“And his kin wept not for him...”

Alexander Dovzhenko died around midnight on a Sunday night in November 1956. His gravestone bears the Russian inscription, “Died on Sunday,” perhaps hinting that he might one day resurrect (the Russian word ‘voskresenie’ means both ‘Sunday’ and ‘resurrection’ — Ed.).

Death claimed him as he was about to start shooting Poem of the Sea. He had not made a film in several years. This time, like before, he hesitated: maybe it would be better to damn this movie business to hell, this industry, where an artist depends so much on the will, desire, and reluctance of hundreds of people?

Writing is a different thing: you just sit down and write, even if what you’ve written will never be published. He did this at the beginning of World War Two. This finally resulted in the screenplay Ukraine in Flames, the mark of the terror that overwhelmed an individual, who saw that his nation was poised above an abyss. Dovzhenko cried out in horror, and the authorities did much to ensure that he stopped speaking, writing, and making films. He was still doing this for over 10 years, until he collapsed.

“OTHERWISE, IT WILL BE IMMORAL”

Dovzhenko’s complete diary was never published, and the manuscript will be opened only in 2009. Until then it will remain in the chill depths of the archives. What we can read now was sifted by the artist’s widow Yulia Solntseva (she was the one who designated when the diary would be declassified).

The diary entries from the final year are fragmentary and probably highly selective. “After finishing this film (Poem of the Sea — Author), I will apparently abandon my long-standing principles and make Taras Bulba based on Gogol. This is a long-time wish of my friends.” It was hardly possible to realize this wish: Taras Bulba still has not been made in Ukraine. Dovzhenko began work on this film in 1941, but the war, the artist’s pitiful condition, and Poland’s new “socialist” face put the skids under the project: Gogol’s work is still considered anti-Polish.

Work on Poem of the Sea was difficult. A reappraisal of values had begun in the mid-1950s, and Dovzhenko could not have failed to understand it. He wrote that it may happen that the future film “will be Mosfilm’s only film on the good qualities of our contemporary Soviet people. It will be hard for me. Starting with Vanka-Cain (a reference to the studio manager, the well-known film director Ivan Pyriev — Author), almost everyone is against me.”

Obstacles were erected. For example, the film’s budget was deliberately underfunded: “A villain in the ministry, S. or K., had originally planned a financial disaster for me. And the minister? The half-leader: he agreed and sanctioned it” (diary entry dated Sept. 3, 1955).

That summer Dovzhenko visited Ukraine. The country was gloomy. “The cities are miserable and impoverished. Chyhyryn, Novoheorhiievka, Kremenchuk, Dniprodzerzhynsk, Dnipropetrovsk — dust and potholes everywhere, the roads are bad, people look drab, downcast, and exhausted. Indeed, a contemporary of mine is truly paying dearly for the privilege of a great era. And there is bad taste all around. What nice things did I see? A few houses. There is more refinement of artistic taste in a few simple peasant houses than on the entire Khreshchatyk” (July 27, 1955). He only liked Zaporizhia, which had been rebuilt.

His spirit was perpetually troubled. Chimerical dreams sometimes ran through his mind. “Twice I had a strange dream: Lenin was hugging and kissing me. He kissed me on the forehead and the eyes and said some nice words. And I, brimming with gratitude and intense excitement, moved to the utmost, kissed his cheeks and eyes, thanking the beloved and priceless person. Then I woke up. Then the dream came again. I think this augurs badly for me” (July 28, 1955).

Yet, in spite of his troubling thoughts and feelings, he still strove to raise the creative bar as high as possible. “Not to fear any passions, any generalizations. You must fear only lies and exaggerations. Always think only about great things. Raise nature to yourself and let the universe be the reflection of your soul.” This is about Poem of the Sea.

A characteristic touch: here is a small sketch for a script — a dialogue on the values of human life: “Happiness, happiness...We could do without it. There are things that are more important than happiness. What kinds of things? For example: duty, responsibility.” (Nov. 12, 1955). This is about himself and people whose mentality in Soviet times was always channeled into a struggle for the state’s happiness and prosperity, and everything else, was for later. “Airplanes come first. And girls? Well, girls come second!” Whoever thinks differently is a philistine and, hence, the enemy.

Poem of the Sea is about rebuilding life itself. A dam is being built on the Dnipro, then another one; this is a guarantee of a happy future. But what is the payment “for the privilege of a great era?” And why is it great only in the party bosses’ reports and the scale of construction sites, while the common people, who are “drab, depressed, and exhausted,” live in cramped shared apartments, and very seldom have a square meal? And now you have to abandon your centuries-old dwelling place warmed by the souls and work of generations and move God knows where because a manmade sea is going to flood the ancient land. “I remember S. N. and his wife, and his words, ‘Our new sea is our new misfortune.’ This is what people say about the sea.” As a result of bureaucratic stupidity, “the entire Dnipro basin may become ugly” (July 31, 1955). This is eventually what happened.

Dovzhenko wanted to make Poem of the Sea not just in Ukraine but at the Kyiv Film Studio. He apparently made a deal with a deputy minister in Moscow, to whom he said, “I am a son of the Ukrainian people, and I am not so young. My script is dedicated to the life of the Ukrainian people, and the film is set in Ukraine. So it is crystal clear that the movie should be made in Ukraine too, chiefly with Ukrainian actors. I cannot imagine anything different; otherwise, this will be something immoral and, frankly speaking, very unnatural and savage.”

However, his plans came unstuck because “only one representative of Ukrainian non-culture objected. Neither my appeal nor my mentioning the opinion of a deputy minister of culture of the USSR could persuade N.” (Nov. 7, 1956). It is possible, however, that Moscow also refused to give Dovzhenko the go-ahead. It is common knowledge that high-ranking bosses say one thing publicly and then issue a totally different instruction to their subordinates.

“THERE IS NO SUCH THING ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD”

The above entry was written 19 days before Dovzhenko’s death. Near it is something else. Today’s bureaucrats and numerous party and state servants, who chew on their favorite rag of “bilingualism,” should read these words, although I seriously doubt that they have ever read Dovzhenko’s works. “In the fortieth year of socialist construction, in the capital of the forty-million-strong Ukrainian SSR (like in other Ukrainian cities), all disciplines in higher educational institutions are exclusively taught in the Russian language. There is no such thing anywhere in the world. I recall Lenin’s letters on the nationalities question and think: don’t say anything else to me. I’ve understood everything and I am brimming over. If my nation has failed to create a higher school of its own, all the rest is of absolutely no value. What unheard-of immorality! What a cruel fraud! I am sorry and ashamed.”

This was written on an anniversary of the Great October — Socialist! — Revolution, which turned out to be a brazen lie. I am writing these lines on the anniversary of another revolution — the Great Orange one-and wondering if Dovzhenko would have addressed the same words to its leaders. What would he have said, for example, about the court order to cancel the dubbing of foreign-made films into Ukrainian and the support for this decision from some of our too cavalier deputy prime ministers? There is no regret or shame, though.

Dovzhenko was dying with these thoughts and feelings. “I am lying with an ailing heart in the woods near Moscow. The snow is covering the ground.” Meanwhile, “the director of the Kyiv Studio, a thick-skinned scoundrel who would make a better prison or concentration camp warden than a film studio manager,” rejected the idea of co-producing Dovzhenko’s Poem of the Sea. “And I saw,” the artist continues, “that this monster with a party membership is totally devoid of ideals; he is a boor and a butcher who, together with his wife, has settled down on an estate called the Kyiv Studio. What a decline! What degradation! If one can do this with impunity, what more can I say?”

But there was no impunity. Many years later, the name of this manager — Davyd Kopytsia — was revealed. He was a writer, I’ll have you know, one who “needed to justify his loutish and Cain-like action, not to let me into the Kyiv Studio obviously in keeping with some ‘ideological principles.’ Of course, Korniichuk [the renowned Soviet Ukrainian playwright] and the culture minister are behind him. I don’t think I will ever return to Kyiv. Thirteen years of futile expectations” (Nov. 7).

But as early as spring of the following year the Kyiv Studio from which he was banished and where he was not allowed to make his last film was named after Dovzhenko. There are no limits to cynicism.

Ivan Pyriev, the director of the Mosfilm Studio, himself a prominent film director (The Tractor Drivers, The Kuban Cossacks, The Brothers Karamazov, etc.), was also noted for his special “soulfulness.” One of Dovzhenko’s diary entries, written three days before death, is about him. Dovzhenko was unable to give a lecture during a film directors’ course because he was ill. Pyriev bawled out Solntseva, who wanted to apologize for this. In her reminiscences Dovzhenko’s wife reproduces the conversation with the studio director:

“What else is wrong with him?”

“His heart.”

“He should come anyway.”

“He has to stay in bed.”

“He has to come! Let him come!” Ivan Pyriev shouted.

“He may die.”

“So he’ll die.”

When Dovzhenko found about this conversation, he wrote down his verdict. “Therefore, I should not forget even for a minute that my destiny will be in the paws of this ferocious beast for a year or so.” But it was a question of days, not a year. He also wrote about the army of bureaucrats and “invaluable” bosses whose characteristics, I fear, have not changed since then.

“The only thing you hear at all the meetings is: show firmness, show flexibility. Why don’t they say: show intelligence, show kindness, concern, honesty, attention and an uncompromising demand for accuracy, taste, and refinement in work? Yes, we have become flexible as eels and so hard that no one will chip away at us.”

Then he writes an imaginary dialogue.

“All architectural monuments throughout the country have been turned into outhouses. Who is to blame? The Radnarkom [Council of People’s Commissars] — the Radnarkom is like us.”

“We are to blame. The tightlipped, the toadies, and the non- resisters.”

“And since when should a people’s commissar know more about architecture better than you?”

Well, the number of tightlipped people and non-resisters has hardly dwindled since those days. And so? “I despise the government of Ukraine for its brutish attitude to the cultural monuments of its past. It does not love its own people. And the people have every reason to hate all of us for this.” All of us! Because when you keep silent, then do not complain about the accursed bureaucrats: they functioned within the framework you drew up.

THE LAST JOURNEY

Dovzhenko spent his last Sunday in November 1956 at his country house in Peredelkino, near Moscow. Solntseva has left us quite a detailed account of what took place. The house was designed to Dovzhenko’s taste: high ceilings, a wooden beam, a large room that smelled of wood. In the middle stands a bare table. There are cactuses on the windowsills and shelves — under the very ceiling — with Ukrainian-style glazed china. “Sashko so loved to sit in the corner of this huge wooden room, in a cane chair, and look at everything that surrounded him, especially the beam: it obviously reminded him of his parents’ house. In his thoughts he would always return to his childhood, drawing inspiration for his work from it,” Solntseva writes.

Dovzhenko’s ailing heart ached, so it was doubtful that he would go to Moscow. But he had things to do at Mosfilm the next day: it would soon be time to start shooting the film. They went. On the way he felt sick. “Entering the house, he immediately lay down on the bed. He felt worse and worse. I sent for his attending physician. She was a bad doctor, a thirty-year-old unmarried woman, who saw nothing around her.” When it became clear that Dovzhenko’s condition was grave, she called a professor. He refused to come, although she told him that, by all accounts, the patient was dying. But still, it was a Sunday and a thousand more excuses. Another doctor came. He asked a few questions and began to take his pulse. “There was no pulse; a minute of silence, and he dropped the wrist on poor Dovzhenko’s chest. Yes, he dropped it; he didn’t lay it down... After realizing that Dovzhenko was dead, he quickly left the room without a word.” Solntseva claims that Dovzhenko’s last words were, “Yulia, you have done so much for me in your life.”

Not everyone believes these words and this version of Dovzhenko’s death. For instance, his nephew Taras Dudko (a doctor like his parents) often said that there are grounds to believe that it was a contract murder masterminded, of course, by the secret services and carried out by Solntseva. He alleges that her account of what happened in the first hours and days after his death was very muddled.

But it will hardly be possible to prove these allegations. The motives are also not very clear. Dovzhenko was supposed to fly to Paris in early December to attend celebrations in his honor — after being forbidden to travel for 26 years (the last time he went abroad was in 1930). No one knew how he would behave in Paris: what could he have said about the Soviet system and leadership that had banned him from working in Kyiv? This is the only likely motive that comes to mind.

By far the most important part of Solntseva’s reminiscences is her desire to honor her husband’s last wish to be buried in Kyiv (the subject of heated debates today). “After Dovzhenko died, within an hour I phoned Mykola Bazhan to ask him to help me have the body shipped to Kyiv and buried there. His wife answered the phone and said in a totally calm voice that Bazhan was out and she didn’t know when he’d be back. I explained the problem again and asked her to tell him to call me when he returned. There was no call either that day or the next. I made some more calls to Kyiv, but Ukraine refused to bury Dovzhenko in Kyiv” (Dnipro, 1994, Nos. 9-10, p. 82).

Mykola Bazhan, one of the greatest Ukrainian poets of the 20

th century, was Dovzhenko’s friend in the 1920s. Then their relations deteriorated, and the film director wrote a lot of bitter and not always just words about the writer in his diary. In particular, he accused Bazhan of reneging on his promise to evacuate Dovzhenko’s parents from Kyiv during the war. In fact, it was very difficult to do this. And now there was one more transgression: he did nothing to honor the film director’s last wish.

But could he have done anything when the authorities, especially those in Moscow, took an unambiguous stand? Bury Dovzhenko on the Dnipro slopes in Kyiv and thereby create one more sacred hill after Taras’s Hill in Kaniv? No, the rulers were only too well aware of the possible consequences. Therefore, no force, including Bazhan, could have overcome this resistance. But, in keeping with a lifelong habit, Solntseva put all the blame on the Ukrainians: they didn’t want to. There was no point in saying anything about Bazhan: he had always been “a secret enemy of Dovzhenko’s, and his absence from the funeral seemed to be the crowning touch of all the bad things he had done to Dovzhenko. Incidentally, he was also one of those responsible for his death; it was his fault that Dovzhenko could not return to Ukraine. He and Korniichuk objected to Dovzhenko’s return to Ukraine; even when he was dead they rejected the request that Dovzhenko had made a few years before his death about being buried in Ukraine.” Things were not that simple, though.

Thus, neither Bazhan nor any other well-known writer or artist came from Ukraine to attend the funeral. There was a delegation headed by the writer Vasyl Mynko; and Bazhan. He repented later. At any rate, we are not his judges because we, too, do not always follow our own conscience and then fly into a blind rage against our very selves. Still, this is one more stroke that can be added to the picture of that awful era.

Dovzhenko was buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, where he still rests. The funeral was held at the state’s expense because there were only 32 rubles in his savings account. The mourning ceremony was held at the House of Writers. The singer of genius, Ivan Kozlovsky, who was a friend of the deceased, sang “It is all one to me indeed” (if I live in Ukraine or live there not at all) and “Do you hear, my brother?” to the accompaniment of Leonid Kogan’s violin. Mynko had brought a sheaf of rye, some Ukrainian soil, and a few apples in a bundle. At the cemetery Kozlovsky spilled this soil into the grave, saying, “The earth on which your feet walked is now warmly receiving you.”

“IT MAKES A GREAT DIFFERENCE TO ME”

Dovzhenko often thought about Taras Shevchenko and read his works. His poem “It Is All One to Me Indeed” would often pop into the film director’s mind during his Moscow period. Perhaps the phrase “Ukraine in Flames” derived from the following words of Shevchenko: “But while I live I cannot bear to see/A wicked people come with crafty threat/To lull Ukraine, yet strip her ruthlessly/And waken her amid the flames they set-/By God, these wrongs are not all one to me!” These were the last words that Dovzhenko’s injured soul heard.

He had asked to be buried practically in the same way as Shevchenko. As a 20th-century national prophet, he had the moral right to want to be buried on the slopes of the Dnipro in Kyiv. “That I may gaze on mighty fields,/On Dnipro and his shore...And hear/The Great One roar.”

The question of honoring Dovzhenko’s last will has been raised repeatedly in the past few years. Incidentally, there have been some very strange proposals, for example, to rebury Dovzhenko on the grounds of the studios named after him. That is a very wise suggestion indeed. Nor is there any sense in reburying the artist in his native village of Sosnytsia, in Chernihiv oblast. Several hundred well-respected persons signed a letter in support of this idea.

But there is not a single piece of evidence, written or oral, that Dovzhenko wanted something of the kind. At first glance it is an axiom: the deceased’s last will and testament is the only possible way. You do not want to honor it? Then let the incorruptible remains of Ukraine’s genius continue to rest in Moscow soil. But no, we see an emerging competition of murky ambitions.

This year there have been some pleasanter moments of attention paid to Dovzhenko’s creative legacy. Several books were published, including Enchanted by the Desna: A Historical Portrait of O. Dovzhenko by Vasyl Marochko, which was just launched in Kyiv and Moscow. The National Alexander Dovzhenko Center has released a number of his films on DVD, and the Maksym Rylsky Institute of Art, Folklore, and Ethnology Research at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences has begun work on the Dovzhenko Encyclopedia. Genuine discoveries of this classic filmmaker are still ahead of us.