The Ukrainian Classics

The Soviet notion of the Ukrainian ‘national classics’ referred primarily to the nineteenth century, when the indigenous intelligentsia began developing modern Ukrainian high culture based on the peasant vernacular and folk traditions.

During the post-war decade, figures who had been valorized during the war, such as Kulish or the poet and educator Borys Hrinchenko, came to be suspected of ‘nationalism,’ and the ideological censors gradually dropped them from the canon of Ukrainian classics. Newspapers no longer claimed Gogol as a ‘great son of Ukraine,’ but rather hailed him as a ‘great Russian writer’ with the ‘closest of ties to Ukraine.’ Ivan Kotliarevsky, the author of the first literary work in modern Ukrainian, preserved his traditional place of honour, although his biographers now highlighted Kotliarevsky’s military service in the volunteer corps during the Russian Empire’s war with Napoleon.⁵

Most important, however, was the national cult of Shevchenko. Even at the height of the Zhdanovshchina, the annual commemorative rallies featured practi­cally unreserved glorification of the ‘great father,’ whose ‘image lives and will always remain in the hearts of the Ukrainian people.’⁶ At the same time, the republic’s ideologues asserted that Soviet Ukraine embodied Shevchenko’s dream of a ‘new and free family and denied the emigre nationalists’ claim to his spiritual inheritance Post war Soviet statements on Shevchenko presented the ‘great son of the Ukrainian people’ as a ‘revolutionary democrat,’ who had headed the radical wing of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood As well, the bard had allegedly maintained close contacts with Russian radicals, admired Russian culture, and despised contemporary Ukrainian ‘bourgeois nationalists ’⁷

The official discourse also increasingly cast ‘junior’ classical writers, such as Franko or Lesia Ukrainka, as revolutionaries and allies of progressive Russian culture Depending on the current political atmosphere, the press presented Franko as a fighter against either ‘bourgeois nationalism’ or ‘rootless cosmopoli­tanism,’ and occasionally against both these opposite trends simultaneously ⁸ The pre-war and wartime patriotic interpretation of the Ukrainian classics now appeared heretical The KP(b)U Central Committee banned V Diachenko’s book Mykola Lysenko because it highlighted the classical composer’s role in the Ukrainian national movement, speaking ‘too much about Ukrainian culture and too little about the friendship [of peoples] ’ As it turned out, the author was killed in action during the war and his book had been submitted to the publisher in 1941, when its Ukrainian focus was not considered unorthodox ⁹

The republic’s ideologues proceeded carefully in their construction of cults devoted to several more ‘junior’ classical writers who had lived during the late ninetieth and early twentieth centuries On 6 May 1949 Khrushchev wrote to Stalin asking for permission to celebrate the centenary of the writer Panas Myrny (1849-1920) ‘In his novels Do Oxen Bellow When the Cribs Are FulP, Fallen Woman, and others, he vividly described the process of class differentiation among the peasants, the exploitation of the poor by the landlords and kulaks, and the growth of the revolutionary movement in the countryside In his creative work, Panas Myrny demonstrated close links to progressive nineteenth-century Russian writers ’¹⁰ The central Agitprop replied that the Ukrainian authorities did not actually need the Kremlin’s permission to celebrate the anniversary in the republic, but Moscow approved the proposal in any case ¹¹ Within months, Myrny was extolled in the Ukrainian press as ‘our national pride,’ a ‘realist’ writer and democrat who, sadly, ‘did not rise to Social Democracy ’ The government sanc­tioned the publication of his works, the naming of a street in Kiev after him, and the construction of a monument to him in Poltava ¹²

The populist poet Pavlo Hrabovsky, who had been involved in the Russian narodmki revolutionary movement and had died in Siberian exile in 1902, appears to have been a more promising candidate for the role of classical writer linking the national tradition with both Russian culture and the Russian revolutionary heri­tage On the 50th anniversary of his death, a KP(b)U Central Committee internal memo proposed that the poet be designated a thinker who had ‘accepted Marxism and become its propagandist ’ But a senior bureaucrat edited out this untenable claim, and the official pronouncements honoured Hrabovsky as simply a revolu- denary poet ^J

As the republic’s ideologues were weighing various writers’ revolutionary credentials, Ukrainian intellectuals pushed for the canonization of the famous nineteenth-century blind peasant bard, Ostap Veresai (1803-90) In 1950 the Institute of Ukrainian Art and Folklore, the Writers’ Union, and the Composers’ Union proposed that the 60th anniversary of his death be commemorated Veresai, however, had the misfortune of having been invited to perform before the tsar and of being admired by the ‘nationalists ’ Accordingly, party functionaries advised against this untimely celebration In 1952 the KP(b)U Central Committee agreed to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1953, albeit on a more modest scale than the authors had proposed,’ without an official festival or the erection of a monument¹⁴

Although they often disagreed in their appraisals of specific cultural figures, Ukrainian bureaucrats and intellectuals collaborated in a peculiar ‘codification’ of the national classics during the post-war decade that was made necessary in the historical memory of High Stalinism by the advent first of the nation and then of the empire Initially, the Ukrainian elites attempted to collect the surviving manuscripts of all prominent nineteenth-century literary figures in one Kiev depository In 1949 Kornnchuk submitted a proposal to Khrushchev that the heritage of several of the most eminent writers be declared state property Private persons possessing manuscripts by Kotharevsky, Shevchenko, Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, and Kotsiubynsky then would have been required to surrender these documents to state organizations Incredibly, the Politburo rejected this idea as ‘infringing on the right to personal property guaranteed in the Constitution ’¹⁵ Nevertheless, the KP(b)U Central Committee supported the Institute of Ukrainian Literature in its efforts to retrieve valuable manuscripts from Russian depositories As a result of Nazarenko’s letter to Suslov, the Theatrical Library in Leningrad turned over the originals of many Ukrainian classical plays from the archives of the Kiev Censorship Committee ¹⁶

The republic’s authorities also supported the plan to concentrate all manu­scripts of Ukrainian classical writers in the Manuscript Section of the Institute of Ukrainian Literature By 1950 this depository held ‘practically all’ the surviving writings of Shevchenko, Franko, and Myrny, as well as the majority of the other classics manuscripts With help from the party and the government, the Institute sponsored major efforts in 1950 and 1953 to purchase or otherwise obtain remaining originals from Russian archives and personal collections ¹⁷The Institute’s depository enriched itself at the expense of other Ukrainian museums and research institutions as well. In 1950 the entire archives of Ivan Franko were moved from

Lviv to Kiev, where a twenty-volume collection of the writer’s works was then in preparation When, three years later, Lviv enquired about the fate of the archives, the Central Committee apparatus advised First Secretary Oleksn Kyrychenko that Franko’s manuscripts should remain in the capital ¹⁸

The second stage in the codification process concerned editing and publishing the national classics in new and definitive Soviet editions During the late 1940s the authorities initiated several grand projects that included no fewer than two complete’ editions of Shevchenkos oeuvre The first version of the poets Complete Works appeared in 1949 in three large, luxurious volumes with an impressive print run of 100,000 and an incredible price of merely 50 rubles, but it included only ‘selected letters’ and a portion of Shevchenko’s artwork By the end of 1951 the Institute of Ukrainian Literature had prepared five of an envisaged ten volumes of another, more academic edition under the same name The project’s researchers sought to undo the editorial changes introduced by the poet’s ‘bourgeois-national­ist’ mentors and, in particular, substituted the original draft of Shevchenko’s autobiography for the traditional version edited by Kuhsh The Institute also prepared new ideologically sound commentary for the edition The first six volumes went to press during the early 1950s, but the colour reproduction of Shevchenko’s artwork in the last four volumes required such sophisticated poly­graphic technology that it had to be completed in Moscow¹⁹

In May 1950 the Institute also prepared the twenty-volume Works of Ivan Franko for publication, with the intention of having the entire series published during 1950—1 Although newspaper coverage did not report any omissions, the editors excluded several of Franko’s political articles and poems that espoused what might be perceived as his ‘nationalistic’ views In any case, in 1954 publication of both the ten-volume Shevchenko collection and the twenty-volume Franko set remained incomplete ²⁰

Financial and human resources in post-war Ukraine could not fully support this drive to codify and canonize the national classics by subsidizing luxurious multi­volume editions of all prominent cultural figures In 1945 the authorities an­nounced a plan to publish a thirty-one-volume complete works of the ‘founder of Ukrainian national music,’ Mykola Lysenko By 1950 this project had shrunk to twenty volumes, although their publication was nowhere in sight When celebrat­ing the 75th anniversary of Lesia Ukramka’s birth in 1946, the authorities decreed the publication of her complete works in fifteen volumes, but when commemorat­ing the eightieth anniversary five years later, the republic’s bureaucrats tacitly suppressed the old plan and promised instead to publish a three-volume collection of her work In contrast to this last decision, the Institute of Ukrainian Literature reported in 1954 that it was preparing a five-volume edition of her oeuvre As of August 1954 the publication of the works of Panas Myrny m five volumes, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky in five, Marko Vovchok in six, Vasyl Stefanyk in three, and Pavlo Hrabovsky in two volumes remained unfinished ²¹

During 1948-9, however, the authorities succeeded in publishing in one- volume mass editions the selected works of the majority of the Ukrainian classical writers These selections appeared in two popular series, ‘The Ukrainian Classical Novel’ and ‘Kolkhoz Library ’ Although the state kept book prices artificially low, the population could not afford to collect the ‘national classics’ during the late 1940s In 1949 the bookstores of Drohobych province in Western Ukraine received 990 copies of Franko’s one-volume works and sold 175 copies, or 17 68 per cent Kotharevsky’s works sold slightly better (20 per cent) and Kotsiubynsky’s much worse (9 74 per cent), but these figures actually represented success com­pared with the sales of Soviet literary works and political literature Aleksandr Fadeev’s The Rout, for example, was able to manage only 3 76 per cent and Dmitrn Furmanov’s Chapaev 4 21 per cent Amazingly, none of the 400 subscribers to Lenin’s multi-volume Collected Works in Ukrainian in the city of Drohobych picked up volumes 1 and 2, and only 9 out of 350 cared to collect the 7 available volumes of Stalin’s Works ²² In impoverished post-war Drohobych, Ukrainian classics appear to have been more popular than the writings of the Soviet leaders

Literary scholars carefully edited out ideologically problematic passages from the classical works before sending them to print As the Institute of Ukrainian Literature reported to First Secretary Kyrychenko in 1954, ‘Literary works and other material by the Ukrainian classical writers (some letters, notes, etc ) are not included in their collected works if these materials are not of socio-political or literary-historical importance, or if they might prompt in the present-day reader a reaction incompatible with the Soviet policy of mass education By the way, the amount of such material in the Ukrainian classical heritage is insignificant ’²³

Yet the party apparatus did not rely on the scholars’ ‘internal censors ’ In 1951 the Central Committee’s experts halted the publication of volume 4 of Kot- siubynskys Works because some of his letters ‘contained certain uncharacteristi­cally erroneous statements ’ The functionaries demanded that the letters in which Kotsiubynsky acknowledged the influence of Ibsen and Maeterhnk and referred to his literary school as ‘European’ be excluded, as well as his correspondence with the ‘nationalists’ Mykola Shrah, Borys Hnnchenko, and Mykhailo Komarov, in which the writer had approved of their activities, mentioned Hrushevsky, and made problematic comments about Russians ²⁴ In a communication to Nazarenko, Oleksandr Biletsky, the director of the Institute of Ukrainian Literature, strongly defended the original selection of letters, but to no avail The debate between the Institute, the State Publishing House (Derzhhtvydav), and the Central Committee lasted more than ten months, delaying the completion of Kotsiubynsky’s five- volume Works for years ²⁵ The censors likewise banned the publication of Myrny’s letters to the publishing house Vik simply because they were addressed to Serhu lefremov, its nationalist’ director The Institute proposed dropping lefremov’s name and including the valuable letters in Myrny’s Works, but the Central Com­mittee apparatus shelved the matter Eventually, Myrny’s Works sNOte published without his letters to lefremov ²⁶