Lypynsky is back in Zaturtsi but not in Ukraine

The restoration of the family manor and the opening of the Viacheslav Lypynsky Memorial Museum in Volyn have already been called wonder. In the 10 years that took the virtual ruins to be restored, almost everybody lost hope that this would ever be finished – not only the descendants of the glorious noble family that had done so much for Ukraine, now living in the neighboring Poland, but also those who were busy restoring the place of Lypynsky’s last earthly refuge at an old Catholic cemetery and minutely collecting all kind of documents for the future museum.

But in the 20th year of Ukrainian independence, for which Lypynsky had also laid some theoretical groundwork, Borys Klimchuk, chairman of the Volyn Oblast Administration, got him back home, figuratively speaking. While from 2002 to 2010 only 1.4 million hryvnias were spent on the restoration, in 2011 Volyn received 2.4 million from the state for this purpose.

Yet it still remains to be seen whether Ukraine will properly appraise Lypynsky.

A FAMILY OF AGRONOMISTS, DOCTORS, AND PATRIOTS

The Lypynskys’ ancestral manor is now immersed in the remnants of what used to be a gorgeous park, a model of garden art. You can still find here the virtual traces of Waclaw-Viacheslav who was the only family member who, in order to emphasize his being Ukrainian, spelt his last name Lypynsky rather than Lipinski, on which the descendants of this family are insisting even today. The latter represent the Lipinskis who come from Viacheslav’s brothers Stanislav and Volodymyr and now reside in Krakow or Gdansk. And when the 90-year-old Jan and his wife, a year his senior, who maintain close ties with Zaturtsi, learned that their ancestral home had been restored, they were ready to travel here even by a regular bus. Their children sojourned in London at the time, where, incidentally, Viacheslav’s daughter Eva had once lived.

It is a pity that old age and these circumstances prevented them from arriving in Volyn – for the old palace, which had been burned and ruined more than once, seems to have risen from the ashes. According to Vitalii KUSHNIR, the Memorial Museum’s founder and director, the manor was restored on the basis of old photographs kindly supplied by the Lipinskis’ descendants.

Did Zaturtsi residents always remember this family? Did they know who Viacheslav Lypynsky was?

“The people were always convinced that [the Lipinskis] had been local owners, not the alien osadniks whom Pilsudski rewarded with Volyn lands,” Vitalii Kushnir says. “These families are very deep-rooted, for the first Lipinskis settled in Ukrainian Podillia as long ago as the mid-13th century. And Viacheslav’s grandfather Volodymyr married the Zaturtsi owner Emilia Bieczkowska in 1839 and thus launched the family’s Volyn branch. I had heard about Viacheslav from my father since I was a child, but, in general, the village was full of stories about a young nobleman who had gathered other young noblemen and spoke with them about national identity. He used to ask: ‘Who are you?’ And whenever he heard in reply ‘We are local peasants, khokhly,’ he would passionately object: ‘You are no khokhly at all, you are Ukrainians!’ But when someone says, especially at scholarly conferences, that only Viacheslav positioned himself as a Ukrainian, while ‘the others were Poles,’ I feel outraged. For you should know facts. Kazimerz Lypynsky would give his son money to buy books for the common people. And mother! Viacheslav writes in a letter that ‘dear mum has always helped me in the hard work for the Ukrainian idea. Although we spoke Polish and French at home at the time, none of our family members enthused about the Polish political idea, considering it very harmful to our territory.’”

Are the present-day descendants laying claim to the restored manor and the park that surrounds it?

“Jan Lipinski wrote in a letter: ‘We are happy that our house and out courtyard will be serving your culture.’ As for restituting the former property in some way, I asked Jan about this when he and his family stayed at my place during his visits to Volyn. ‘How long will it still take to restore?’ he answered bitterly. It is Kazimierz Lipinski who erected a good building with columns, which we can see now in its original beauty, on the foundation laid in 1871. Incidentally, the well-known historian and ethnographer Tsynkalovsky writes about an interesting object found when the foundation was being laid and the old park uprooted. Those were two bowls – one with pearls and the other with documents, which clearly indicated an ancient Aryan burial place. Moreover, there was a village, Kysylyn, nine kilometers away from Zaturtsi across the woods, which hosted an Aryan acade-my. During World War I, Zaturtsi was just on the front line for 18 days. Nothing was left out of the village, and the landlord’s manor was also ruined. Stanislaw Lipinski came back here in the 1920s and began to restore the estate.”

In the first winter after coming back here, the landlords, like all the Zaturtsi villagers who had returned from evacuation, lived in dugouts. But, if history had taken a different path and the Lipinskis were still be living in Volyn, they, in Kushnir’s view, would have not just made a great contribution to Ukrainian science and economy – they would be no less Ukrainian than Viacheslav was. The first thing the museum visitors can see is a large board with the copies of family photographs. Here is a scene of the obzhynky rite well before World War I. Girls are walking with wreaths and grain ears on… And here is Stanislaw, his wife Maria, and children surrounded by sheaves on the field… There is a picture in the museum’s repository, which shows the Lipinskis painting Easter eggs… In other words, they were really cultured people who profoundly respected local traditions. This family line brought forth dynasties of well-known agronomists and doctors.

“As soon as September 18, 1939, on the second day after the ‘liberation’ of Western Ukraine, Stanislaw Lipinski loaded all his property onto two carts: five children, seeds, and the family archives, and left for Poland. Two years later, he bred a potato variety symbolically named ‘exile,’ for he was perhaps aware that he would never come back to his home country. And what varieties he bred in Volyn! He called them trans-Turkish white, trans-Turkish wolfgang, early Volynian… He was also a patriot of his land.”

AND THE GRAVE WAS PLUNDERED…

The restoration of the family manor in fact began with restoring the family… crypt. Kushnir still remembers his father telling him that “a Ukrainian government minister” was buried at the old Catholic cemetery. He recalls that it was a family crypt for as many as 24 persons (judging by this, the Lipinskis believed that more than one of their generations would live in Zaturtsi). But there were only three burials here: of Stanislaw’s baby, Viacheslav, and Stanislaw’s wife Maria.

Why did Viacheslav Lypynsky want to be buried in Zaturtsi?

“He left a will that authorizes Stanislaw to be in charge of his funeral. He did it a year before his death. The will does not mention Zaturtsi as burial place, but the brothers must have agreed on the place. For why then Stanislaw and Volodymyr reflected for two days on how to carry the coffin with Viacheslav’s body to Zaturtsi across the borders of several states? I was told and I saw on photos that there was a tall oak cross on the grave.”

Attempts were made to plunder the crypt even when Stanislaw’s family still lived in Volyn, when ‘liberators’ came in 1939. In 1945 the crypt was broken up, and the remains of the dead body were just thrown out. Zaturtsi people still remember who did this. Word has it that the plunderers were after the metal coffin in which Lypynsky had been carried from Austria. They allegedly intended to re-melt it into… kitchen utensils. At least one peasant (his name is known) used to say that he could not eat whenever he looked at an aluminum spoon or bowl. And in the late 1950s, the Catholic cemetery was razed to the ground altogether. This is why the first three Rukh [Popular Movement. – Ed.] members in Zaturtsi, including Vitalii Kushnir, restored their prominent fellow countryman’s burial place in 1990 on the basis of anecdotal evidence. A photograph of the schoolboy Viacheslav, the only one available at the time, was affixed to the oak cross.

Kushnir had to search for information about Lypynsky as far away as in Lviv, at the Stefanyk Scientific Library. So when people are visiting the museum nowadays, they are perhaps unaware of what Kushnir had to go through while preparing the current exposition.

What makes your museum interesting and unique?

“It is Ukraine’s and the world’s first and only museum of Viacheslav Lypynsky who was called Great Ukrainian. The exposition is located in four spacious rooms of a two-storied columned palace. One of the rooms is for changeable exhibitions, and the former salon is now a conference hall. As it is a memorial museum, it is important that it has a lot of original objects from the everyday life of Viacheslav’s family and himself, documents and photos that his descendants kept. Viacheslav’s daughter Eva twice outlived her father and died aged 98 (!) quite recently, in 2007. The Zaturtsi museum has received a lot of originals from her and the Krakow nephews. But the Krakow and Gdansk branches of the family still have other rich archives. And my dream is the family signet with three silver crosses against the red background, which, as far as I know, is at the disposal of the grandson Volodymyr Li-pinski – the Volodymyr who worked in Lutsk as a doctor. His house is still standing on Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street [there is a bank here now. – Author].”

How could you, knowing the true history of this glorious family line and of Viacheslav Lypynsky himself, explain his importance for Ukraine?

“Viacheslav Lypynsky was a talented historian, political scientist, and statesman of Ukraine in the first third of the 20th century. He was born, if I may say so, outside his time. He left behind not only his contemporaries but also the current politicians. The state formation principles that he put forward are very topical for present-day Ukraine. Incidentally, although Lypynsky never renounced either his Polish origin or his Roman Catholic faith, very few of the now living can understand and defend the interests of Ukraine the way he did. Lypynsky’s ideas are still of importance today – for example, the following one:

‘Nationalism is of two varieties: state-formative and state-ruining – one that promotes the life of the nation as a state and one that erodes this life. English nationalism can be the example of the former and Polish and Ukrainian are that of the latter. The former is a territorial nationalism, while the latter is extraterritorial and denominational nationalism. The former is called patriotism, and the latter is chauvinism. If you want to have a Ukrainian state, you should be patriots, not chauvinists. What does this mean? This means, above all, that your nationalism should rest on the love of your compatriots rather than on hatred towards them for not being Ukrainian nationalists.’

“Or this one: ‘Nobody will build a state for us if we do not build it by ourselves. And nobody will make us a nation if we ourselves do not want to be a nation.’”