Mykola ZEROV: Three Summers in Zlatopil
It is impossible to find a town poetically called Zlatopil (City of Gold) on the maps of today’s Ukraine. It existed only until 1959 as an individual populated area. It once was a southern nook of Kyiv Province, bordering on the territory of another, Kherson, province. With a railway laid here in the early twentieth century, Zlatopil burgeoned so much that it... merged with the neighboring Novomyrhorod (now Kirovohrad oblast) a few decades later.
In the old days, Zlatopil was renowned for its fairs visited by people from the whole neighborhood, as well as for a boys’ high school established in 1868 on the basis of the district school for the nobility founded by Prince Lopukhin, a local arts patron. It is here that Volodymyr Vynnychenko passed his extension exams in 1900. It is this school that educated Borys Liatoshynsky, later a composer. This school also taught Pavlo Fylypovych who became a great neoclassical poet and a Kyiv University professor in the 1920s. In August 1914, the Zlatopil High School employed a new Latin and history teacher Mykola Zerov, to become a neoclassicist and professor.
Zerov wrote about his first day at Zlatopil 16 years later in a sonnet whose lines recalled the presentiments and anguishes that tormented the 24-year- old graduate of Kyiv University’s Department of History and Philology on the day he was to start his school teaching career:
“From behind the silk-lined whitish clouds, the moon was looking at the field of grain; /A church’s silhouette stood out in the darkness that lay all around. /The steppe spread out of all bounds under the white-faced vault of sky, /With bluebells dangling and the sleep-bound Hulai Pole coming down into the vale. /I thought, ‘Oh, steppe! What will happen to my anguish when the dawn breaks? /Will I lapse back into the treacherous trap of bitter darkness? /Or will the new day’s radiant beams play in a blue pond on the yellow bottom of a valley?”
And, seriously, what was in store for young Zerov in Zlatopil? Joy and consolation? Or perhaps disappointment and distress? One of Mykola’s Kyiv classmates, Oleksandr Goldenweiser, once wrote him, “So you are a teacher now! Sorry, but I find it hard to imagine your ironic physiognomy over the lectern... Shulhyn (Oleksandr Shulhyn, another classmate of Zerovs, minister of foreign affairs in the Ukrainian People’s Republic — Ed.) is a different mater... I cannot possibly fit your psychological face into the image of a high school teacher.”
But Goldenweiser was wrong. Those who had seen Mykola in a high school class (for example, Pavlo Fylypovych’s brother Oleksandr) recalled that “his lectures were always interesting to listen to. He knew how to couch a dry historical fact in a lively and interesting shape, sometimes resorting to personal reminiscences. He would express his thoughts clearly, easily and orderly.” Short, bright eyed, fair haired and with rosy cheeks, he was jocularly nicknamed baby doll by the coeds. Whenever sport competitions were held, Latin and history teacher Zerov appeared on the racing lane together with the upperclassmen.
He was well-read and had a wonderful memory. He spent most of his time at the school, among the students. Yet, he also participated in patrolling the Zlatopil streets at night. Saturday balls, to which pupils from the neighboring girls’ high school were invited, gave way to concerts for wounded soldiers, charitable functions, fundraising campaigns to support the war effort... Let us not forget it was the year 1914 and the First World War...
Mykola Zerov could also have been mobilized for active service back home in Krolevets, Sumy province, but he was registered as a standby reservist. He was lucky. In the evenings, at 41 Dvorianska Street, Zerov made mental journeys to the world of ancient poetry. He translated the clear lines of his favorite Romans and the French Parnassian poets... There were three art societies at the Zlatopil High School. The novice poets even published the almanac On the Way to Art (one of the issues carried Zerov’s Russian translation of one of Leconte de Lisle’s Poemes antiques). A few years later, in 1920, Zerov would publish his translation of
The Anthology of Roman Poetry in Kyiv. He had begun writing it in the inspiring days of Dvorianska Street.
Researchers usually refer to Mykola Zerov’s Zlatopil years as provincial oblivion, in which he, like a Byronic hero, suffered and missed Kyiv. He did miss it, of course. “A wall of boggy mud has separated me from the cultural world,” he wrote in a 1915 poem. Yet, things were not so simple. I recall in this connection the words written in the mid- nineteenth century by Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood member Tulub: “Noble Zlatopil dwellers love education... The intellectual and moral life in Zlatopil can withstand competition with not only the second-rate cities of Russia but also such as Kyiv.” That is it! And in the early twentieth century, parents who had an opportunity to choose an educational institution by the criterion of prestige preferred, for some reason, to send their children to the Zlatopil High School. The Fylypovyches serve as a good example.
What somewhat livened up Mykola Zerov’s “provincial oblivion” was his youth and the concurrent romantic stories. In the early 1890s, there was a 90-year-old Vira Romasiukova, the daughter of an education official who worked with Zerov, still living in Kyiv’s Rusanivka neighborhood. She then showed me a precious relic of her young years — a copybook with lines in Zerov’s neat handwriting, including a poem dedicated to none other than her, Vira Romasiukova! “He was sort of lonely at that time and he was leaning toward our family. For we still kept up the Ukrainian spirit, and he was a true Ukrainian.”
The copybook Ms. Romasiukova has preserved is mostly full of intimate poems. You can even trace a solid love plot in them. In these poems, the woman bears the seal of anguish on her brow and the twilight shadow of a drama perhaps caused by an early ailment that suppresses the spirit. Some poems were printed still in Zerov’s lifetime, others were published as late as 1992. Most of them are dated 1917-1918. Their lovelorn sadness was caused by reminiscences. “You have been filling my senses for three years” he wrote in 1918 — this means the love story dates to 1915, when Zerov only debuted as a high school teacher. Fylypovych recalled that Zerov was at the time infatuated with French-language teacher Valeriya Arsenieva. The two of them and history teacher Anton Prykhodko were sometimes seen together on the ice of a large pond on the outskirts of Zlatopil, for Mykola Zerov was not good at skating! Viktor Petrov also wrote about a “Volyn-born priest’s daughter” who taught French at the high school in his Marshy Lucrosa, saying that in the summer of a certain year Zerov even visited Valeriya’s parents in Volyn.
I read the intimate poems full of farewell regrets in the copybook of Zerov that Vira Romasiukova kept. Maybe, these verses were addressed to none other than the French teacher whose white hands, flying over the piano keys, spellbound the poet?
Meanwhile, the year 1917 came — a time when, after February, the Central Rada is already having sessions at the Pedagogical Museum and the young Ukrainian state has already heard the golden peal of St. Sofia’s Cathedral. “What was in store for Zerov, a Latin teacher at the high school of a backwater town exposed to all the elements, had the revolution not broken out?” Viktor Petrov asks rhetorically. A quiet provincial career with promotions and salary increments? An escape from reality, so to speak, to Tahiti, (like Gauguin who left Paris to permanently settle on a lonely Pacific island)?
No, Mykola Zerov chose a third way that required overcoming his own self and breaking with the predetermined circumstances. Viktor Petrov, who once visited Zlatopil and remembered a small room on Dvorianska Street with a pot on the window believed that Zerov had “ended up on the fringes of life in his steppe hermitage.” There is some mystery in the words of Marshy Lucrosa’s author about Mykola Zerov who in 1917 “rose up against himself, broke with reality, completely destroyed the external shell in order to assert the only, exclusive and absolute reality of his own isolated ego. This is a road to malady, the road of nervous breakdown and of the absolute freedom of things subjective. I have already said: this is the way it was. There was a nervous disease and a course of treatment at spas...”
What is the breakdown Mykola Zerov suffered in Zlatopil? Was it related in some way to his purely amorous relationships? Or, maybe, the question is of a turning point in his destiny, the choice of a path, a painful inner conflict over the necessity of taking a decisive turn in his life so as to realize himself as a personality, an artist and a scholar? Mykola Zerov left Zlatopil suddenly, soon after the new academic year had begun. It was the fall of 1917.
He was wanted in Kyiv. Ukraine needed intellectuals. Zerov was moving toward his destiny, his triumphs and ordeals. He was unaware of his future road of the cross: precisely twenty years later, NKVD Captain Matveyev shot dead Solovki camp prisoner Mykola Zerov near the village of Sandormokh, along with another 1110 other wretched of the earth devoured by the Moloch of the revolution.
