Sensible Scarab In Flight

Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, one of Ukraine's most prominent poets, would have been 90 on October 5.

If one looks in an encyclopedia, of course not the Soviet one, but, say, the late Danylo Struk's Encyclopedia of Ukraine , one will find an entry reading “Antonych, Bohdan-Ihor (1909-37), Ukrainian poet born in Lemkivshchyna. Collections of verse Pryvitannia Zhyttia [Greetings of Life] (1931), Try Perstni [Three Signet Rings] (1934), Knyha Leva [Lion's Book] (1936); posthumous Zelena Yevanheliya [The Green Evangel] and Rotatsiyi [Rotations] (1938). Marked by daring quest and versatile (particularly imagistic and expressionistic) influences, Antonych's verse is not subordinated to a single creative trend; it is always profoundly original, showing a broad range of lyrical and philosophic views.” Instead of this entry one visualizes one made by Antonych himself, in which he carves his name not among the titles of his collections of verse, but among his lyrical heroes: “Antonych was a scarab and lived in cherry trees, those same very trees glorified by Shevchenko.”

I can imagine the inquisitive West Ukrainian reader's surprise, were he to learn that there was not only Antonych the chafer and poet singing glory to “stormy life” and “drunken happiness,” but also Antonych the cat, a reticent, emaciated phlegmatic person, son of a village priest by the name of Vasyl Kit [the surname literally means cat] who had to change the last name, because in Lemkivshchyna kit also meant a rogue, and for a priest to have this name was as bad as for a journalist a surname like Liar. Thus appeared the Rev. Antonych and his son Bohdan-Ihor. “One cannot agree that Antonych, our idol, was an ordinary man, friendly, smiling, polite, cordial, without feverish gestures, even-tempered, weighing every word he spoke,” wrote his fiancee Olha Kseerzopolska (nee Oliynyk) almost thirty years after his death, recalling how they first met. “One who never showed off or obviously enjoyed his publicity. His emerald eyes were always squinted in concentration behind his glasses and cleared every time he smiled.” Incidentally, he met Olha Oliynyk, a high school student, not at some bohemian party but in a cozy Lviv candy store with a name, Oaza, reminding one of Turkish delight.

The chafer and cat even spoke differently. Antonych the poet — devotee of the “gray-bearded minister of the poets' republic” Walt Whitman and Omar Khayyam who “cooled his sun-scorched lips in a glass of wine” and felt at home in literary Ukrainian, was a Lemko (member of a Ukrainian community in Poland and Slovakia with a very distinct dialect —Ed. ), humble, dressing in an old-fashioned way (his aunt would always select his bow ties), speaking with a pronounced Polish accent — was regarded by many as a Pole studying Ukrainian.

His biography is not eventful. Things seemed to take their natural course: childhood spent at Novyci, high school, and then Lviv University. Everything was quite ordinary, even trite, even his death. What would one think reading about a consumptive Ukrainian poet dying in 1937? Either that tuberculosis killed him in 1937 or the NKVD did (perhaps forgetting that until 1939 Lviv residents had no need to fear the Gulag). The cause of his death was appendicitis, or rather lethal postsurgical inflammation. Just that and nothing heroic. In a word, there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about the man, except his poetry. Chimerical branches of plants “calling out about growth not to be stopped by anyone,” “foxes, lions, swallows, men, dawns azure, and rustling leaves” were all born in his dreams. People who knew him recall that he wrote poetry early in the morning, still drowsy from sleep. And he would spend hours exploring Lviv streets, his walking cane knocking on the cobblestones to the rhythm of music only he could hear. He lived his life as though in a Chinese parable, something like “Bohdan-Ihor, son of Lviv priest Vasyl Kit, once fell asleep under a cherry tree which was in blossom again, ‘just like in Shevchenko's time,' and saw a dream in which he was a scarab buzzing over the cherry tree.” Or maybe it was one sleeping and having a dream about turning into a great Ukrainian poet named Bohdan-Ihor Antonych?