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By Prof. James MACE, Consultant to The Day,
The Day Weekly Digest, Kyiv, Ukraine, Dec 16, 2003
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On December 13, 1893, 110 years ago, Nikolai Fitilov, who would make history
under the penname of Mykola Khvyliovyi, was born. Ukraine has never asked
many questions about where one came from, in this case of a writer of
clearly Russian origin, if only one wanted to traverse the road together
with Ukraine. Of the many tragedies Ukraine suffered in the terrible year of
1933, one of the greatest happened on May 13 of that year, when Mykola
Khvyliovyi put a bullet through his head, symbolically marking the end of
the period remembered as the rozstriliane vidrodzhennia, literally the
renaissance that was put in front of the firing squad.
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MID-1920S: UKRAINIAN WRITERS STORM STALINO (NOW DONETSK) UNDER PORTRAITS OF THEN CPCBSU LEADERS KAGANOVICH, LENIN, AND STALIN
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The literary rebirth that accompanied the decade of Ukrainization (1923-
1933) was intimately bound up with a phenomenon, still poorly understood in
Ukraine, that of national communism, through which Ukrainian Communists
sought their own national road to socialism within the context of the early
Soviet Union. Both ended tragically in the whirlwind of the Holodomor
famine-genocide of 1932-33.
Khvyliovyi ended his life six months short of his fortieth birthday. It was
a terrible time, a time of death and destruction that only be described as
the murder of everything productive and creative in the Ukraine that had
hitherto existed in what was then the Ukrainian SSR. There is a phrase that
occurs over and over in the Ukrainian literature of the 1920s; morituri te
salutant, the ritual Latin phrase of the Roman gladiators, those who go to
their deaths salute you. Not only Khvyliovyi went to his death. Almost all
of the literary revival of his generation were either killed, repressed,
forced into emigration, or otherwise silenced.
Yet, one of the handful that survived, Yury Smolych, wrote over thirty years
ago that all of his generation recognized Khvyliovyi as their elder brother,
elder not in years but in talent. The Ukrainian Revolution produced a
situation reminiscent of Dickens' description of the French: the best of
times and the worst of times. Khvyliovyi led a generation that tried to
create a new world only to be offered up to the idol they had created.
The rozstriliane vidrodzhennia was a golden age for modern Ukrainian
literature and in general for what was called the Ukrainian cultural
process. Essentially what had happened was this: in 1923 at its Twelfth
Congress, the All-Union Communist Party (bolshevik) (VKP{b}) made a major
bid for non-Russian support by adopting a policy called indigenization
(korenizatsiya) by literally taking root in soil inhabited by non-Russian
peoples, and since the Ukrainians were by far the largest of those peoples
and their country the most important, the Ukrainian version of that policy,
known as Ukrainization, went farther and deeper, which is one reason why its
suppression cost the destruction of the hitherto existing Communist Party
cadres in Ukraine, the intelligentsia that had grown up loyal to the
national communist regime, and the millions of innocent villagers who were
starved to death in the Holodomor.
In any case, when the Communists in Ukraine were ordered to make themselves
more Ukrainian and support things Ukrainian, they did it in their typically
authoritarian bureaucratic fashion. People were literally ordered to learn
Ukrainian, and not a few resented it. Yet, a new generation of literary
lions produced a whole of constellation of new talents unprecedented and
still without equal brilliance in the entire firmament of the history of
Ukrainian literature. And no star shined brighter than that of Khvyliovyi,
who reigned as unchallenged king of the literary pride of lions that was
Ukrainian literature in the 1920s.
After eighty years we can only imagine the golden opportunity that they must
have felt in the very air they breathed. Their nation, suppressed for
centuries, suddenly confronted the modern world. Those who worked with
words were true pioneers who had to find the words to express, in a language
hitherto largely confined to the mundane life of the villager, the
subtleties of Einstein's theory of relativity and the ideas underlying their
efforts to build a new world in which their nation and language had got the
chance to take its rightful place.
The members of that generation asked and tried to answer questions as broad
as some god might when pondering what kind of world to create, for they felt
themselves engaged in creating a whole new cultural universe. How ought
Ukrainian culture to develop. In what direction? With what models to guide
it? What kind of culture should it be? The very fact that such questions
were asked can only begin to indicate the enthusiasm of those who felt
themselves to be creators of a new world.
MYKOLA KHVYLIOVYI
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Khvyliovyi himself is a joy to read. The late George Shevelov (Yury
Sheveliov) mentioned how Khvyliovyi loved the smell of word, weaving them
into arabesques, ordering them in melancholic processions and arraying them
in dancing groups. He could be humorous as in his satire on a local
Proletsult group whose members were so militant that they imagined the
trains tooting ka-pay-bay-oo, the initials of the Communist Party
(bolshevik) of Ukraine, or tragic in exploring the tensions of his own
ambivalence toward the revolution that had promised and taken so much but
yielded so little of that promise, the theme of his "Ya (Romantyka)" and his
partially destroyed novel, Valdshnepy (The Woodsnipes).
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A Party member and the most popular Soviet Ukrainian writer of his day,
Khvyliovyi took it upon himself to be the spokesman for his creative clan,
challenging the restrictions that writers always find so hateful and
enunciating their collective vision of a Ukrainian proletarian culture that
would be European and break with the tutelage of Russian culture. He defied
the restrictions he felt had been imposed by the traditions of Taras
Shevchenko, who had more than anyone defined what it means to be Ukrainian,
and of the Prosvita network of village self-improvement societies that
sought to bring Ukrainian culture to a peasant people, even if that
sometimes required watering it down to a level accessible to those the
village. His antidote to the lowering of the level of Ukrainian culture was
to assimilate the highest attainments of European culture without going
through the mediation of Russian culture that had so limited things
Ukrainian in the past and perhaps even today continues to do so.
Perhaps in a stratagem to find some ally to counter the dominance of Russian
culture in the Ukraine of his day, Khvyliovyi even articulated a novel
theory Ukrainian cultural messianism, based on the argument that Ukrainians
were in a unique position. On the one hand, they were a formerly colonial
people that had now been told they had achieved national liberation as part
of the Soviet Union and had their own national minorities, whose rights they
had to protect. On the other hand, they were a European nation able to
master all the attainments of European culture, which he recognized as the
highest attainments in all human history, the attainment of a West that was
now - and here he followed and modified Oswald Spengler - in decline caused
by its decadent capitalism and would inevitably be forced from center stage
by the youthful energy of the rising colonial peoples of the East.
As a European country armed with all the greatness of European cultural
history, Ukraine could then act as something of a transmission belt in
conveying this greatness to the East, thereby leading an Asiatic renaissance
of peoples united in the anti-imperialist struggle for world communism,
which he understood as social justice, albeit flawed in how it was being
carried out. This did not, Khvyliovyi argued, imply any disloyalty to the
Soviet Union, which he argued was a military and political union joined in
the defense of socialism against a hostile capitalist world. But, in his
view, this did not extend to culture, where Ukraine had its own unique and
historically progressive role to play.
This quite novel view did exactly win friends and influence people in
Moscow, where Yosip Stalin on April 26, 1926 wrote and sent a letter to
"Comrade Kaganovich and Other Members of the KP(b)U Central Committee
Politburo," denounced Khvyliovyi's views as representing the "dark side of
Ukrainization," views that could lead to a struggle against Russian culture
as such and "its highest attainment, Leninism." Having been denounced from
the very summit of political power in the Soviet Union, Khvyliovyi had to
admit that he had fallen prey to a national deviation, khvyliovism, but
protected by his own influential friends in Ukraine's Party establishment,
especially the Commissar of Education and self-proclaimed Commissar of the
National Question Mykola Skrypnyk, he continued to play a central role in
his nation's cultural process and continued to be the Soviet Ukrainian
writer with more readers than anybody else writing in Soviet Ukraine at the
time. A survey of book-lending institutions published as Kost Dovhan,
"Ukrainian Literature and the Mass Reader" (Ukrainska literatura i masovyi
chytach), Krytyka, 1928, No. 8, tells us so.
The fire in his literary output was put out about that very same time, when
as part of the orgy of officially orchestrated paranoia and forced orthodoxy
that accompanied a so-called Cultural Revolution imposed in connection with
the coming collectivization of agriculture and "liquidation of the kulaks as
a class," literature and culture were straightjacketed along with just about
everything else and everybody had to think and write pretty much the same
things. A year earlier he had been invited abroad by dissident members of
the Communist Party of Western Ukraine with the suggestion he serve as their
ideologist. He declined, and perhaps this was what made his untimely end
inevitable. Still he remained influential and was appointed to the
organizing committee for the Union of Soviet Writers that would be created
the year after his death.
According to an article by Arkady Liubchenko, secretary of Khvyliovyi's
Vaplite (Free Academy of Proletarian Literature) group of writers, in 1933,
in the midst of the terror in anti-Ukrainian terror associated with Pavel
Postyshev, Stalin's newly appointed satrap of the second Soviet republic,
Khvyliovyi was sent to the countryside and saw for himself all the horrors
of the Holodomor. He returned and tried to explain to his friends in the
Party that it was a mistake, only to discover that it was no mistake: the
manmade famine was a deliberate policy. And it was this realization that
cast the writer into the despair that led him to suicide.
His own letters, published only after Ukraine became independent, indicate
that he saw more and more the how the pattern of arrests of like-minded
Ukrainian writers was clearly directed at the destruction of everything he
had worked to create and develop. For whatever reason, and it was most
likely a combination of both, the writer committed suicide on May 13, 1933.
His romantic vitaism, his praise of life in all its romantic splendor, was
replaced by the straightjacket of socialist realism, the Soviet commandment
to portray life the way it ought to be in the eyes of the rulers, a way
those who were ruled over knew it could never become and was the exact
opposite of anything that existed in real life.
Khvyliovyi's works, so beloved by his countrymen, were banned, and it was
pretended that he and those like him had never existed or that everything
they had created had been somehow a bane concocted by the enemies of what
came to be known as real socialism. Thus, Ukrainian culture was cut off its
richest treasures, and only after independence could that treasure be
unearthed. The process of restoring that history, the continuity of the
process that was so violently halted in literature as in so much else,
continues in this postgenocidal society. It is part of a healing process
that will take no one knows how much time.
But at least the process of restoring what was taking away is taking place,
and remembering Mykola Khvyliovyi is a vital part of that process. His Tvory
(Works) published in two thick volumes by Dnipro Publishers in 1991 is must
reading for all who wish to understand the full meaning of what Ukraine
could have become and of what the world was denied in its being prevented
from so doing. The crime of genocide consists not only in the deaths of
millions but also in the deaths of those individuals who gave those millions
voice. The clearest and most resonant voice of Ukraine in the 1920s was that
of Mykola Khvyliovyi.
Real socialism actually began to come to an end at the end of the 1980s when
Ukrainian scholars like Mykola Zhulynsky first dared to seriously discuss
figures like Khvyliovyi in newspapers like Literaturna Ukrayina. Other
figures like Mykhailo Hrushevsky, not only Ukraine's greatest historian but
also president of the Ukrainian Central Rada in 1917-1918, and Oleksandr
Shumsky, the tragic leader of the Borotbist Ukrainian
Socialist-Revolutionaries who left the Ukrainian cause for the Bolshevik
one, was arrested in 1933, and later, upon his release from the Gulag,
murdered on the personal orders of Stalin and his most trusted lieutenant,
Lazar Kaganovich.
In order to understand the full tragedy of what happened to Ukraine in the
twentieth century, one must first understand the height of their hopes and
only then the depth of their betrayal. In Khvyliovyi one can find how he saw
things starting to go wrong in the 1920s with its omnipresent informers and
OGPU, and his vision influenced even such implacable anti-Communists as
Dmytro Dontsov and Stepan Bandera. Khvyliovyi placed the choice squarely:
Ukraine in Europe or Little Russia.
Now on the 110th anniversary of his birth, it is worthwhile to reread him,
attempt to understand the tragedy of his life and times in the terrible
contrast of his vision of the beautiful commune just over the hill and the
reality of national matricide, starving millions, and the omnipresent
repression of any independent thought that might come from anywhere but
Moscow, enshrined in a 1934 Pravda editorial as the capital of the workers
of the whole world.
Moscow, of course, bears no blame for this - those who live there are for
the most part fine people - but those who ruled in its name bear much blame
as do those who so recently attacked the action of The Day and so many
others to light a candle for those who died before their time in the 1930s.
Not all of them were of the village. Mykola Khvyliovyi deserves a candle not
only in the window but a flame that burns eternally in our hearts.
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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