict the “red,” the carnal, and the erotic. As if predicting her own northward itinerary, quite real, Troianker sacrifices her “day,” “love,” and “body” for the night, winter, and poetic art.

Who is the addressee of this poem, so unusually philosophical for Troianker? Was this Mephistopheles a pure symbol? Context offers a clue. In an earlier verse permeated with philosophical symbolism, “The Poem on the Old Profes­sor,” Troianker tells the story of an aging scholar courageously doing his re­search in times of war communism, revolutionary ruin, famine, and cold, and studying the problem of rejuvenating humankind. He spends five hours in line to get his ration, a pound of bread and two of potatoes, and goes back home to feed two creatures—helpless, charming, and hairy orangutans—that he uses in his research on aging. The old professor places his life and health on the altar of science, to the extent that he uses his dissertation, the last thing that he can burn, to warm his room. Not only does he burn his dissertation: he burns himself, too, for the sake of his “golden lover—science.” Troianker praises the old professor’s self-abnegation, assuring the reader that a redeemed humanity will discover his notebook with its secrets for human rejuvenation, as well as the surviving orang­utans, and will solve the riddle of immortality.

For Troianker, the old professor is a mythic symbol of constant searching, of self-sacrificial service for a lofty goal, and a bold challenge to the power of death. He sacrifices something more important than his life: he rejects the satisfaction of his own bodily urges for the sake of the embodied results of the subject of his experiment, the orangutans. While Troianker calls him Faust (twice), it is even more important that she also addresses him with the name and patronymic of a contemporary:

Oh, wonderful Valer’iane Lvovychu,

You are trying to become the second Faust.⁹⁶

There was only one person in Troianker’s milieu with this name: Valer’ian L’vovych Polishchuk, another visionary, seeker of millenarian utopia, and self- sacrificial thinker. Troianker imagined herself face-to-face with Mephistophe- les, as if to imitate the situation in which her imaginary old utopian-minded pro­fessor, named after Troianker’s senior colleague, editor, and poetic mentor, appeared vis-a-vis death and eternity. If so, the professor’s research on virtual immortality and Troianker’s poetry replicated one another as mutually inter­changeable entities. Their obstinate self-abnegation is similar, too: the professor coughs blood; he “paints his handkerchief, as if with blood.” And Troianker speaks about “blood-written stanzas.”

Thus, Troianker, “a woman-poet,” emerges as the double of her mentor Valer’ian Polishchuk: they both sought ultimate knowledge ready to challenge the divine, both tend to bridge the “yesterday” and the utopian “tomorrow,” both are ready for self-sacrifice. This was a trap. Once Troianker had made Ukrainian male-poets so crucial to her spiritual growth, she ran the risk of encountering a poet and a male who would not necessarily be Ukrainian, particularly because she was now entirely decolonized and on a par with the Ukrainian poets. Appar­ently she never mused on such a dangerous encounter. Her premonitions did not deceive Troianker. Her Mephistopheles did appear in Kharkiv, together with three other Russian literary men. And Raia not only fell in love with him but also brought her Ukrainian talent, and her Ukrainian poetry, and her Ukrainian- Jewish themes to the altar of her new erotic madness.

The name of this Mephistopheles was Il’ia Sadofiev (1889-1965). As with many other ofTroianker’s men, he was a poet. Unlike them, he was a Russian poet, by that time a key figure in the RAPP (Rossiiskaia assotsiatsia proletarskikh pisatelei; Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), a colleague of Maiakovsky and a friend of Esenin, the author of a dozen poetic collections, praised for his rev­olutionary pathos by the founder of Russian symbolism Valerii Briusov himself. Sleek, self-centered, sprayed with the best cologne, and well dressed, he impressed Raia with his unparalleled self-confidence, with his aura of an established proletar­ian poet, with his manners of celebrity, with his fascinating physical health, and with his very impressive sexuality. Those who knew him personally portrayed him as a “mighty and robust” individual who “rejected lyrics if they were not followed by the bangs of the hammer.”⁹⁷ Sadofiev visited Kharkiv together with three other members of the writers’ delegation, heard Raia at a poetry recital, condescended to some positive remarks, and fell in love with her.⁹⁸ When they were introduced to one another, the acclaimed Sadofiev could not resist Raia’s charms. Her second and last collection of Ukrainian poetry carried the dedication:

to you, who sees an individual, where nobody else is able to see

To my beloved

Il’ia Sadofiev.

Apparently Sadofiev was an unheard-of tiger in Troianker’s collection. Raia agreed to become his wife and move to Leningrad.