An unread Lesia Ukrainka

A year ago the Volyn Museum of Regional Studies presented what may be called a pocketbook. Its cover is of khaki color, like that of Ukrainian servicemen’s field uniform, for it was supposed to be sent to our army units in the undeclared war zone in the east. It is My Only Weapon, Dear Words…, a collection of Lesia Ukrainka’s poems, prepared by the Volyn museum after the Shevchenko Institute of Literature had sent to the front The Kobzar, a similar pocketbook.

One of the compilers of the Lesia Ukrainka book is Natalia Pushkar, chief custodian of collections at the Volyn Museum of Regional Studies. She focuses on Lesia Ukrainka’s oeuvre and life story in her research and has prepared hundreds of publications on this subject. Lesia captivated her, when she was a 5th-year university student – girls would keep diaries and copy the poetess’s “Your Letters Always Smell of Withered Roses.” Later, at the museum, she read Lesia Ukrainka’s letters of the period when this lyrical novella was being written. She just began to read her poems, without even suspecting that she would become a Lesia Ukrainka expert.

The “frontline collection” comprises poems that are well known from the school curriculum as well as the ones that are an exciting discovery for many. Lesia Ukrainka was not only a subtle lyricist, but also a philosopher, and Pushkar believes that everybody will, sooner or later, read not only the “withered roses” but also the lines that can be called prophetic. Let us go, together with her, through the “frontline collection’s” pages and marvel again at Lesia Ukrainka’s accuracy, farsightedness, and predictions about Ukrainians who “are by nature more sensitive, compliant, and slow (for the ‘whole learned world has admitted this,’ so nothing can be done), while those accursed, brazen, aggressive, and intolerant Muscovites are of a much more impetuous disposition.”

“‘How long shall we, oh Lord, wander in search of a homeland on our own earth?’ It is the question that the Ukrainians of today are also asking. ‘Send us, God, honest enemies!’ This has been on the agenda in all the centuries of Ukrainian history, including the present day,” Pushkar says, leafing through the collection.

Or: “Our people, like children born blind, have never seen sunshine. They will go through fire and water for their enemies, surrendering their leaders to torturers.” These lines are from “In Remembrance of My Comrade,” and the collection prepared by the Volyn museum has the three stanzas that were also in the original print of this poem. Pushkar says one should read the whole poem rather than quote certain stanzas because it is about today’s Ukraine, about what we have come across even in the past few years of our history.

“You read and can see how Lesia’s heart ached for Ukraine and the people, and she said everything about us in her poems. Her farsightedness astonishes: ‘A heavy red cloud drew near, full of a thundering fratricidal brawl; it covered the whole country and ruined it altogether. My spirit froze and my heart went numb, and no words dared to come out of my mouth, for that country was mine’ (from the poem ‘A Legend of Centuries’). How could she foresee what came true so many years later? Or about the language: ‘Maybe, our language will also remain a mute, cold, and weird corpse of words in the centuries to come,’” Pushkar says.

The print run of the collection My Only Weapon, Dear Words…, published with support from the Volyn 2014 charitable foundation, is small – 300 copies. A half of it was immediately sent to the front in order to boost the soldiers’ morale. But it is important to read Lesia Ukrainka today not only in such extreme situations as the undeclared war in the east. The people still remain “like children born blind.” Lesia, whose 146th anniversary we marked on February 24, also said about this: “Whoever frees himself will remain free, and if one frees someone else, he will take him into captivity.”