Hnat Mykhailychenko, a gifted Ukrainian writer, was shot eighty years ago

He was born in an epoch of enforced humanness, with the period of duels gone, replaced by executions, violence, and terror. Then it was called class struggle, a struggle for the ideals of struggle. Like the devil’s casino where one bets his life and one can win only if caught by the demon of survival. Fear of living without the demon was worse than the fear of death (nor was it coincidental that cocaine was on sale at every drugstore, like aspirin).

Mykhailychenko caught the spirit of and was driven by his epoch even as a student at an agricultural school in Kharkiv (he could enroll after a two year village school). At the time, revolutionaries operated like present-day drug dealers, starting with underground literature, arranging secret meetings, setting up illicit organizations, all this so excitingly attractive to the credulous and inexperienced. Later, Hnat added bits and pieces to his education in Moscow, at an agricultural school, attending university lectures, making trips to Europe, mostly illegally. In 1914, he deserted from the front, becoming a professional revolutionary. In 1915, he was arrested for the first time, tried, and sentenced to six years in Siberia. After the February Revolution, he returned to Ukraine, joining the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Social Revolutionary Party, specifically its Left wing (later known as Borotbysts, who wanted a Soviet but Ukrainian- led Ukraine and later merged with the overwhelmingly non- Ukrainian Bolsheviks). Twice arrested in 1918 by the Central Rada and German forces (the Borotbysts were openly opposed to the Hetman State, championing socialist extremism), sentenced to death, but managed to escape. In May 1919, Mykhailychenko was appointed Soviet Ukraine’s People’s Commissar of Education, but he was no bureaucrat, rather a natural underground operative. As a member of a terrorist group, he crossed the Polish border to organize a peasant rebellion in Halychyna. Denikin’s forces occupied Kyiv on November 20, 1919. At the time he lived secretly in a small house near the Vydubytsky Monastery, in a place known as Krucha (combining his revolutionary activities with writing). A regular meeting of the Healthy Futurism literary group was held there, and the next morning the house was raided by Denikin’s counterintelligence (Mykhailo Semenko, future leader of the Nova Generatsiya group of Ukrainian futurists, left two hours before the raid). Hnat Mykhailychenko and poet Vasyl Chumak were arrested and shot that same day.

Little has been written about Mykhailychenko (except in the 1920s, when he was lionized as one of the four “braves” who founded Ukrainian proletarian literature —Ed. ) and few have read his works. Ukraine’s only two-volume complete collection was prepared to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the writer’s death, but only the first volume appeared in print. Although proclaimed the ideals of proletarian culture in his report “Proletarian Art,” believing that his Blue Novel was their embodiment, there was hardly a proletarian interested in the story of a struggle between the red and the blue. Cunning Egyptian sphinxes, chimerical psychological tortures, twisted visions, realities merging into dreams, exquisite sexual aggressiveness, suicidal impulses appear in the novel. Blood equals life, the thirst for life, intertwined bodies on barricades, love and love- making by everybody amidst blood and dead bodies, graves, and women’s tears. Incidentally, back in the 1920s, heated literary debates were focused on whether the Blue Novel should be considered prose or verse.

Contemporaries called Mykhailychenko a “black Whitman,” “paranoid maniac” and “crazy author of the Testament of Death.” Volodymyr Hadzynsky, his researcher, wrote: “He remained standing grandly, like a rock, leaving behind neither a literary school nor epigones... He remained alone and unshakable.” And then Mykhailychenko seemed to have vanished from the literary horizon forever, although those that read his works would never forget him. His Bridge is read between the lines of Bulgakov’s White Guard. Andriy Holovko, mindful of the Blue Novel’s infernal psychological impact, titled one of his pro-Soviet books Red Novel. Most radical Ukrainian poets of the 1990s, loath to inherit the “attainments” of socialist realism and post-Soviet pharisaic ethics, found their idols in Che Guevara and Mykhailychenko, appreciating the latter’s openness, irrepressible fantasy, and radicalism of blood.