Behold the Poet!

Ukraine is bringing more and more of its sons and daughters into its huge orbit. It is steadily engraving more names on its spiritual tablets not so much for the sake of those illustrious persons who departed this life long ago as for our children, who are just learning about the world and their place in it, so that they will not be fatherless but will speak proudly about their land, and have the ability and wherewithal to create in its name.

One of these names is Sviatoslav Hordynsky.

Today, this name is known to a narrow circle of esthetes, mostly in western Ukraine. Although President Yushchenko has issued a decree to honor Hordynsky’s memory, too little has been done to mark his centenary. We have only glanced in the direction of adequacy and declared the intention to honor the artist’s talent and oeuvre. The National Museum in Lviv has opened an exhibit entitled “Facets of Creativity: Early Graphics, Literary and Critique Heritage.” It is to this museum that Hordynsky, who died in the US on April 8, 1993, bequeathed part of his library: 4,000 titles and an extensive archive that is nearly catalogued.

The poet, Roman Lubkivsky, who is the chairman of the National Taras Shevchenko Prize Committee, and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine, was instrumental in bringing this treasure to Ukraine.

Mr. Lubkivsky, you contributed the article “A Bridge over the Depths of Time” to the book The Watershed of Epochs, which includes literary studies, reminiscences, and Hordynsky’s letters.

“Was Hordynsky’s oeuvre not ‘a guelder-rose bridge over the river of time’ (to quote his close friend Antonych)? Sometimes it even seemed that this bridge, which sprang from his native land, was suspended with its other end over stormy waters. And now at last it is resting on firm Ukrainian soil. But I have one reservation. We often see newspaper headlines, like ‘Hordynsky is back,’ and hear it said that Hordynsky is in Ukraine again. To a certain extent this claim of a comeback is correct if it applies to his readers, to those people who only became interested in his works in the past few decades.

“But if we mean Hordynsky himself, he never separated himself from Ukraine. To tell the truth, some of his contemporaries, who harshly criticized the totalitarian regime that had driven them out of Ukraine, finally turned into outcasts and involuntarily affixed a negative seal of sorts to their fatherland. They constantly argued with it and even cursed it. That was their discomfort, which crystallized into a complete break with their native land, literature, and culture. As we now know from Hordynsky’s works and activities, the artist made Herculean efforts to make his contemporaries accept Ukrainian culture in its entirety. Ukraine was literally his life’s cause. It was not rhetoric; it was an intention to understand what was going on in reality, what was tragic, transient, and expedient, and what was genuine and what would remain forever. He saw the actual situation in literature and art even from a distance. He had a very precise idea of what was going on in Ukraine from various books and other publications. This can even be classified as a feat of sorts, when an individual tries, like very few others, to make this connection permanent.

“Another important thing: in spite of all kinds of dominant ideological views outside Ukraine, many politicians railed that everything was destroyed in Ukraine and nothing valuable was left, while Hordynsky could still see talents and interesting people. He was one of a handful of people who tried to maintain contacts with Ukrainians. There was a fixed idea among Ukrainian emigres, even in the 1960s, that all those who go abroad one way or another work for the regime, i.e., they go with the KGB’s blessing. Hordynsky was determined to reject superfluous and sometimes provocative judgments; he always tried to get to the root of the matter. In the 1960s, when Dmytro Pavlychko and Ivan Drach came for the first time to the US ‘on an official level’ as part of the Ukrainian SSR’s delegation to the UN General Assembly and had a lot of meetings (I am now leafing through archival pages and see this), Hordynsky defended these poets, although of course he knew that both of them ‘were paying a certain tribute’ to the regime.

“He still said, ‘These are our poets, this is our culture, see how modern and patriotic they are!’ One more thing that we did not know at all: he was interested in such people as Viacheslav Chornovil, Vasyl Stus, and General Petro Hryhorenko. I found photos of these people in Hordynsky’s archive. As leader of the Slovo Association, whose members were writers from Canada, the US, and Australia, he made sure that the congress of this organization passed a resolution in support of Ukrainian dissidents. Seemingly a man of pure art, he was nevertheless deeply interested in political processes and would even engage in open polemics with those who did not know what Ukraine was and only saw Ukraine as part of the Soviet Union, in which there were a lot of talented writers and artists whom they considered cultural and spiritual appendages to that enormous conglomerate.

“Hordynsky set the record straight. This especially applies to his study of The Tale of Ihor’s Campaign, his lifetime work. This was a serious and profound study, as he himself admitted. He proves that The Tale of Ihor’s Campaign has a concrete birthplace, namely, the Kyivan and Galicia-Volhynia areas of ancient Rus’. This is not simply the intuition of a patriot. He proves the geography of this masterpiece on the basis of names, ethnonyms, and characteristic features of described places. Finally, he clarifies ‘dark spots,’ such as the story of Prince Sviatoslav drinking a blue wine. Studying the medieval chronicles, Hordynsky learned that this beverage truly existed, as does its chemical formula. So this shows not only penetration into the verbal fabric but also an attempt to broach related scientific fields.

“I must note that his research on The Tale, hushed up in Ukraine, was highly appreciated in Petersburg even though it stirred up disputes. Russian historiography and culture treated Hordynsky as an outstanding researcher of The Tale of Ihor’s Campaign. So when he came to Ukraine after a long interval, he wanted to visit what was then Leningrad in order to meet and debate with people who knew The Tale and, as he said, to reassure himself about their respectability. He read other translations (I saw his notes on and quotes from the Serbian translation), reviewed Bulgarian publications of The Tale, and did his best to get his Ukrainian version published in German and English.”

The impression is that Hordynsky never existed in Ukraine, although it is difficult to find another personality with the same educational level and talent. He published the anthology Poets of the West in 1961 in New York, which I was lucky to see later among Ukrainian emigrОs. The subheading read, “60 translations from Latin, Italian, French, American, German, and Polish poetry.”

“I see Hordynsky as a phenomenon that is acquiring new features over and over again. A painter, graphic artist, publisher, editor, literary scholar, restorer, translator, and essayist, he was building a world of his own throughout his lifetime and now seems to be growing daily. As a poet and translator, I am very much interested in his practice of translation. There was a series called Masters of Poetic Translation which, unfortunately, ceased to exist about 15 years ago. I am convinced that a volume on Hordynsky should have been published after the ones devoted to Lukash, Kochur, and Bazhan. Maybe it would not have been a large volume, but it would have comprised world classics, such as FranНois Villon, Emile Verhaeren, and Polish poets. His translations of the works of Jozef Lobodowski, a direct descendant of the famous Cossack colonel, Loboda, are important.

“Studying these contacts, Hordynsky decided to translate Kondratii Ryleev, a true herald of freedom and democracy in imperial Russia, for which he suffered. The translation of his poem Wojnarowski is a very important work because Ryleev saw the true essence and tragedy of this politician and diplomat. I think this piece is of great value now if we want to maintain a normal Ukrainian-Russian dialogue. I think this book should be republished because the current generation of Ukrainians and Russians is unaware of many things.

“Out of the immense treasure that we call Hordynsky’s legacy, I would name a few purely literary problems that we must tackle: Hordynsky and Ukrainian literary classics, Hordynsky and the Neoclassicists, Hordynsky and Bohdan-Ihor Antonych. The latter is a special subject. They were friends and individuals who complemented each other. After the death of Antonych, Hordynsky began to popularize his works and left behind a lot of materials, notes, and articles about him. He exalted the name of Antonych on the North American continent by publishing a huge volume of his works, the so- called ‘American volume.’ When the book Rings of Youth came out in Priashiv, it really had an impact, but the ‘American volume,’ whose motor was Hordynsky, not only evoked interest among Ukrainian emigrОs but also made a lasting impression on people interested in 20th-century Ukrainian culture without the restrictions of censors or ideology. Pavlychko, who also popularized Antonych and rediscovered him in Ukraine during Khrushchev’s thaw, undoubtedly made use of Hordynsky’s practice and experience later.

“There are a few more themes, for instance, Hordynsky as an organizer of cultural and artistic life, Hordynsky and the free spirit of the 1960s. I am mostly preoccupied with literary matters. And art! This is an immense space!”

Experts from Lviv’s Gallery of Arts told me recently that they found an article by Hordynsky in which he analyzes the prewar art life of Galicia and that his analysis is not only correct but to some extent still applicable in our day.

“Oddly enough, no one can name even the approximate number of Hordynsky’s articles on art. Those that were published as forewords to monographs are well known, but there were also dozens, if not hundreds, of articles in various journals and newspapers. In other words, a complete bibliography has yet to be compiled. Some of them were documented by the author, others by certain institutions and individuals. But serious work is still ahead. Forgotten and half-forgotten publications must be researched. When I was in Munich recently, I looked through some publications and saw that if a newspaper had a literature and art page or was of a generally cultural nature, it always carried a contribution by Hordynsky, either a translation, or an article, or a review of an exhibit. There are publications in German and English. This requires a tremendous research effort. The artist’s epistolary heritage is extremely interesting. It comprises hundreds of letters from and to him. Hordynsky may even be better at expressing himself in letters than in articles. Articles usually show a customary approach, while in the letters he reveals himself as an unconventional and extraordinary personality.”

You were personally acquainted with Hordynsky. Could you tell us how you met?

“We first met in 1976 in New York. I ended up accidentally at the Ukrainian Institute of America: I saw a yellow-blue flag over the entrance and asked a friend what that building was. The friend said it was a Ukrainian cultural institution. In the window was a book by Sviatoslav Hordynsky, called The Ukrainian Icon. I wanted to buy it and rang the doorbell. Hordynsky had a studio in that building — that is how we met. Then, when the UN General Assembly, which I attended, was over, we lost contact. Some time later I published some of his works in the journal Zhovten. When I came again to the US in 1990 to attend the Shevchenko Readings, we met again. I visited his home in New Jersey and met his family. I have a lot of photographs, recordings, and notes from those days.”

Where did Hordynsky work?

“He painted over 50 Ukrainian churches in Canada, the US, Germany, and Italy. These are large-scale paintings, mosaics, and frescoes. I have photographs of him standing on the scaffolding of St. Sophia’s Church in Rome. Incidentally, it was Josyp Cardinal Slipyj who founded this church. (I have the correspondence between Hordynsky and Slipyj.) He managed to devise projects and paint churches, but very often he would only submit sketches, and other people carried out his ideas. Yet, he managed to find the time to participate in all kinds of exhibits and literary soirОes and answer all the letters he received. He was interested in artists who had something to do with Ukraine as well as in all the well-known and talented people whose work showed modern trends. Hordynsky was an extremely dynamic person, although he found it very difficult to communicate. He did not speak clearly because he had had a serious disease and lost his hearing at the age of 12. From then on he communicated by means of notes or wrote with his finger in the air. His family got used to it and would also write like that, and he was able to read this instantly.

“He was still working in his old age. In 1993, at the age of 85, he brought gold leaf to Lviv to restore the Ukrainian icons in the National Museum. He also visited Zvenyhorod, Plisnesko, Pidlyssia, Bortiatyn and Vovkiv, places that are associated with our prominent figures of literature and culture. He made the rounds of Lviv’s museums and studios and met his friends, including Mykola Kolessa. He lived to see our independence and published very good comments on his stay in Ukraine. He saw changes in his fatherland, and from then on he lived inseparably from Ukraine. He died of a sudden heart attack in 1993.

“After a while his house in the States was sold. His family took his archive and the library and donated some of the materials to Lviv’s National Museum. The remaining archive, which is now being catalogued, is also supposed to be sent to Ukraine. When I was in the US the year before last, his widow Tamara and I managed to roughly catalogue the archive, and last year it came under scholarly scrutiny. This time I didn’t bring so much, just a few drawings that I donated to an exhibit.

“Why didn’t I bring more? Because there’s going to be a high-profile exhibit in New York’s Ukrainian Museum. Before this, the museum hosted an exhibit of works by my close friend Archipenko, and the people in charge want to organize the Hordynsky exhibit on a very high level, too. This is why the transfer of his heritage was delayed. A lot of Hordynsky’s works are still in private collections, including his family’s. One daughter, Lada, has some of his works in her Paris home; his other daughter, Larysa, lives in Boston and also has a considerable part of her father’s works. His brother’s wife Tamara also has quite a few pieces. We do not know what else he gave to other people. This raises the urgent problem of compiling a large catalogue of his art work. This in turn involves the problem of publishing at least five volumes of his literary works. This is not so easy to do because today we know about his poetic, translation, and, partially, his literary and artistic heritage, but if you also take his letters and the newly-discovered works...I still hope that the presidential decree on marking Hordynsky’s centenary will be carried out. There is already an organizing committee headed by Yurii Bohutsky, Minister of Culture and Tourism. There are plans to publish Hordynsky’s works and hold scholarly conferences in Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil oblasts.”

The president decreed that a museum of literature should be established in Lviv. In all likelihood, at least one room in it could be dedicated to Hordynsky. Is anything being done to this end?

“Naturally. Certain efforts are being made in two directions. We have already chosen a suitable building, and we are gathering materials. But you know the way things are done here: as soon as Ivan Franko’s jubilee was over (the decree was issued at that very time), the subject was forgotten...Still, the problem of the museum and the Hordynsky exhibit in it should be resolved. And Bohdan-Ihor Antonych: his centenary is in one year. Again, the date will ‘fall like early snow.’ The literary situation in Lviv was very interesting in the lives of Hordynsky and Antonych. But they were not the only ones. A huge group of people led active artistic lives. Even during the war, in all sorts of very complicated political situations, literary and artistic life flourished, and this should be shown. And the postwar time was not just black and white.”

When Iryna Vilde, Rostyslav Bratun, and Dmytro Pavlychko lived in Lviv...

“And Hryhorii Tiutiunnyk, Denys Lukianovych, Mykhailo Rudnytsky, Mykhailo Yatskiv, Volodymyr Hzhytsky! I once wanted to establish a museum under the aegis of the Union of Writers. There were some possibilities, but privatization stood in the way: several households had to be evicted. Even now it is not so easy to find an imposing downtown building, but there is no way to avoid this. The very wording of the presidential decree calls for very resolute action.

“As for Hordynsky, I will say that we must focus on the geography of his life and works, especially on a few specific places — starting with Kolomyia, where he was born 100 years ago into the family of a teacher and literary specialist. He got an art education first in Lviv at Oleksa Novakivsky’s Art School. Then he completed a part-time painting course at the Berlin Academy of Arts. In Paris he studied at the Academie Julien and the Academie Moderne Fernand Leger. He exhibited his works with considerable success at Paris’s Salon des Independents, Salon de la Societe des Artistes Francais, Salon des Artistes Decorateurs, and the International Exhibition of the Art Book. His graphics were reproduced in the elite art magazines of Paris, Berlin, and London.

“He came back to Lviv in 1931 and together with Kovzhun and Muzyka established the nucleus the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists (ANUM). He made his debut as a poet with the collections Colors and Lines, Words on a Stone, Wind over the Fields, and Snovydiv.

“I will give a few details about the latter. The village of Snovydiv, which is now Buchach raion, Ternopil oblast, should by no means be omitted from the Hordynsky celebration. It is the birthplace of his wife Myroslava Chapelska, and the two of them often visited it. The main street of the village is named after Hordynsky, but I did not find even one plaque.

“The village lies high on steep slopes; it is surrounded by hazelnut groves and endowed with some kind of strange magic. To tell the truth, I went there again a few days ago to see what a fantastic and colorful place it is. Believe me, you feel the same kind of magic in Zvenyhorod, Vovkiv, Bortiatyn, and Plisnesko. I felt it, so I know why Hordynsky dedicated a poem to Snovydiv. It is sort of a paean to man, nature, and art. However, in those times this work was not interpreted the way it should have been. Even now it remains largely unknown: contemporary readers are still grappling with its symbolism.

“And the Carpathians, where Hordynsky often went with Mykola Kolessa! The two friends once even tried to pull down a Polish border post. What a scandal this could have caused! Kolessa says in his memoirs that they were young and cheerful guys.”

What does immortalization mean to you? Is this just a question of museums and memorial plaques?

“First of all, it means encouraging young artists to study his oeuvre as well as popularizing his beautiful applied works through mass-circulation publications. He is the creator of hundreds of New Year’s greeting cards, posters, and book covers. Moreover, his centenary should be marked at the UNESCO level, because Paris was the place where he studied and developed as an artist. His works are in churches in Canada, Italy, Austria, and Germany. He held a lot of exhibits in these countries. All we have to do is show some interest and find an opportunity to organize solo exhibits there.”

But Hordynsky is not even mentioned in schools.

“I think he will eventually be part of the school curriculum. Unfortunately, Hordynsky was left on the sidelines, although he is no less a poet than Yevhen Malaniuk. Malaniuk is more open and outspoken; he may be sounding louder now, while Hordynsky is a lyricist. His poems and translations of Francois Villon really strike a chord with me. We have Pervomaisky’s classical translations, but those by Hordynsky have a special charm. As a poet, he occupies a very important place in the line of our Neoclassicists, such as Zerov, Fylypovych, Drai-Khmara, and Rylsky, who, even in their best works, confined themselves to well-known, traditional themes of antiquity.

“Meanwhile, Hordynsky’s neoclassicism embraces the events and realities of everyday life and goes beyond the canonical limits. Secondly, Hordynsky introduces elements of satire and grotesque into this solid canonical sequence (Rylsky did too). Thirdly, I think that Hordynsky transfers many things from painting and graphics into poetry. There are certain details of vision that betray the artist in him — either a color or a composition. All this means that he is not just a poet but an unconventional artist. I once took a rather dim view of him as a man of letters. He was interesting, but somewhat vague. But now that I have read more of him, I have a high regard for his poetry. Still, many people are sure that he is more of an artist, a painter.

“But I may be right too, because he showed all kinds of features — creative, investigative, and interpretive. In other words, he was a Renaissance man, a Ukrainian Renaissance man. With the broad expanses of his Ukrainian spirit he resembles Franko somewhat. This spirit is not just an external thing or a tribute to ornamentation; it is not about some superfluous Ukrainian particularities. It is an inner thing. This high nobility comes from our ancient culture. This tolerance is a purely Ukrainian — Galician — feature, the ability to make contact with different cultures and peoples rather than a desire to bring down the opponent. He was invested with an optimistic and vitalistic nature, which enabled him always to travel, move around, observe, and admire. His world is not stagnant or monotonous. I will stress again that Hordynsky can discern the Ukrainian soul in the highly versatile surrounding world. I would say he is a great Ukrainian not only by his formal attitudes but also by his essence. And this gives him the right to be immortal in his native culture and world culture. Paraphrasing the biblical ‘Ecce Homo!’ (Behold the man), we can say about our centenarian: ‘Ecce Poeta!’”