mail: Bill Thayer	Help	Up	Home
previous: Chapter 18 This webpage reproduces a chapter of Twentieth-Century Ukraine by Clarence Manning published by Bookman Associates New York, 1951 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 20

 p168  XIX

Ukrainian Literature

With the nation thus torn apart and under a constant strain, it is no wonder that the literature constantly reflects the interplay of the dominating forces. The contrast between those authors who were imbued with the Ukrainian spirit and those who were loudly praised by the Communist masters is indeed striking, and the list of literary victims of the Soviet regime has steadily grown to include a large proportion of the outstanding artists of the written word.

From its origin with the Eneida, Ukrainian literature has sounded the note of democracy and freedom. Perhaps of no other literature can it be so truly said that it is a literature of the common man, his hopes and aspirations, his fears and difficulties.⁠1 The Ukrainian revival in its early stages was predominantly literary in character, for it was only in prose and poetry that there could be any national expression. During much of the nineteenth century all political work was impossible, but the writers at the risk of Siberia or prison dared to voice, sometimes openly and sometimes in guarded language, those ideals which otherwise would have been expressed in the political arena.

The literary revival started in Eastern Ukraine under Russian rule. The fate of Taras Shevchenko, the great poet who dared to lash out at the Moskals and their system and then  p169 found himself in a Russian penal battalion in central Asia was a warning against too much plain speaking as to the people's suffering. As a result the ethnographical school gained in prominence. Here the difference in psychology, culture and modes of living between the Great Russians and the Ukrainians were stressed. The ideas of the authors were often cloaked in almost scientific descriptions of the life of the villages and they conveyed in the most diverse ways the real character and thoughts of the Ukrainians.

In 1863 the Russian minister of education denied and proscribed any separate Ukrainian language and an edict forbidding the publication in the language of books for popular use was interpreted by the censors to mean utter suppression of all literary work in Ukrainian. In 1876 these rules were made even more all-embracing and not until the revolution of 1905 were they at all relaxed. In the meantime most of the authors published their works at Lviv or elsewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and thus undesignedly helped to knit together the two sections of the dismembered country.

The revival in Western Ukraine under the conditions of the Hapsburg system was slower but after it had taken firm root, it progressed somewhat more evenly. Its standard-bearer, Ivan Franko, a hard-working journalist of Lviv, showed himself not only a conscientious writer and critic but a man of keen insight. Through him and his associates Ukrainian literature was able to draw upon the literary development of Vienna and the West for broadening its outlook and its ideas.

By the first decade of the twentieth century Ukrainian literature was ready to break its original ethnographical bonds and stand out as a modern literature with its own aspirations and styles. It was able to express, despite unfavorable conditions, the Ukrainian version of all those tendencies which were dominant in the literatures of Western Europe as well as of Poland and Russia. The leading writers of the day, such as Lesya Ukrainka and Kotsyubinsky, shared in the literature of Western Europe. They sympathized with the developments  p170 of the modern period; their literary techniques were modern, and although they were criticized by the more conservative and static elements of the day, they justified their ambitions to place Ukrainian on a par with the other Slav and European literatures.

By the beginning of World War I most of these giants of the past were no more. Franko had died in 1916 after the retreat of the Russians from Galicia. Lesya Ukrainka had passed away in 1913 and so had Kotsyubinsky. The new phase of the Ukrainian movement which began with the war needed new talents and new modes of expression.

The enthusiasm for the establishment of an independent Ukrainian National Republic called back into literature such a man as Ivan Stefanyk, who had become silent many years before, and gave him new hope and inspiration. He was not alone. New resources of Ukrainian energy were tapped by the enthusiasm of the days of liberty but it proved to be a false dawn when the continued succession of wars and the Soviet conquest carried down the newborn state. Still, the relative freedom of the years of Ukrainization brought forth many new writers.⁠2

The most promising of these, like Pavlo Tychyna, were in the group of Ukrainian Symbolists. They developed the musical resources of the language and broadened its philosophical concepts more or less on the pattern of French poetry which had inspired the international Symbolist school.⁠3 The common sense which had characterized Ukrainian literature kept the authors from imitating the more decadent and abnormal aspects of Symbolism. What they saw in the movement was not the desire to shock the manners and morals of the bourgeoisie but the opportunities to adapt to Ukrainian the ideals and techniques of Western Europe. The leading authors were men of education and culture, and following in the path of Lesya Ukrainka, they felt that the Ukrainians were heir to the poetic culture of Europe. Thus they became another link in the chain which connected Ukraine with the  p171 whole of European civilization.

Another aspect of this longing of the Ukrainian people can be seen in the Neo-Classic group headed by Mykola Zerov, a lover of Greek and Roman literature. Zerov was tremendously impressed by the fact which had been so often overlooked by writers and scholars that the Black Sea coast of Ukraine had formed an integral part of the ancient Greek world. All along it were scattered the ruins of ancient Greek colonies and the region had been visited by classical writers, such as Herodotus and the exiled Ovid, who had died there.⁠a Zerov's imagination played on these scenes of the past and he sought to win for the literature of his country some part of that clarity and statuesqueness which had marked the ancient world. Among his followers were such men as Maksym Rylsky, with wide erudition and appreciation of the masters of world literature.⁠4

The third tendency which developed in Ukraine, as in many other countries, was Futurism, whose leading exponent was Mikhaylo Semenko. The Futurists preached destruction for the sake of destruction. They broke with all the accepted canons of art, with the ideals and traditions of the past, the respect for the peasantry and the village, the poetic systems which had been developed for the language, the normal uses of meter, rhyme and even words. While they paid lip service to the fact that they were working to build something in line with the new proletarian culture, they reveled in the negative aspects of both the old and the new, sneered at everything, and went their own way.⁠5

Both the Symbolists and the Neoclassicists sought support in the long history of civilization and culture. The Futurists denied and rejected the past and were vague about the future. They were all in a way apart from the writers who accepted in one form or another the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and tried to work in harmony with the new philosophy.

The outstanding feature of these early Communistic writers was their almost pathetic endeavor to organize groups and to announce platforms as to the precise ideological program for  p172 which they stood. In the beginning there were many of these groups, each of which interpreted Communism in its own way. Thus, for example, the group of Muzahet through the pen of Yu. Ivaniv-Mezhenko concludes a long discussion of the functions of creative art with these words: "The creative individual can only create, when he considers himself as a being higher than the collective, and when, without submitting to the collective, he yet feels his national kinship with it."⁠6 Other groups under the name of the Red Crown, the Vineyard, etc., brought forward other ideas, while the VUOPP (All-Ukrainian Federation of Proletarian Writers) followed in the same path as the Russian school of the same name and proclaimed that the only possible literature for the new day was that produced by definitely proletarian writers — most of whom were on a relatively low educational level.

The discussion over the rights of the fellow travelers, those persons who sympathized with at least part of the Communist program, though they were not Communists, lasted for some years, but about 1922 the groups and factions became more rigid; each had its own organs for publication and each indulged in lively polemics with all of its rivals.

In the course of time the groups tended to consolidate and the feuds became more bitter. There was first the Pluh (Plough) which rested its case on the theory that the basis of Ukrainian Communism must be the village and the peasant, since these had best preserved the fundamental Ukrainian characteristics and the new Communist culture was to be built by adapting these characteristics to Marxism and the teachings of Lenin. The Hart (Hardening) of the Lovers of the Workers' Theatres took its stand on a more purely proletarian and Communist basis and declined to recognize the peasant as superior to the factory worker. It denied the territorial basis of proletarian literature within Ukraine and had a generally broader foundation. Then there was the AsPanFur (Association of Pan-Futurists), later the AsKK (Association of Communist Culture), which stressed the international character of Communism and cared little or  p173 nothing in its later developments for the purely Ukrainian, while the VUOPP (Pan-Ukrainian Society of Proletarian Writers) continued its original course.⁠7

Soon out of the Pluh developed the Molodnyak (Young) which appealed for support to the more youthful classes of writers. The Hart after numerous dissensions developed into the VAPLITE (Free Academy of Proletarian Literature) and this was to be for some years the leading organization.

The discussion between these groups were wordy and sterile but the issues which gradually emerged were clear and well-defined. These concerned the independence of Ukraine even within the Communist union of the USSR. On the one side were those writers who treasured the traditions of Ukraine and wanted to develop them through Communism. On the other were the men who were completely entranced by the visions of a great Communist Soviet Union with little variation between the Soviet republics and who accepted eagerly the slightest hint from the Kremlin, as it commenced its course of enforcing the ideas of the Russian Soviet Republic upon all of its satellite states.

In this feud Mikhaylo Khvylovy came to the front as a defender of a specific Ukrainian Communism. Undoubtedly the foremost prose writer of the day, Khvylovy was a strong supporter of Communism and of the proletarian literature that was to be but at the same time he rebelled against the narrow cultural outlook of too many of the Communists. He insisted that Ukraine had the right to a life and a Communism of its own. He called for the strengthening of Ukrainian bonds with Europe, for the continuation of an interchange of cultural ideas and methods, and he warned against the utter dependence upon the Russian Soviet Republic, which was in the throes of an Asiatic renaissance. More than that, he was disgusted by the uselessness of the orgies of murders that had been carried on during the Communist conquest of Ukraine.⁠8

Such ideas were rank heresy to the powers of the Kremlin and even before the final acts of repression, he was continually  p174 under attack both by fanatical Communists and the Russian sympathizers. In The Woodsnipes (1927) he clearly stated his ideas and indicated his lack of faith in the new paradise. He was compelled to apologize and burn the second part of the novel which was still unpublished, and it was a foregone conclusion that he was to be an outstanding victim of the purge that was to come.

In greater or lesser degree most of the capable poets and prose writers sympathized with Khvylovy. Whether Romanticism or Realism was their predominant style, whether they wrote about the present or the adventures of the past, whether they worked in poetry, prose or the drama, authors like Pidmohylny, Yanovsky, Slisarenko and Pylypenko tried to express something of the old Ukrainian spirit. They realized the difference between the ideals of Communism for which they had fought and the steadily growing power of the inhuman and cold-blooded bureaucracy and terror that they saw creeping over the country. Mykola Kulish in The People's Malakhy pictured an innocent and sincere Communist going up to Kiev to see the millennium which he could not find in his native village, only to be even more disillusioned. In the Sonata Pathetique he pictured all aspects of Ukrainian and Russian life and the entanglements of the revolution, when nationality and ideas were hopelessly confused.⁠9 Borys Antonenko-Davydovych in Death showed a Communist coming to the realization that he has been but a tool for Moscow imperialism. The list could be increased almost indefinitely, as during the years 1925‑29 old illusions began to pass away under persistent signs that the era of Ukrainization was nearing its end.

The modernists and the Neo-Classicists remained apart from these disturbing questions as long as possible. In the first years men like Tychyna, Rylsky and Bazhan were able to maintain their point of view and to consider the changes that were taking place from a disinterested standpoint. Slowly but surely they found it advisable to take their part in the various political questions of the day. Tychyna, for example, could keep up his  p175 old interest in the eighteenth‑century Ukrainian philosopher Skovoroda but step by step he drifted away from the philosophical attitude that had inspired that remarkable figure. He came to introduce motifs that had a definite connection with modern life and to review his past works. It led him into the VAPLITE along with Khvylovy and made him a convert to the newer ideas.

Then came the end of Ukrainization. Special representatives of the Kremlin came down to Kiev and Kharkov to liquidate nationalist influences. The old liberties that had been accorded to the fellow travelers and nonparty writers were abridged. In Moscow this was done by pla­cing the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) in practical control.⁠10 In Ukraine the same thing happened but here, besides the demand for proletarian control, there was a condemnation of everything connected with the name of Professor Hrushevsky.

It was quite to be expected that measures would be taken to put an end to such literary tendencies as the VAPLITE. Khvylovy was roundly denounced for speaking of the necessity of having relations with Europe and for his ideas of an Asiatic renaissance in Moscow. In return he established another organ, the Literary Market, which ostensibly published articles of all schools but added pungent introductions and comments which finally attracted the attention of the authorities.

During 1931 and 1932, as part of the general campaign for collectivization outlined by the Five-Year Plan, there came the artificial famine which proved that the Soviet leaders would stop at nothing to eliminate the old Ukrainian spirit, even when it was presented through a Communist prism. Henceforth there was to be no gainsaying the position of the Moscow-dominated Kremlin. The letters of Stalin and the arrests ordered by such leading agents as Postyshev and Kaganovich confirmed this truth.

In 1933 Skrypnyk, the Ukrainian Soviet commissar for education, was under fire and committed suicide. In the same year Khvylovy ended his life with a bullet. He was just in time to  p176 escape the holocaust of writers, for some seventy-nine leading authors were liberated from their nationalist errors by execution or deportation. The list included most of the names that had already become famous in writing or the theatre — Zerov, Mykola Kulish, Kosynka, Les Kurbas, Antonenko-Davydovych and Pidmohylny. The list accommodated with impartiality men who had been ardent Communists as well as those who had sought to remain apart from the struggle.⁠11 In many cases, as in that of Dmytro Falkivsky, their fault was that they had dared to say that they loved their village and its environs far better than Tibet, the Urals or the Caucasus, which was easily taken to be a hostile criticism of that greatest of all Russians, the Georgian Stalin.⁠12

A few, like Tychyna and Rylsky, saw the light and were able to adapt themselves to the new conditions by abjuring all that they had formerly believed in. For example, Tychyna was not above emphasizing Skovoroda's weakness in maintaining an aloof attitude toward the affairs of men⁠13 and he was able to go so far as to write of Kiev, "Although old Sofia stands within it, yet industry is all around" and to state that "we do not need the golden-domed, weakly dark, simple Kiev, stifled in its aged self but the new Kiev full of strength, with gold and silver, young of the young."⁠14a He could turn from mystical themes to glorification of a tractor driver, and bring himself to flattering eulogies of Derzhinsky,⁠14b the first leader of the Cheka, whose tortures and massacres had horrified the entire world. Rylsky was little better and the same was true of all the old writers who bought their personal safety with their personal integrity.

More and more the prime essential of poetry was unreserved adulation of Stalin and his associates, praise of the omniscience of the great master and of the devotion of Kirov and other Communists. Aspiring writers waxed lyrical over the great writers of Russia and the Soviets and passed over in silence their views on the development of Ukrainian literature. Some, like Yanovsky, who were more fortunate, wrote tales of the  p177 civil wars and the fighting against the Poles and Petlyura.⁠15 Abuse of the most scurrilous kind was heaped upon the men who had founded the Ukrainian National Republic and with each successive year Ukrainian history and literature became more unrecognizable.

Yet the most abject flattery of the powers in control did not satisfy the new master. Men like I. Kulyk could declare then that Tychyna and Rylsky were still only lukewarm in their devotion to the Communist fatherland. Praise was reserved for those young men like Mykytenko and others who had never been led astray and had consecrated themselves from the beginning of their literary careers to the building of socialism and the condemnation of the dregs of society, the old industrious peasants and workmen.

Yet even those men who had formed the nucleus of the VUAPP (Pan-Ukrainian Association of Proletarian Writers) were soon themselves found guilty of the charge of Ukrainian nationalism. Their turn came as soon as the old literature was entirely broken or ended. They had not gone far enough in realizing that the new man must be built purely on the models set out by the Kremlin for the content of socialist realism and that anything specifically Ukrainian was to be restricted to the mildest form of scenic background.

The later thirties passed under this depressing picture, as the writers who wished to live and work vied with one another in adapting their language to Great Russian and their themes to the adulation of Stalin and his circle and to the glorification of the Soviet Union, with especial reference to the friendship and unanimity which Stalin had created between the Ukrainians, the Great Russians and the Soviet Georgians. At the same time Ukraine and her fighting against the Poles and Petlyura came to play a bigger role in Soviet Russian literature. But there was one significant factor in it — the Russian writers made no mention of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. We might overlook their acceptance of the Ukrainian National Republic as consisting solely of Fascists and White Guards but their failure  p178 to pay any attention to the machinery of their own Ukrainian Soviet Republic in literature illustrates beauti­fully their rabid insistence on the unity of the Soviet Union and their denial of all semblance of independence to their subordinate Soviet republics. Even Nikolay Ostrovsky, held up by his compatriots as possessing the highest type of Communist conscience, does not feel it necessary in his novels to mention the Ukrainian Soviet Republic as part of the Communist machinery which he describes in detail, along with the fighting on Ukrainian territory.⁠16

The new literature naturally developed that hardness and inhumanity which had been introduced by the Communists into Ukrainian life. The older writers had depicted a harsh and often a forbidding life. The lot of the Ukrainians in the days of serfdom and afterwards had not been pleasant but it had not deprived the people of a sense of sympathy or at most there was an unconscious brutality which enlightenment and better living conditions could mitigate. The new regime and the new literature boasted of brutality and Kulyk could condemn a novel written by the proletarian and Communist author Holovko, because in one of the characters "we distinctly sense the symbol sadly familiar to us of 'Mother Ukraine' whose heart aches 'equally' for all of her sons; for the workingman Artem, for the peasant Ostap and for the intellectual-nationalist Yurko."⁠17 Here in one sentence we have the whole difference between Communist and non-Communist Ukrainian literature. The more honest and sincere Communists, like Khvylovy, could not bring themselves to this attitude and they perished under the wheels of the Moscow juggernaut. The Tychynas and the Rylskys did their best to stifle their senses and so in Rylsky's Marina, which was glorified as the equal of Shevchenko's Haydamaki and Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz, we have a grotesque vulgarization of all human qualities which reduces even the possibly sympathetic characters to monsters and turns the unsympathetic into devils in human form. The slightest touch of human understanding was enough to bring charges of  p179 Ukrainian nationalism against the most inveterate Communist. It was one of those things that so power­fully stirred up Ukrainian sentiment against the Soviet regime.

Meanwhile the literature of Western Ukraine continued the old Ukrainian tradition. Despite the difficulties with both Poland and Romania, the authors worked with relative intellectual freedom. There was no command for them to do more than to avoid too open seditious material. Thus, under the influence of Ivan Franko, the literature of Western Ukraine continued its bonds with the West. Some authors, such as Stefanyk, who very soon relapsed into silence, Marko Cheremshyna with his descriptions of the Hutuls in the Carpathians and Les Martovych, continued the older ethnographic school.

The newer impulses were represented by Bohdan Lepky, who approximated Symbolism and showed a keen sensitivity for all the thoughts and aspirations of the individual. For a while he had withdrawn into exile but he later returned and became a professor of Ukrainian literature in the University of Krakow. A still younger group of Western Ukrainian authors flourished in the thirties in Galicia. Its leading representatives as Bohdan Ihor Antonych and Svyatoslav Hordynsky and Bohdan Kravtsiv, all show the influence of the West and also the results of the Ukrainian renaissance of the twenties, especially the work of the neo-classicists. During the same years a group of emigres in Prague headed by Oleksander Oles and embracing such varied names as Olena Teliha and Yury Lipa did good work in reviving the idea of the state in the Middle Ages in contradistinction to the purely ethnographical and popular treatments of the people.⁠18

The hopes that had been kindled after the Revolution of 1905 that Kiev might become the center of the thought of a united Ukraine were gradually shattered. The center of Ukrainian progressive thought drifted back to Lviv, where it had been in the late nineteenth century, or to the Ukrainian circles of Prague. It was a severe disappointment, especially after the liquidation of Professor Hrushevsky and the other  p180 intellectuals who had returned to Kiev during Ukrainization. Most of them disappeared or perished.

It was in Western Ukraine and especially in that part under Polish rule that progressive Ukrainian thought developed more strongly. Here the ideas and the emotions which worked around Europe in the twenties and thirties could receive a Ukrainian coloring. Writers like Ulas Samchuk might follow ideas similar to those of Khvylovy and spread them in the Scientific Literary Messenger. It was in Western Ukraine and in Vienna that philosophers and sociologists like Lypynsky were able to work. Some of these naturally adapted the ideas of the twenties and thirties to Ukrainian thought in their dreams of a future Ukrainian state. They could not fail to be influenced by the ideas of the Polish intellectuals but they remained Ukrainian and there was none of that slavish adaptation of their own ideas to the will of an alien conqueror that was seen in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

Then in 1939 came World War II and the Communist rod was extended over Western Ukraine. Refugees fled to the west to escape the engulfing tide. For those who remained there was the choice of submission, death or deportation, the same choice which had confronted their Eastern brothers ten years before. There was the same necessity to pour out the grossest adulation of Stalin and his friends as the price of liberty. Those authors in the East who had made their peace with the Soviets heaped new compliments upon the dictator for his great generosity in "freeing" Western Ukraine and adding it to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Tychyna was especially perfervid in his praise of the great event.

To win popular support the Kremlin for a while carefully withdrew some of their restrictions but not those which had evoked laudation of the ruler. In fact more than ever it was made perfectly clear in the literature published under the Soviets that national defense was entirely the result of Stalin's inspiration. The war poems of Tychyna, of Rylsky, the prose and dramas of Korniychuk and of all other writers are one  p181  long paean to Stalin as the head of the Red army, to the Kremlin as the wellspring of Ukrainian courage and patriotism, to the Great Russian brother as the protector and supporter of Ukraine, to the peoples of the Soviet Union as the direct and willing executors of the will of the master. There is not a word that can appeal to a Ukrainian nationalist, no matter how mild his sentiments. Of course there is not a mention of the desperate struggle of the Ukrainians to become masters in their own home. Such would be summarily dismissed as the work of Nazi and Fascist imperialists.

A striking commentary on this passing bid for support by the people of Russian policy is the changed attitude toward Khmelnytsky. A few years before he had been declared the enemy of the Ukrainian people; now he was restored to favor because it was he who at the Treaty of Pereyaslav had taken the first step toward connecting the Zaporozhian Kozaks with Tsar Alexis. For this act all else was forgotten and the once despised and rejected hetman now became the symbol of Russian and Ukrainian oneness. There was even a decoration founded in his honor but it is to be remembered that this was done by the Kremlin and not by the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, which might as an independent entity be supposed to possess some power to confer its own honors.⁠19

It cannot be denied that for certain types of war stories, the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet literatures possessed an adequate technique. Communist writers who had worked during the civil war and the fight against Ukrainian independence had built up a simple and direct type of writing in which the enemy were only black and the Communists white as the driven snow. They had an excellent supply of condemnatory epithets and knew how to use them and they never ceased to supply to their readers examples of this genre. They were able to turn out during the war a flood of forceful narratives exhibiting their hatred and disgust for the Nazis and their brutalities. Stories of the heroism of the individual soldier of the Red army and of the bravery of the civil population  p182 in resisting the invaders and in enduring the tortures of the Nazis were supplied wholesale as much for propaganda as for literature. In most there was the same note that it was all done for Stalin.⁠20

With the ending of the war, Ukrainian Soviet literature continued in the same vein. In the first days of the new puppet governments, the old standbys were sent around to Prague, Warsaw and Belgrade, to meetings of the Slav Congress, to testify to Ukrainian gratitude for the beneficent works of Stalin and to inspire in the people of the other Slav states the same sentiments.

This era of good feeling did not last long. Almost at once there was a reversion to strict Communist doctrines. Once again the range of literature was narrowed and the political and authoritative critics began to criticize and suspect even Rylsky of going too far in lauding the services of the Ukrainians. He was at once accused of Ukrainian nationalism. The task was resumed of wiping out any vestiges of the old Ukrainian spirit in the name of the new Communist man as dictated by the Kremlin and the time-serving Korniychuk can deplore even in work with a national coloring, the overemphasis on the old mode of life.⁠21

It was also the turn of many of the success­ful writers of war stories. They were accused of not practicing socialist realism, in that they had not sufficiently motivated the heroic actions of their leaders by linking them up with a conscious acceptance of the ideas of Stalin and the Great Russian masters of the Kremlin. It was not enough for an author to picture the heroic deed of a man defending his family and his village and his Ukrainian people. He had to do it purpose­fully because he was following the teachings of Stalin and acting on behalf of all the peoples of the great Soviet Union — or he risked the accusation of being a Ukrainian nationalist.⁠22 Attacks were renewed on the vestiges of religion even while the subservient Orthodox church of Moscow with its hand-picked patriarch was thanking God for selecting Stalin to rescue  p183  Russian religion.

It made the postwar Ukrainian Soviet literature even more schematic and sterile than it had been in the thirties and it made the Ukrainian elements even more obviously a mere background setting for the ordinary Communist tale. The process of denationalizing the literature and of eliminating the personal and the individual was carried even further, as the popular authors fell more and more under the ban.

It is small wonder that it is only among the displaced persons and escaped authors that we can find any traces of literature imbued with a national spirit in its highest and best sense. Even under the hardships of life abroad there came a revival of Ukrainian literature which cannot be overestimated. These authors, often on the verge of starvation and in the most dire physical circumstances, are yet freer to write of their thoughts, feelings and experiences than they have been for nearly a quarter of a century. Men like Vasyl Barka are able to pick up once again the threads of contact with Western civilization and from the Ukrainian symbolism of the period of Ukrainian independence they can go on to describe their personal moods without reference to the directives of the Kremlin. There is a large number of novels and stories, like Dokia Humenna's Children of the Chumak Path and Ulas Samchuk's East which picture the forced introduction of Communism into the Ukrainian village and its devastating effects. Authors like Oleksy Zaporozhets describe, often with humor, the chaos and stupidity of the new bureaucracy which can see only rebellion and sedition in resistance to the mad whims of incompetent Communists who force their slaves to perform the most foolish and unprofitable actions in the attempt to make records for Communist efficiency. Others depict the tyranny and atrocities of the Soviet secret police. Others treat of the patriotic and personal motives that drove so many thousands to join the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Other young writers as Michael Orest and Ivan Bahryanny have made their appearance. These men also have the sad advantage that they  p184 have become as intimately familiar with the works of the Western Ukrainian authors who have shared their fate in the camps.

Literary critics are able again to write honest and intelligent estimates of the great Ukrainian writers of the past and see them as they are and not as they must be in order to fit into the Communist ideology. They can discuss Shevchenko without feeling bound to point out that he was one in sympathy with the Russian radicals in his hatred of the tsar and was opposed to all of his high-placed friends because they were aristocrats. They can discuss Franko without shaping him to a Marxian sociology against which he was struggling for the sake of humanity. They can picture Lesya Ukrainka as a profound student of world literature without making her an adjunct of the Bolshevik party of 1905. They can bring back to Ukrainian literature and criticism the traditional meanings of liberty and freedom that have been barred in Soviet writings under the interpretations of Lenin and Stalin and have there lost all their original and normal sense.

It is still too early to know how permanent an effect this literature in exile will possess. It was the product of unusual circumstances. From 1945 for over three years the bulk of the free writers from all parts of the country were forced together. Now they are again scattering as they take up their new homes abroad.

We cannot overlook the few authors who have been writing abroad, especially in Canada, on the efforts of the Ukrainian immigrants before and after World War I to adapt themselves to the new life into which they have been plunged. In some cases these writers have been tempted to incorporate words and expressions which are not of the purest Ukrainian; they have translated English phrases; but their sins in this respect are no greater than those of Soviet authors who have edited and emended their writing into a Great Russian Ukrainian to please the Kremlin. They furnish available material for the student of Ukrainian character in its widest aspects and  p185  with all their defects they are often more valuable and appealing than the machine-made literature that has been duly passed by the Communist censors.

A rich and valuable store of memoirs and reminiscences by refugees, is accumulating. The world is already familiar with the stories of certain ex-Communists who have succeeded in escaping to the outside world. It does not realize how many of these same tales have been written by victims of the Nazi and Soviet prisons, who are able to describe in horrible detail their own experiences in the dread past. We can confidently expect more such books as Ukrainian writers settle down in the New World and recount their experiences in acclimating themselves.

The history of Ukrainian literature during the last quarter of a century is a sorrow­ful tale. With World War I a new era opened which crowned the efforts of the past to make Ukrainian a truly modern and European literature. Then the Ukrainian National Republic suffered shipwreck before the growing pressure of Communist dictator­ship. The list of literary martyrs who strove to express Ukrainian ideals was a long one. The republic has survived only in the truly amazing flowering of Ukrainian literature in exile. That literature can only be sad and depressing but it reflects the unquenchable spirit of liberty and democracy which has distinguished Ukrainian literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and which found earlier expression in the dumas and folksongs. We can only hope that that spirit may once again infuse the literature at home, that the fetters which bind it may be speedily broken and that the traditions of Shevchenko, Franko and Lesya Ukrainka may be restored in their native land.

The Author's Notes:

1 C. H. Andrusyshen, "Ukrainian Literature — A Mirror of the Common Man," The Ukrainian Quarterly, IV, 44 ff.; Clarence A. Manning, "The Democratic Trend of Ukrainian Literature," The Ukrainian Quarterly, I, 40 ff.

2 Serhey Efremov, Istoriya Ukrainskoho Pismenstva, II, 337.

3 This does not prevent I. Kulyk (Literature of the Peoples of the U. S. S. R., Moscow, 1934, p58) from declaring, "His early works (1910) were saturated with symbolism, mysticism and abstract 'cosmic' ideals, which, in the long run, expressed the ideology of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie." Again, "Stronger organizational ties with the realities, emancipation from artificial, at times purely bookish culture, such are the conditions on which depends further progress by Tychina along the new road chosen by this great Ukrainian poet." Yuriy Sherekh, "Trends in Ukrainian Literature under the Soviets," The Ukrainian Quarterly, Vol. IV, p151.

4 See Svyatoslav Hordynsky, "The Fivefold Cluster of Unvanquished Bards," The Ukrainian Quarterly, V, 249 ff. Also the introduction of Volodymyr Derzhavyn to Mykola Zerov, Sonnetarium (Berchtesgaden, 1948).

5 See Efremov, op. cit., II, 387. Sherekh, op. cit., p153.

6 Yuriy Sherekh, "Trends in Ukrainian Literature under the Soviets," The Ukrainian Quarterly, Vol. IV, p163.

7 Sherekh, op. cit., p164.

8 See note II, Chapter Nine. S. Mykolyshyn, Natsionalism u literaturi na Skhidnykh Ukrainskykh Zemlyakh (Paris, 1938), pp18 ff. Honore Evach, "Mykola Khvylovy — Communist and Patriot," The Ukrainian Quarterly, I, 272 ff.; Sherekh, op. cit., p156.

9 Svyatoslav Hordynsky, "Ideas on the Scaffold, Mykola Kulish and his Sonata Pathetique," The Ukrainian Quarterly, V, 331 ff.

10 Ernest J. Simmons, An Outline of Modern Russian Literature (1880‑1940) (Ithaca, 1943), p49.

11 See Sherekh, op. cit., 165. Yar Slavutych, Moderna Ukrainska Poeziya (Philadelphia, 1950), pp62 f.

12 See "Dmytro Falkivsky" Samostiyna Dumka, Chernivtsy, 1936, parts 3‑5, p166 ff.

13 Pavlo Tychyna, "Davyd Guramishvili chytae Hryhoriyu Skovorodi 'Vytyazya v Tigroviy Shkuri'," Vybrani Tvori, Kiev, 1946, Vol. I, p248 ff.

14a 14b Tychyna, "Feliks Dzerzhinski," op. cit., Vol. I, p242 f.

15 Yanovsky, Vsadniki.

16 Nikolay Ostrovsky, Kak Zakalyalos Stal (Moscow, 1936).

17 Kulyk, op. cit., p57.

18 Yar Slavutych, op. cit., pp37 ff.

19 Clarence A. Manning, "The Soviets and Khmelnytsky," The Ukrainian Quarterly, III, 12 ff.

20 Clarence A. Manning, "Socialist Realism and the American Success Novel," South Atlantic Quarterly, XLVIII, 213‑19.

21 Yuriy Kobiletsky, "Shlyakhi Narisu," Dnipro, Year 3, No. 2, pp101 ff.

22 [There is a footnote number 22 in the text, but there is no endnote 22: they only go thru 21. See my comment above]

Thayer's Note:

a The Emperor Augustus exiled Ovid specifically to Tomis, the modern Constanṭa in Romania, where the poet ended up living for many years; but although the city lies on the coast of the Black Sea, it is 140 km from the closest point in modern Ukraine. Herodotus on the other hand shows enough familiarity with Crimea for a scholarly consensus to prevail that he probably did visit the country, although he never says he did, nor has any direct evidence survived to make it certain.

◂ previous						next ▸
Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
UP TO:		Twentieth-Century Ukraine	History of Ukraine	European History	Home
A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two *asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.

Accessibility