The Red Word ofIvan Kulyk

Kulyk discovered the Ukrainians and Ukrainian folklore just as Ukrainians were rediscovering, or better to say, reconceiving the Jews. Although Ukrainian drama, poetry, and prose on Jews and Jewish themes appearing in the 1920s to early 1930s will require a separate study, several observations will help place Ku- lyk in context.

The late 1910s and 1920s saw a radical revision of this approach. Marxist and socialist patterns pushed away the populist ones that had dominated literary dis­course at the turn of the century. A new take on Jews emerged: no less exploited, destitute, persecuted, and mistreated than Ukrainians, subjected to the same en­forced Russification, and as voiceless and colonized as the Ukrainian peasant. The class-based vision of a Jew as a proletarian sui generis—stuttering or voice­less, hard working and yet hardly making ends meet—permeates post-1917 Ukrainian prose. The novelty, however, lies in the fact that Ukrainian writers found their Jewish proletarians in the shtetl among poor Jewish artisans, not in the industrial city. Perhaps under the impact of Kuprin’s “Gambrinus,” as early as 1918 M. Levyts’kyi realized that such an indispensable shtetl dweller as the wedding violinist was not necessarily a “bourgeois” Jewish bohemian. Rather, like his own Peisakh Leiderman, he was a hard-toiling proletarian, penniless, de­crepit, and burdened with sick relatives for whom he had to provide in his old age.⁸¹

Stepan Vasyl’chenko also placed the moving Avrum Marchyk, a “timid toiler-tailor with an always cheery expression on his pale and anemic face,” in a Ukrainian shtetl.⁸² Like other Ukrainian laborers portrayed by Shevchenko or Franko, “because of the back-breaking drudgery” Marchyk could not see “how the sun shines, how orchards blossom, and how dawns break through.” Inspired by the sense of brotherhood and solidarity he experiences at a socialist meeting, Avrum dreams of having a son: “People will elect him as a deputy, and he will bring to people a red-hot word about what freedom is.”⁸³ Avrum’s son is born in the midst of a horrible pogrom that decimates the town’s Jewish population, in­cluding Avrum’s family.

Like Vasyl’chenko, Volodymyr Hzhyts’kyi in his short novel Mutsa sympa­thetically portrayed Haim, a hard-working shetl Jew from Ianiv (Janow) in west­ern Ukraine, whose revolutionary-minded son Natan opens his eyes to class struggle and proletarian internationalism, in this case, Ukrainian-Jewish. To his father, still attached to “klal Yisroel,” the people of Israel, Nathan retors: “We can and must love those with whom we share interests—with the poor, for we are poor, and with the rest we should fight, and fight until a complete victory.”⁸⁴ This new class identity altered what was considered a major anthropological quality of traditional Jews: their cowardice. In his short story “Ziama” (1924), Arkadii Liubchenko traced the itinerary of a timid shtetl musician who as a dis­tributor of political leaflets, killed a policeman and spent years in prison, and who after the revolution immersed into its “red whirl” and was killed on the front.⁸⁵ Kost Kotko sharply circumscribed the framework for a reimagined Jew, making one of his Jewish Bolsheviks address his main character Shlioma: “You are no Jew, you are a worker. You, Shlioma, are a proletarian. Do you understand this word? A Jewish worker. Comrades, Shlioma is a proletarian, a tailor, he has earned his bread from the age of fourteen.”⁸⁶

Developing a class-based approach to the Jews, Iurii Smolych wrote Kinets mista za bazarom (The Edge of the Town Behind the Market, 1924), a humorous narrative about a certain Yosel Natanzon, a Jewish shoemaker who is exploited during the NEP (New Economic Policy) years by a local criminal. Permeated by the Marxist smoke of a nearby plant—the headquarters of the local Kom­somol—Yosel learns the language of emancipation, liberates himself, and ac­quires a new sense of dignity.⁸⁷ In Dytynstvo (Childhood, 1937), the same Smolych revisited his father’s house in the midst of the 1905 Revolution, when local outcasts from the Black Hundreds enticed by a Russian Orthodox priest and police burned to ashes the town’s Jewish district.

The quest for the “reconceptualized alien” manifested itself not only in the Ukrainian discovery of the “no-longer-alien” Jew but also in the mutual— Ukrainian and Jewish—efforts to appropriate the classical literary values on both sides. The Ukrainian poetry dedicated to Sholem Aleichem and Jewish po­etry canonizing Shevchenko are the best examples of these efforts.⁸⁹ To be sure, Smolych’s Jews were victims—ruined, scared, and helpless paupers crying out for protection. Paradoxically, while Ukrainian “proletarians and intelligentsia” (as Smolych depicts them) took it upon themselves to defend the proletarian Jew, Kulyk took it upon himself to defend the Ukrainians and whomever he as­sociated with the oppressed Ukrainians worldwide. And both sides eagerly de­clared that the Russian Revolution had changed once and for all the status of both peoples. Kulyk would pay for that mistake as dearly as his Ukrainian col­leagues.

Over the course of his career, Kulyk’s Ukrainian-Jewish identity, his belief in the international socialist revolution, and his attachment to the Ukrainian cause evolved considerably. This can be seen in the way Kulyk uses “green” and “red” images in his poetry. His first volume of Ukrainian poetry, Moi kolomyiky (1921), a thin gray-paper pamphlet, combined his ten-year-long interest in Ukrainian folklore, his admiration for Shevchenko’s revolutionary romanticism, and his new concept of class struggle. Most of its themes and motifs stemmed from the time Kulyk spent in Polish prisons. The book imitated Ukrainian folklore kolo­myiky, rhymed folkloric poems mostly of western Ukrainian origin, and offered some two dozen poems in various folksong genres: peasants’ dirges, songs of ploughman and sower, cavalry ballads, peasant-rebels’ victorious halleluiah, Cossack military marches, and soldiers’ farewell songs.

Whatever Kulyk’s Marxist inclinations, in his first book he emerged as a ro­mantic populist—akin to a socialist revolutionary obsessed with the fate of the Ukrainian peasant—rather than a Bolshevik. The first half of the book, “Pid iar- mom” (Under the Yoke), views Galicia realities through the lens of Shevchen- kian peasant imagery. Kulyk identifies with the Galician peasant lamenting the wartime famine, the cattle confiscated by Romanian lords and Polish legion­naires, the crops left unharvested in the fields, the weeds in the rye. He decries the pitiful fate of his kolomyiky, these sad peasant songs walking like orphans over the ashes of postwar fires. He celebrates the victorious peasant revolt in the second part, “Chervona Halychyna” (Red Galicia). Yesterday’s oppressed peas­ants return to their homes as the “free lords of life.” The poor border village and the devastated town of yesterday are now “red” and “resuscitated.” The peasants throw away the bourgeois yellow-blue banners of right-wing Ukrainian national­ism, lofted red banners instead, and expelled the Romanian and Polish ex­ploiters.

In keeping with his folkloric models, Kulyk avoids references to local Ukrai­nian lords. He introduces the negative image of the exploiting “attorneys- lords”—picked up from emigre folklore he researched in the United States— while leaving out the third element in the chain of exploitation, the Yids, and at­tempts to offer a new class-based folklore genre, free of xenophobia.

Kulyk’s own voice emerged in Zelene sertse (The Green Heart, 1923), a well- designed volume ornamented with light green vignettes built on proletarian ur­ban motifs. The book reflected his new experiences as a very young party leader, Komsomol organizer, agitator with international outreach, and a feeble human being anticipating a worldwide socialist revolution. Kulyk’s “green”—human, all too human—heart encounters the rising Red Soviet society. The “green” as­pects make Kulyk the lyrical hero of his own poetry: like an overexcited child, he admires the self-sacrificial deeds of the members of Young Communist League (Komsomol); he falls in love with a young worker named Shura (diminutive of Aleksandra); he is deeply saddened by the famine in Russia and left-bank Ukraine and calls for help to overcome its dreadful consequences; he cries for Ukraine and Kyiv from a Polish cell, and he is irritated by the boredom of the peaceful Ukrainian town he supervises. Kulyk’s feelings are “green,” and he is far from being a stalwart “red” fighter for the new socialist future. He emerges from the book as an untutored Marxist given to romanticism.⁹¹ He perceives the world more with his “green” heart than with his red-hot brain. Even when he dreams of the world revolution, he portrays his revolutionary premonitions as “painfully sweet.”⁹² Perhaps it was not unreasonable for Kulyk to call himself an “impressionist,” thus associating his poetry with condensed metaphors, an emotion-centered Weltanschauung, and sensuous imagery.

This lyricism, uncommon in hammer-banging and optimistic proletarian verse, also imbued his third poetry collection, Votochenni (Besieged, 1927). In this volume, Kulyk refers ironically to his own career and reveals the soft unin­sistent voice of a revolutionary romantic who does not measure up to the de­mands of the era:

I am not remembered. I am not for posterity.

I am not admired even by my contemporaries.

My songs were not that intense.

And not that dense.⁹³

Although he repeats the incantation “vanish, moment of weakness” throughout Besieged, it is precisely his weakness that makes his voice unusual. Kulyk is still “green”-hearted—he fails to grapple with the superhuman tasks set before him, and his attempt to turn into dogmatic ideologue causes a psychological crisis.

Exhausted, the Kulyk of Beseiged is sent for treatment to the Nadezhdino sanatorium near Moscow where psychologically challenged Russian revolution­aries undergo medical treatment. Kulyk is no satirist, perhaps he does not even grasp the ludicrous nature of the environment he is depicting, a hospital for neu­rotic communists! On the contrary, Kulyk portrays the sanatorium for damaged party comrades sympathetically. Forbidden to read newspapers or discuss poli­tics, they take pains to muse over political rumors and dream of joining again the ranks of the Red fighters. They complain that the nonstop class struggle has drained them of energy. Thirsty for mass meetings and parades, they enjoy the company of the nearby villagers, whose inspirational speeches help heal their decimated nerves. With the precision of a professional psychiatrist, Kulyk de­picts his own obsession—the madness of a devoted Marxist who realizes that he has failed to understand Marx:

Overworked. Tired. Drained.

A broken thought. Stress.

Somewhere on the pages

Of Marx’s Capital.

Confused in formulas. What is “S”?

Surplus value?

Well, “C” is a constant capital.

And “V” is variable.

But what is “S”?

This is not madness, says the doctor.

Just a crisis.

Just overexhausted.⁹⁴

Indeed, Kulyk concludes his collection by returning his lyrical hero back to the coal mines, to the robust workers, and into the energetic proletarian milieu. Yet in most of Besieged, Kulyk the artist still has the upper hand over Kulyk the Marxist. And his prediction of the impending world revolution still conveys his perception of the internationally oriented Marxism rather than what Stalin would consider Soviet Marxism in the mid-1930s.

Kulyk’s fascination with events of epic magnitude, his proletarian interna­tionalism, and his anticolonialism underpins his writings on American slavery. In Chorna epopeia (The Black Epic, 1929), Kulyk glorified the 1816 rebellion of some three hundred African-American slaves and twenty American Indians in­habiting Big Lick Garrison Fort in Apalachicola Bay, Florida. Known as the Fort Blount Revolt, this episode provides the historical backdrop for Kulyk’s por­trayal of his Errant Black, the murdered yet constantly resuscitating African- American slave Sambo. Kulyk traces Sambo’s itinerary and tells the story of how he cursed his fate of picking cotton on southern plantations, how he deceived and ran away from his master, and how he finally found safe haven in a commune of runaway slaves in Fort Blount. During the murderous bombardment of the commune by U.S. battleships, Kulyk saves Sambo from the massacre, makes him a free African American, and turns him into a colonized urban proletarian. Sambo works at a factory, dances in a pub, dreams of vengeance, commits a crime, and dies on the gallows—only to be resuscitated again for a new yet un­written “red epic.”⁹⁵

Kulyk’s The Black Epic translates his folklorist predilections from Ukrainian into “American” and back. To tell what Sambo was living through, Kulyk has his character sing Ukrainian songs to the rhythm of the step, the foxtrot, and the Charleston; recite a Ukrainian-Scottish ballad about the Fort Blount commune; listen to a bravado Ukrainian military march and the quasi-pirate songs of the U.S. troops sent to suppress the rebellion; share his wit and fatalistic optimism in a Ukrainian limerick; pour his broken heart into a Ukrainian blues; and sing his final farewell to his murdered relatives in a melancholic Ukrainian spiritual. Ku- lyk’s imitation of the whole gamut of English and American folklore genres in the Ukrainian language made many critics consider The Black Epic the pinnacle of his work.⁹⁶ Critics also praised the proletarian internationalism shaping the imagery of the poem.

Ideologically, however, Kulyk’s poem was far from pristine: he imbued his Sambo with the spirit of Huliai-pole anarchism, of Ukrainian Cossack fatalism, and of French socialist utopianism. “Black” was not only about African Ameri­cans; it was also about the unruly and freedom-loving Makhno, whose black- bannered troops had a luminary presence on the Ukrainian political and military map of the civil war. Kulyk deliberately crafts ambiguities in his epic so that it can be read as a narrative of Ukrainian emancipation. For example, by inserting an episode about John Brown (with its indispensable “glory, glory, halleluiah”), he reminds his reader of another “glory, glory” (“slava, slava,” in this particular duplicated form), the call of Petliura and the Haidamak Ukrainian People’s Re­public troops.⁹⁷ Ukrainian language and folklore come to serve as a medium for the redemption of a black from slavery. Only inspired by the folklore of he Ukrainian rebels can he find freedom. In a sense, Kulyk’s The Black Epic is not only about the emancipation of black American slaves but also about the emanci­pation of Kulyk from his “green” solipsism through Ukrainian and American folklore. Kulyk’s class-based perception of folklore, however, did not survive the rightward shifts in the Kremlin’s strategy in the 1930s.

By the mid-1930s, Kulyk had slowly but steadily eliminated the “green” from his poetry and came to associate himself only with “red.” Before the secu­rity organ Narodnyi kommissariat vnutrennikh del (NKVD) came for him, he managed almost entirely to expurgate his “green” weakness and became “red” through and through; the fact that his autobiographical Sofia Park remained un­finished was a result of his own attempts to neutralize the “green” aspects of his poetry. Kulyk allowed his Marxist self to crush his artist self. There was nothing unusual in this: once he set out on a certain path in 1921, he could not but get to where he found himself in 1935. It was in his My Kolomyiky that he erected “red banners” over the roofs of the houses in East Galician towns. In The Green Heart, Kulyk celebrated the “red” hand of help stretched during the famine by the right-bank Ukrainians to their brethren on the left bank. He called on all op­pressed human beings to look with hope toward the “red dawns.” He predicted that a “red-thunder song” would cause an earthquake to awaken the human be­ings from their lethargy. The new generation of young communists, argued Ku- lyk, should “not to be afraid of dirt and blood.”

When Kulyk became tired of the boredom of his life as a provincial party leader, he condemned the monotonous urban calm, which he wished to inundate with a “wild mob,” immerse in “street fights,” and adorn with “blood and ban­ners.” Painting the world in red was his utmost dream:

So painfully sweet to feel

That this task is ours:

To unfold red streamers

Over the Eiffel Tower.⁹⁸

The love of “red” and the dreams of the world revolution conveyed a vision of class struggle that had no place for “green” feelings. In The Green Heart, Kulyk admires the stamina and decisiveness of the girl he loves—not only because she was a comrade-in-arms at war and a workers’ activist at a knitted goods factory, but above all because she expurgated “green” feelings from her “red” heart:

A trial. Your brother, a traitor.

Rough voice: put him to death.

And you, so calmly: why waver?

And signed your name first.⁹⁹

In The Green Heart, the behavior of his girlfriend fascinates him. But in the 1930s, Kulyk learned the lesson only too well. He finally equates his internation­alism with socialist utopianism by juxtaposing two self-descriptive metaphors, his “word for all” and his “red word.” At the best moments of his apophasis, he abjures humaneness and presents himself as the “scald of the victorious class, / The class of sickle and hammer.”¹⁰⁰ His postcolonial triumph rejects his anti­colonialist strivings.

After the brutal suppression of Ukrainian revivalism in the early 1930s, Ku- lyk experienced a radical transformation on many levels. He compares Canadian forests to the woods ofVolhynia, brings together the St. Lawrence River and the frozen Dnieper, and discusses the resemblance between North American farm­ers and Ukrainian peasants, but he accepts all these parallels only in a red revo­lutionary framework. Do not be saddened, advises Kulyk, we will decorate the Canadian spring with red stars and the revolution will shortly be victorious in this North American country, just as it was in Ukraine: “You should not worry there, in Kharkiv / It’s already close, the ocean will not be an obstacle.”¹⁰¹ Kulyk spends page upon page celebrating the extraordinary might and natural beauty of Niagara Falls but at the end paints it red. A timeless and useless luxury, Nia­gara Falls enters Kulyk’s utopian future only as a new electric power station, as a huge plant, or as an enormous mine through which ore flows like water. Canada, concludes Kulyk, “will be a wonderful country/ when it has red banners!”¹⁰² When Kulyk claims that the best of all poems is “the poem of four letters called the USSR” and modestly acknowledges that it has “a drop of his color,” there is no doubt he implies red and not green.

By the mid-1930s, red had suppressed all the other colors in Kulyk’s palette. This was Kulyk’s response to the murderous repressions of the Ukrainian re­vival by the Kremlin in the early 1930s, when Kulyk’s onetime colleagues and friends either committed suicide (Skrypnyk, Khvyl’ovyi) or were arrested and sent to the Solovki Islands.¹⁰³ Ivan Kulyk turned away from not only Yisroel Iu- dovych but also Vasyl’ Rolenko. Admiration of things all-Russian replaced love of things Ukrainian. In 1921, Kulyk had cried out to the Ukrainians to help their left-bank brethren and save them from famine; in 1932, like most of his col­leagues (but not like Osip Mandelshtam, Leonid Pervomais’kyi, and later, Vassili Grossman), he had passed through the tragedy of the famine in silence, and like some, praised the construction of the White Sea Canal, built by the inmates of the rising Gulag. At the beginning of his career he had cared for Ukrainian peasants and workers and celebrated the Ukrainian Electropolis (most likely Kharkiv); now he sang praises to the newly established Moscow subway and por­trayed himself as a flourishing poet of Moscow, not of Ukraine.¹⁰⁴ He had dreamed of Ukraine celebrating the New Year in 1920 while sitting in Warsaw’s Central Prison—but in Moscow on the eve of 1933, he did not even mention Ukraine as he turned calendar page. He did not become Russian; he simply pre­ferred to bow down to the imperial.¹⁰⁵

In the early and mid-1920s, without making a big fuss of it, Kulyk had saved people whenever he could and helped Ukrainians—even strangers—who had found themselves in desperate situations. In the mid-1930s, however, with his hands on the mechanisms of Soviet power, he failed to help friends and col­leagues. Surovtsova bitterly commented: “Tender and sensitive person, he knew how to be stone-firm. I would not pause on his ‘principle-based’ approach to life events when he believed in the justice of what he saw. I cannot forget though a brief episode from my last extramural meeting with Kulyk: when after my arrest in 1932, my mom, in despair, turned to him for help—Kulyk, Ivan Kulyk, my boss in the commissariat of foreign affairs, my colleague in literary endeavors, my friend from the first days of the revolution, in the museum work of the pre­revolutionary times, our ‘Rol’ka’ from Uman, looking simple-mindedly and openly in the old woman’s eyes replied that he ‘does not know me well enough to get involved with my case.’ He was honest with himself.”¹⁰⁶ Even Kulyk’s beloved Canada reappeared for just a moment as “the alien and long forgotten land.”¹⁰⁷ His poetry of the 1920s was permeated with various genres of Ukrai­nian and American folklore, but in his Zmuzhnila melodist’ (Mature Youth, 1935) there were three domineering genres: the march (for triumphant socialist con­struction), the ode (for Stalin’s guidance), and the newspaper eulogy (for the as­sassinated Sergei Kirov).¹⁰⁸

Now the “green” question marks that brought his previous poetry alive were replaced with the exclamation marks of patriotic pamphleteering and slogan­making. Iurii Luts’kyi, not at all sympathetic to Kulyk, was not really exaggerat­ing when he argued that Kulyk’s public appearances of the mid-1930s were servile, if not sycophantic, toward Moscow.¹⁰⁹ Significantly, his “red” territory also shrank. In the 1920s his wholehearted revolutionary utopianism made him paint the world red; establish imaginary soviets in Paris, Bombay, and London; and bring together the Carpathians and the Cordilleras and emancipate their peasants. Following those Ukrainian poets who sang hosannas to the regime, he glorified “with the most glorious of all glories/the Party and the Ch.K.,” that is to say, the Extraordinary Committee (Cheka), the most vicious institution in the country. In the 1920s, Kulyk was ready to sacrifice his life for the emancipation of oppressed ethnicities worldwide. In his Marxist lyrics of the mid- 1930s, there was only one value worthy of his self-sacrifice: the Communist Party led by Stalin. Ultimately, he demonstrated that he had learned the lesson of his cold­blooded girlfriend Shura, who calmly approved of the execution of her own brother. In a poem denouncing the hypocrisy of Ukrainian nationalists, Kulyk appeals to his readers with a call to redouble vigilance, divulge internal enemies, and “raze them pitilessly!”¹¹⁰

In the 1920s, critics generally treated Kulyk as the exemplary Ukrainian poet. They singled Kulyk out among contemporary literary figures. The only lit­erary figure who appeared in Kulyk’s context and to whom Kulyk was compared was Vasyl’ Ellan-Blakytnyi (1894-1925), a former socialist revolutionary ac­tivist, later a Borot’bist, and finally a Bolshevik, whose prose both bemoaned and celebrated the tragic spontaneity and grassroots enthusiasm of the revolution. This was a high praise, for Ellan was seen as “a central figure in Ukrainian cul­tural life after the collapse of the UPR” and “a symbol of Ukrainian commu­nism.”¹¹¹ Significantly, the authoritative Oleksandr Bilets’kyi clustered Ellan and Kulyk together and depicted Kulyk (in Ellan’s terms) as a person for whom revolutionary fervor and personal feelings were one.¹¹²

Yet some critics argued that Kulyk was too good a Marxist to be an artist. A champion of the classic form in art and poetry, Mykola Zerov criticized Kulyk (along with Khvyl’ovyi) for not speaking “directly to the heart” of the reader, who remained “indifferent and cold” to their lyrics. On Kulyk’s attempts to combine traditional Ukrainian folklore and new revolutionary imagery in his Red Galicia, Zerov observed: “This is good for a banner, for an agitation pam­phlet, for Red Army newspaper satire. But it is difficult to say what this has in common with so-called poetic achievements.”¹¹³ Iurii Poletika, the Russian re­viewer of Kulyk’s The Green Heart and overtly condescending to Ukrainian au­thors, was even less enthusiastic. In his short review he called Kulyk “an aristo­crat among the proletarian bohemians,” who seemed to have abused his position as a high-ranked functionary to lard his book with ideological rattle and ensure that it was perfectly designed and printed.¹¹⁴ Other pundits celebrated Kulyk’s fusion of poetry and ideology and praised the pure proletarian convictions con­veyed by his poetry. For them, Kulyk was the first to make proletarian interna­tionalism speak Ukrainian.

Indeed, Kulyk’s anthems to the rising industrial Ukraine were unparalleled in the village-oriented Ukrainian literary context. The Ukrainian critic A. Khutorian, reviewing Kulyk’s Besieged, called it “a very, very significant event” that embodied the “pathos of a great epoch,” unlike the “minor-key colors and sad pictures” of modern Ukrainian decadent poetry. Even if some of his motifs gestured toward decadence (“Recovery,” for example, or “The Moment of Weak­ness”), Kulyk celebrated life, work, and an optimism shaped by proletarian in­ternationalism. Khutorian was particularly enthusiastic about Kulyk’s vision of Canada and Ukraine, soon to be united in one and the same realm of world so­cialism. To be sure, Khutorian approved of Kulyk’s vision of the Niagara Falls as the future site of an electric power plant.¹¹⁵

Kulyk’s leading position in the party did not prevent his critics from evaluat­ing his literary production according to its quality rather than its ideology. Many grappled with the question of whether Kulyk was a party ideologue who rhymed socialist mottoes or a genuine poet. Mykhailo Dolengo, for example, under­scored Kulyk’s treatment of the ordinary revolutionary and worker’s life, “so very rare in modern Ukrainian poetry.”¹¹⁶ Reviewing Besieged, the same Do- lengo praised Kulyk’s lyricism. His poetry, he argued, was not a combination of rhymed slogans but rather a manifestation of the collective feelings of the revo­lutionary people. Kulyk dissolved his poetic voice in the collective “we” of the revolutionary masses, thus giving birth to a new type of narrator, both epic and lyric. Dolengo did not call it utopianism but emphasized that Kulyk’s new poetic style matched “the buildings and towers of the socialist Electropolis.” Dolengo praised Kulyk for the way he balanced his quest for personal style with his elab­oration of materialist aesthetics. To translate Dolengo’s critical slang into mod­ern language: Kulyk was an artist despite being a Marxist.¹¹⁷

In a similar fashion, Volodymyr Koriak, a respectable and prolific Ukrainian literary scholar, placed Kulyk among the “first rank of the writers of Octo­ber.”¹¹⁸ In his Ukrainian Literature: A Conspectus (1928), he deemed Kulyk one of the best examples of a truly socialist artist who masterfully synthesized artis­tic experiment and Marxist orientation. According to Koriak:

[Kulyk] is the most consistent and orthodox among Ukrainian proletarian poets. At present he enriches the themes of proletarian poetry with new motifs im­ported from overseas, where he worked for three years as an advisor to the USSR consulate in Canada. His revolutionary kolomyiky that celebrate the Red Army’s fight for Galicia are widely known and popular. As to his poetic language, various trends influenced him: impressionism and futurism are interwoven in his writ­ings with the artistic objectivity of a genuine realism. Kulyk loves experimenting in versification yet he never sacrifices depth of content for it. Critics have unani­mously admitted the artistic and ideological values of his last collection V otochenni (Besieged).¹¹⁹

Some of Kulyk’s poems were among the most popular of the 1920s. “The Worker Shura,” a “Soviet socialist romance,” became a hit song that the critics dubbed “the first portrait of the Beatrice of the New World.”¹²⁰ It was the first of three of Kulyk’s poems that the eminent student of Ukrainian literature Mykola Plevako included in his Anthology of the New Ukrainian Literature: From 1880 to the Present (1926).¹²¹

Although he was not as popular as Volodymyr Sosiura or Mykola Khvyl’ovyi, Kulyk was still a celebrity whose literary endeavors triggered the interest of Ukrainian satirists. When cartoonists at the literary journals mocked proletarian literature as a whole, they portrayed Kulyk as a feeble, big-headed, and bearded East European intellectual holding the quintessential proletarian’s huge ham­mer. It is Kulyk effort to combine proletarian themes and genuine sincere lyri­cism that seems laughable. One of the satirists penned a double-edged parody of Koriak’s portrayal of Kulyk: “He grows right before you. You are standing and watching him, and he is growing right there. He has grown from a leaflet. He grew up and in a certain way started to go. He is a lyric: he gives, finds, selects, forges, creates, sings, yells, summons, and preaches. What he gives is no com­monplace. What he finds are concrete live patterns. What he selects are live im­ages. What he creates is a new language stemming from the proletarian routine life, work, and struggle.”¹²²

Kulyk’s critics found it remarkable that he had discovered America for Ukrainians. Hitherto likely to know only a few names—Edgar Allan Poe or Ralph Waldo Emerson—Ukrainian readers found in Kulyk’s Antoliohiia amery- kans’koi poezii (An Anthology of American Poetry, 1928) an entire universe of names, themes, and genres. Most of the works that Kulyk introduced into Ukrainian had not previously been published in either Ukrainian or Russian. Ukrainians read Western poetry in Ukrainian translations or, in most cases, in Russian. Kulyk, however, translated from the original English. Oswald Burg­hardt (Iurii Klen), a prominent member of the generation of the “executed re­naissance,” called Kulyk’s Anthology “a first-rank event in our literary life.” He noticed, however, the inexplicable absence in Kulyk’s Anthology of such poets as John Fletcher, T S. Eliot, and Sara Tisdale (this absence is revealing in the con­text of Kulyk’s anticolonialism), yet he held Kulyk’s versions of Walt Whitman, Markham, Edgar Lee Masters, and Mike Gold in high regard. Some of these translations, argued Burghardt, were poetic masterpieces that deserved an ap­propriate place in standard Ukrainian schoolbooks.¹²³

Not only American writers but also American themes testified to Kulyk’s unique attempts to bring America to Ukraine. In his enthusiastic review of Be­sieged, I. Raid wittily observed that Kulyk was perhaps among the very few Ukrainian literati, if not the only one, who managed to overcome the gravitation of Ukrainian territory and create innovative Ukrainian images of countries other than Ukraine. Praising the rhythmic, visual, and metaphoric novelties of Kulyk’s long poem “Niagara,” Raid argued that it was one of the best poems of post-Oc­tober Ukrainian literature and that it featured the genuinely industrial motifs that Ukrainian poetry so lacked. Though Kulyk modestly affirms that he is not a “master” in his poetic guild but only an “apprentice,” Raid argues that Kulyk’s poetry, especially “Niagara,” confirms that he is a real master.¹²⁴ Kulyk was also bringing Ukraine to America: the literary scholar Hryhorii Maifet compared Kulyk’s The Black Epic to African-American poetic folklore (from Kulyk’s American poetic anthology and from elsewhere) and praised Kulyk for his use of African-American myths, social themes, assonant rhymes, nuanced poetic re­construction of African-American conversational language, and ideologically mature imagery. Maifet’s essay, perhaps the first scholarly discussion of Kulyk, left no doubt that Kulyk had raised African-American folklore to a level of for­mal and ideological dexterity absent in the original.¹²⁵To wit: Kulyk was an em­inent Ukrainian representative of the African trend in modern American litera­ture.