After Sobor

In his next novel Cyclone, Oles Honchar returns to the story of his student battalion and the fate of the film director Bohdan Kolosovsky (see his novel Liudyna i zbroia [Man and Arms], which he wrote in 1958-1959). Kolosovsky, Honchar’s alter ego, is shown in the 1960s. Assisted by his young cameraman, Serhiy Tanchenko, he is preparing to make a film about the “black odyssey of the encirclement,” i.e., the year 1941, the tragedy of the student battalion, and the concentration camp at Kharkiv’s Kholodna Hora.

The story of the war is told through the recollections and reflections of Kolosovsky, who is introspective and prone to philosophizing. He is also a historian in love with ancient Greece, which enables the author to make vivid projections into ancient times as well as the Cossack epoch. The “black odyssey” is recreated and simultaneously interpreted through hindsight - from the perspective of a quarter of a century. The past flows into the present to become the onscreen reality of the 1960s.

In Honchar’s works the war begins in his novel Praporonostsi [The Flag Bearers] - the story of the armies’ victorious march across the countries of Europe. In Man and Arms the writer revisits his experience as a member of a student battalion. Oles Honchar, Dmytro Bilous, D. Bakumenko, I. Mukomel, and hundreds of other Kharkiv students from Vilna Akademia Street went to Cold Mountain, the location of the military barracks, from where they were sent directly to the front.

There followed the horror of arguably the largest encirclement in the 20th century, the tragedy of the South-Western front and its commander Mykhailo Kyrponis, where thousands of untested young men perished on the banks of the River Ros and in the native places of Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Nechui-Levytsky. Bilous once recalled his first military reconnaissance operation during which he had grenades tucked under his belt. This happened near the village of Semyhory, where the famous Kaidash family lived. Military historians were reluctant to write about that horrible “trap,” and it appears that fiction writers before Honchar also avoided this burning subject.

In Cyclone, Honchar writes about the most painful episode in the history of his war: imprisonment by the enemy. The angle is typically Honchar-like: the novel, much like Kolosovsky’s film, is a “reflection on the indestructibility of man.” With these words Tanchenko provides the key to understanding the author’s concept. Serhiy says that he dreams of making a film about the Light. Kolosovsky says that in this case, “let it be a film about a person’s internal light.” The dialogue between the film director and the cameraman is important in that it reveals the core of Honchar’s aesthetic philosophy.

After completing Cyclone, Honchar wrote in his Diary: “Some people believe that the entire history of culture is an unceasing battle between light and darkness. On the one hand, there were geniuses of light, who believed in the force of good, the harmony of the spheres, and order (Plato, Goethe, Bach), as opposed to the geniuses and champions of the shadows, who viewed the world as a place of chaos and disorder, where blind chance rules (Heraclites, Beethoven, Sartre)” (Feb. 3, 1970). Do these words leave any doubt that Honchar the writer was on the side of light?

There is a great deal of suffering and many dastardly characters in Cyclone. Its pages portray grim naturalistic details that convey the horror of unnatural death, as in this battle scene: “Shell holes were smoking, human entrails were hanging from bushes, and the maimed remains of those who were people not so long ago littered the ground in a mixture of earth, dirt, and blood. I walk among the bodies, the white stains of faces shining through the blackness of the disturbed soil, and suddenly stop, my eyes riveted on a dead young woman, a nurse. White almost to the point of being blue, the tendons of her knee joints protrude from bloody flesh...”

Similar graphic scenes can be found in the works of Erich Maria Remarque, Richard Aldington, Viktor Nekrasov, and Vasily Bykov. Still, Honchar is more interested in light. The aim of his pathos-filled realism is to search for spiritual strength that empowers a person, enabling him or her to preserve humanity even in the direst circumstances, and to endure.

Of course, the events that followed the publication of Sobor were inevitably reflected in Cyclone. Honchar writes about the “black odyssey” of the student battalion, the barracks at Kholodna Hora and its prisoners, young women held captive in medieval German castles. But how could he separate himself from the onslaught of “Beelzebubs” from which he had suffered so recently, when he had to find the strength to endure and not capitulate and betray the “red horses of art”? The following is a seemingly inconspicuous but graphic detail: Kolosovsky dreams of making a movie about Ovid, who was banished by Emperor Augustus to live in the wilderness.

This subject is alive in Kolosovsky: a poet in conflict with those in power; the sorrow of an exile whose imagination takes him across the moonlit lagoon back “to the south, to the white statues and olive groves.” In one of the film’s episodes Kolosovsky is forced to listen to a man named Vereshchaka, a self- proclaimed censor, who sees something suspicious in his old friend’s interest in Ovid and his “ancient Kolyma.” In Brezhnev’s time references to Kolyma were rare. But Cyclone contains such a reference, which occurs in a context that provides readers much scope for drawing inferences.

Thus, after Sobor, Honchar had written a novel about man’s resistance to captivity. The retrospective, wartime, section of the novel contains the most eloquent pages of the novel. The indestructibility of man is the key motif that lies at the heart of the novel: the stories of Ivan Reshetniak and his beloved Katria, Shamil and Prisia, the avenger Baidashny, and the blind prisoner girl Marusia. The battle between humanity and inhumanity is the main nerve of the novel’s chapters on the war.

The author primarily focuses on indestructibility and resistance: “the unspoken law of brotherhood” at work in Kholodna Hora, the “ordinary people’s solicitude for the prisoners of war,” the life-defining tenacity and genuine heroism of Reshetniak (this trait likens him to Tolstoy’s Captain Tushyn), Katria’s love, Bohdan’s mission to survive in order to tell future generations about the “nights in encirclement” and the “planet of Kholodna Hora,” and, finally, simple survival instinct.

This harsh struggle, in which man is tested to his breaking point, is depicted in Kolosovsky’s memory and reflections. The narration is occasionally in the first person, but it suddenly switches to an epic authorial tone and then to “cinematographic thinking,” which produces frames of the future film. In them you can discern the stylistics of the Ukrainian “poetic cinema,” which is not surprising: Honchar wrote Cyclone in the heyday of this artistic phenomenon. During their conversation Aunt Dominika and the actress Yaroslava mention a film director, who “filmed an ancient church in Klymivtsi and stole some icons.” This is an obvious allusion to the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and Serhiy Paradzhanov, a chimerical person and collector whom Yaroslava tries to defend: “He made a beautiful film...Perhaps he walked away with the icons out of his love for art. Had they remained with you, they would have rotted to pieces in oblivion, while he will make them available to the general artistic public”.

As though viewing them onscreen, we see movie frames before our eyes, sometimes expanding into symbols and metaphors. We see a panorama of soldiers, “spirits of the war, weightless elves of the North,” changing their clothes in a blizzard, jumping amid the snow, stripped down to their underwear. There is Katria, “a traveler with a tanned face and a child in her arms,” like the Madonna, walking to her Ivan (Reshetniak) at Kholodna Hora. A close-up focuses on a prisoner and his “look, emaciated with honesty.” We see black sunflowers in the scene where Shamil dies; a moonlit night, meadows, naked young women as they “cling to mangy horses,” trying to escape being captured; blind Marusia, who is trying to find her way home by walking to Ukraine all the way from Germany; a picture of Mamay smiling from the wall of a village hut in the wedding scene; “a smiling boy amid concrete ruins” on a seashore.

Cyclone is a cinematographic novel in which the language of cinematography enriches the narrative prose forms. Before Honchar only Yuriy Yanovsky did something similar. In Yanovsky’s novels Maister korablia [Master of the Ship], Chotyry shabli [Four Sabers], and Vershnyky [Horsemen], much like in Sobor and Cyclone, the plot is based on how the protagonists think about a future film, transforming material from their own life experiences into art.

The second part of Honchar’s novel is devoted almost entirely to the filmmakers Kolosovsky, Tanchenko, and Yaroslava, a flower of the Carpathians. Unfortunately, the excess of pathos here becomes intolerable. There are obvious problems with the individualization of the characters’ voices. The author’s voice clearly dominates both in direct speech and the characters’ internal monologues. Monologues and dialogues merge into a dismal treatise on art that demands sacrifices (the novel ends with Tanchenko’s death).

The novel degrades into reporting: journalism instead of prose, the style of front-page newspaper article (“Soldiers show themselves to advantage,” “Government not skimping on aid to victims,” “Life enters the usual, workaday rut,” “Soldiers and civilians stand in formation: with a sense of fulfilled duty, they listen to the people expressing gratitude”).

The unnatural pathos and rhetoric generates falsehoods: readers will find it difficult to restrain a chuckle while reading about Ukrainian emigrants in Canada, who “are the first to greet Lenin from across the ocean, welcoming red flags on their native soil,” or about Yaroslava’s uncle Yatsko, who spent his “last savings” to cross the ocean to see his native lands.

Cyclone is split in two. While it is brave and artistically expressive in the retrospective part (the war, Kolosovsky’s youth, the “black odyssey” of the encirclement, Kholodna Hora, the occupation, and hardships of young female Ostarbeiters), in the “cinematographic” and “Cyclone” chapters the novel reverts to “socialist realist art.” The ambivalence is striking. Perhaps we are dealing here with the unfortunate effects of “an internal censor” that left his stamp on the work of many writers during Volodymyr Shcherbytsky’s rule.

Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, Oleksiy Vatchenko, and Oles Honchar are all buried on the central alley of Kyiv’s Baykove Cemetery, next to the cathedral behind which is the grave of Mykhailo Hrushevsky. History loves paradoxes, especially when they radiate a deceptive or sad irony.