The Soldier of the Empire

Although Pervomais’kyi enjoyed a relatively secure position among his literary colleagues until 1949, the political shift of the 1930s cast its shadow on his poet­ics. Once the Union of the Ukrainian Soviet Writers was established in 1934 and the capital of Ukraine transferred to Kyiv, Pervomais’kyi moved to Kyiv and set­tled in the Rolit, one of the most prestigious residential buildings of the new So­viet nomenklatura erected for the privileged members of the Union of Writers.

In the public realm, the Jewish-Ukrainian rapprochement was curtailed.

Always cheerful, Pervomais’kyi in the mid-1930s became introspective, sober, aphoristic, and succinct.⁶⁶ In 1930, Sava Holovanivs’kyi, on the brink of complete despair, told him about Maiakovsky’s suicide (Maiakovsky literally and metaphorically brought Holovanivs’kyi into poetry), to which Pervomais’kyi calmly replied, “Pull yourself together and try to comprehend what has hap- pened.^,,67Thirty years later in his poem on the persecuted Spinoza, who was de­spised by his fellow Jewish countrymen, he advised his protagonist: “Grind your diamond and withstand everything.”⁶⁸ This poignant motto, bordering on the stoic, emerged not only from Pervomais’kyi’s personal life circumstances but also from his literary predilections, which in the 1930s had switched toward Rudyard Kipling.

Pervomais’kyi’s treatment of Kipling should be seen against the backdrop of the English poet’s overwhelming, albeit implicit, presence in the Soviet culture of the 1930s, an issue that has been shamefully neglected in scholarship.

Soviet Young Communist League poets, Pervomais’kyi among them, were galvanized by the example of Kipling’s Tommy Atkins, for whom duty and obe­dience became utmost personal values. They misunderstood Kipling’s all-em­bracing imperialism, considering it a manifestation of his naive international­ism. They translated Kipling’s imperialist sympathies into the idolization of the new Soviet empire, the USSR.⁶⁹ For them, workers at the Kuznetsk coal mines and on the Far East construction sites, village motorists and proletarian artists, brave polar pilots and tireless Belorussian dairymaids were soldiers of the em­pire, sacrificing their private human happiness in order to realize the communist paradise. Former national minorities, and industrial and agricultural shock workers hardly able to convey their experiences, suddenly joined the mighty chorus celebrating the epic-making state-building experiment. Being part of this chorus became a privilege and sacred duty in what Terry Martin has called “the affirmative action empire.”

Kipling’s obedient and down-to-earth “young British solider” became no less essential for the singers of the expanding Soviet universe than the marching rhythms of Kipling’s verse.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Pervomais’kyi often turned to Kipling, whose poetry he knew well through his close friend Oleksa Vlyz’ko, perhaps the most consis­tent Ukrainian admirer of Kipling.⁷² Pervomais’kyi’s early Komsomol-shaped poetry was imbued with a morphed Kiplingesque “serve, serve, serve as a sol­dier.” Some of the chauvinistic poetry that he penned in the 1930s elaborated Kipling’s motif of the holiness of state service as, for example, in his servile “Sio- hodni nebo nad Moskvoiu” (Today the Sky over Moscow, 1936), in which he ar­gued that “The great glory of our days / Becomes our duty.”⁷³ Poems such as “Balada vartovykh” (Ballad of the Sentinels, 1931) explicitly cite the source and develop the theme from Kipling’s well-known epitaph, “The Sleepy Senti­nel.”⁷⁴ The recurrent motif of the sapper in his lyrics could have been inspired by the Kiplings Sappers.

Pervomaiskyis poetic cycle “Uhorski rapsodii” (Hungarian Rhapsodies, 1934-35) juxtaposed Kiplingesque self-sacrificial rhetoric and the anticolonial­ist struggle of the Hungarian people, in particular, of Sandor Petcifi (1823-49).

And yet I feel like a soldier,

For I got used to the soldier’s generous fate.

Believe me, my lot is not bad—

Between you the living and, in a field, the dead.⁷⁶

Yet there was a palpable difference between the Kiplingesque Soviet poets and Pervomais’kyi. The Ukrainian poet did not share the Kiplingesque jangling mil­itarism. Nor did he identify with the Kiplingesque readiness to sacrifice the in­dividual for the sake of the impersonal and imperial. While others adapted Kipling for their epics, Pervomais’kyi transformed him through his lyrics. Epic distance between himself and a stoic-minded sentinel was inconceivable for Per- vomais’kyi. He celebrated the soldier’s soft irony rather than his dry stoicism. His Russian colleagues praised the self-sacrificial act of the revolutionary soldier on the battlefields of international socialism; Pervomais’kyi pointed to the uniqueness of the soldiers’ life. The singers of the immortal deed of a Soviet sol­dier underscored the greatness of the cause for which he died, while Pervo- mais’kyi emphasized the tragedy of his death. The former taught Soviet citizens to endure and withstand hardships; Pervomais’kyi taught them to be merciful. His sentinels bemoaned the death of Lenin, crying out loud. His sapper, an ironic thinker, treated death as his routine and macabre interlocutor. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Pervomais’kyi turned to Kipling to humanize the voiceless soldiers on the fronts of the Spanish Civil War and, later, of World War II. Pervomais’kyi made his soldiers into philosophers by revealing the spiritual richness of their inner world.

This is what Pervomaiskyi did, for example, in his Kiplingesque ballad “Saper i smert” (The Sapper and Death, 1943). Reminiscent of the philosophi­cal discourse through which an ironic thinker appropriates and domesticates death, it is based on the sapper’s ability to speak out loud with a mortar shell:

The sapper is holding death in his hands

And talks to it,

This is his habitual job

As if he does not know other ones.⁷⁷

The ability to speak furnishes the sapper—a silent, serious, and rigid lower rank—with an upper hand over death and destruction. But not only that. Pervo­mais’kyi further uplifts his sapper by turning him into his double who, like the poet, neutralizes violent empirical reality by inventing its images and making them speak. By the same token, in “Ivanhorod” (1942), a rank-and-file soldier overcomes the tedium of war through his ability to recite poetry while standing on guard duty, exhausted:

Perhaps there were worse travails

In the lives of each of us.

I am standing and reciting poetry

To make time run faster.⁷⁸

Thus Pervomais’kyi’s soldiers regain their voices, becoming thinkers, poets, and philosophers wrapped in trench coats. Their self-irony transcends Kiplin- guesque imposing pathos. For them, victory is “as young and happy, as our bat­talion bugler,” and the survivors remember the grenade explosions “like an old soldier remembers the number of his Three Line rifle.”⁷⁹

Some of Pervomais’kyi’s poetic decisions may have originated in Pervo­mais’kyi’s deep empathy for his friend Oleksa Vlyz’ko, whose poetic talent he ad­mired.⁸⁰ Vlyz’ko adored Kipling and in Kharkiv in the 1920s would recite his work in the middle of the street, scaring passersby. Pervomais’kyi presented Vlyz’ko as a talented young man who finds his way to dazzling rhymes and mes­merizing rhythm, trying to defeat a sickness unheard of for a poet. Vlyz’ko, hard to believe, was stricken with an incurable disease that eventually took away his ability to speak and hear. His public appearances were horrible, for he could not hear his own voice, was incapable of reciting his own poetry, intimidated many of those who did not know about his disease, and could not grasp the extent of his physical failure. In a poignant memorial essay on Vlyz’ko, Pervomais’kyi empha­sizes not so much Vlyz’ko’s Kiplingian imagery as the Ukrainian poet’s desper­ate attempt to regain his own voice. It was his deep sympathy for a poet doomed to virtual dumbness rather than Vlyz’ko’s masterful Kiplingesque variations that formed Pervomais’kyi’s attitude to Vlyz’ko and, by default, to Kipling.⁸¹ Vlyzko’s tragic fate, to be executed among other representatives of the Ukrainian national renaissance, only sharpened Pervomais’kyi’s belief that the humane should predominate over the ideological.

Transforming Kipling for his own poetic purposes, Pervomais’kyi revisited Kipling’s key notion of duty. In spite of Pervomais’kyi’s numerous self-portraits in the genre of the “artist as an old soldier” and his profound sense of duty recorded in the memoir, Pervomais’kyi’s “duty” had nothing to do with the sol­dier’s unquestioning obedience to authority. The only sense of duty Pervo­mais’kyi acknowledged was his loyalty to his own vocation, his themes, and his ethical principles. Jewish images and Jewish themes appeared in all his creative work in the 1920s and early 1930s and found their way into his later writings as well, although he conveyed his Ukrainian-Jewish sympathies to his readers only sotto voce. For this Pervomais’kyi paid dearly.