Episodes from the history of Ukrainian literature of the early 1970s

In February 2003 Ukraine’s leadership celebrated the 85th jubilee of the 1972-1989 KPU First Secretary Volodymyr Shcherbytsky. The initiators of this celebration wished to remain unidentified. However, speaking in an interview with The Day in August 2002, then Vice Premier Volodymyr Semynozhenko did mention three names: “A group of highly respected people, among them Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk, Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences President Borys Paton, and former Premier Vitaly Masol, addressed a letter to the president of Ukraine with a proposal to commemorate Shcherbytsky and his contribution to history. If those in power preach openness, they simply must respond to such requests, although it would perhaps be easier to limit oneself to a formal rejection. Moreover, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky is a truly historic figure. Even under conditions when he had to coordinate each move with Moscow, he did much for Ukraine.” (See The Day ’s Ukrainian issue of August 22, 2002).

By some whim of fate, it befell to Semynozhenko’s successor Dmytro Tabachnyk to organize the jubilee. An expert historian, in 1992 Tabachnyk published his study on Shcherbytsky and his epoch under the eloquent title The Apostle of Stagnation in the journal Vitchyzna [Homeland] magazine (see issues No. 9-11). “The score of pros and cons in Shcherbytsky’s record is clearly not in favor of the former,” Tabachnyk concluded in his study. In evaluating Ukraine’s economy under Shcherbytsky, he quoted the opinion of another historian, Ivan Kuras: “In the period from 1961 to 1985 the operating profit of enterprises declined almost twofold. The economy became virtually unreceptive to innovations and achievements of science and technical progress.”

I will return to the motives behind the celebration of this strange jubilee at the state level. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that another unfortunate anniversary for Ukrainian literature (and in a broader sense for the nation’s spiritual culture) has been overlooked. In 1972-1973, now over thirty years ago, Shcherbytsky’s appearance on the Ukrainian political Olympus heralded the beginning of an ideological campaign aimed against so-called Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism (UBN). One episode of this campaign was a pogrom of a string of Ukrainian literary works published in the 1960-1970s. Their authors were Oles Honchar, Ivan Bilyk, Roman Fedoriv, Roman Ivanychuk, Serhiy Plachynda, Yevhen Hutsalo, Ivan Chendei, Roman Andriyashyk, Volodymyr Drozd, and others. These episodes are discussed below.

MAY 1972: CHANGES ON THE UKRAINIAN OLYMPUS

Volodymyr Shcherbytsky reached the top rung of Soviet Ukraine leadership in May 1972, replacing Petro Shelest as KPU First Secretary. Shelest fell pray to a political intrigue staged by Brezhnev, who wanted to see Shcherbytsky, his prot О g О from his native Dnipropetrovsk, at the helm of Ukraine. In 1964, Shelest was in fact Brezhnev’s accomplice in the conspiracy to depose Khrushchev. Brezhnev was thus getting rid of those who knew how he had come to power and could be a potential threat. In 1967, Brezhnev sent former KGB chief Volodymyr Semychasny, who played a prominent role in the toppling of Khrushchev, from Moscow to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Shelest, who enjoyed a high standing in the republic, was transferred to Moscow, where he had the “honorable” seat of the USSR Council of Ministers deputy chairman prepared for him. Aside from Brezhnev’s drive to reinforce his personal power, this maneuver was perhaps also prompted by the Kremlin elders’ absolute ignorance of nationality policy and especially of Ukraine and all things Ukrainian. In his memoirs Shelest often mentions the “frenzied chauvinism” of Shelepin, Suslov, Demichev, and Kosygin, who, addressing the Communist Party presidium meetings, would talk to the point of calling young people’s reverence for Shevchenko manifestations of nationalism, that “the Ukrainian language is only spoiled Russian,” that “too much Ukrainian is spoken in Ukraine,” and that “even store signboards and street names are in Ukrainian.”

Against such a background Petro Shelest could also pass for a “nationalist.” In his memoirs he dwells on the issue of extending more rights to the republics, voices concern that “some Ukrainians do not know the history of their people,” responds emotionally to calls for “a fusion of nations, cultures, and languages,” is outraged by the imbecility of the new chief of Ukraine’s KGB Fedorchuk, who suspected everyone of not fighting nationalism actively enough and established “control over the Soviet and active party functionaries,” because — attention! — “There is no Ukraine in our work.” Shelest notes with pleasure the progress in the construction of the Ethnography Museum of Ukraine and the Zaporozhzhian Sich Memorial, rejoices in the archeologists’ finds in Scythian graves, jots down the summary of his conversations with Oles Honchar, Dmytro Pavlychko, Serhiy Paradzhanov, Viktor Nekrasov, and Mykola Bazhan, responds to the language needs and attempts to grasp the logic and arguments of Ivan Dziuba, and recalls how the KPU Politburo in full strength watched at the Dovzhenko Film Studios the film A White Bird With a Black Spot , which subsequently won first prize at the Moscow Festival.

But at this point I will mention the peculiar maxim of Mykhail Yuzefovich, a notorious Kyiv Ukrainophobe who enthusiastically informed on his fellows, when gendarmes raided the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, and thirty years afterward did his best to have the 1876 Ems Ukase in place. “Little Russians never placed homeland (that is, Ukraine — Author ) above their Motherland (that is, Russian Empire — Author ),” Yuzefovich said. By this he meant two kinds of patriotism: the sentimental attachment to their own “Little Russian” homeland with all its historical and cultural attributes, and, on the other hand, the feeling of belonging to a great empire. These two kinds of patriotism invariably revealed themselves when a certain segment of the Ukrainian population discussed its attitude toward Ukraine and the USSR. To all appearances, sentimental national feelings were not alien to Petro Shelest. At the same time, he was wondering sincerely: “I actually pursue Moscow’s line. How else can it be?” Not surprisingly, in October 1990, in the days of the Student Revolution on the Granite in Kyiv, he sent a letter from a Moscow hospital to the Pravda Ukrayiny newspaper. In this letter his two conflicting patriotisms clashed. To imagine Ukraine outside the Soviet Union was beyond him even in the twilight of his life, when the USSR was about to breathe its last. If sculptor Ernst Neizvestny had to sculpt a monument to Shelest, he would perhaps need no less black and white stone than he used in the monument to Khrushchev in Moscow’s Novodievichye Cemetery. There was much from his epoch and its chiefs that Shelest had in him. A secret critic of Brezhnev, a pragmatist with common sense, who, when left alone, was even inclined toward political heresy, Shelest by all accounts was molded from the same ideological clay as Brezhnev. He upheld the same orthodox ideals of Socialism, party discipline, and international commitments. In old age he repented for participating in the conspiracy against Khrushchev. He blamed Brezhnev for permitting the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Yet he himself played a prominent role in these events. He believed that the party can “caringly raise new poets.” He quite earnestly fought against that same Ukrainian nationalism. He was overjoyed when Dmytrenko, Korotych, and Podoliak wrote on his instructions “a nice article refuting Dziuba’s concept.” That he himself ended up among “nationalists,” well, this is far from only case in history, when those who created the system ended up as its victims.

Volodymyr Shcherbytsky was free from the contradictions that Petro Shelest was known for. It is difficult to speak of the two patriotisms in his case. Months after his appointment as KPU First Secretary, Shcherbytsky ordered the withdrawal of Shelest’s book Our Soviet Ukraine from all libraries because it “hurts the cause of raising the toiling masses in an internationalist spirit.” That same day appeared a conclusion by the so-called experts — chiefs of several academic institutions, M. Shamota (director of the Institute of Literature), B. Babiy (academician, secretary of the Department of Economics, History, Philosophy, and Law at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR), and O. Shevelev (deputy director of the Institute of History), who concluded that he author of the book with a suspicious title Ukrayino, Nasha Radianska [Our Soviet Ukraine] (some even saw in it the concealed acronym UNR for Ukrainian Nationalist Republic) made serious “ideological mistakes.” The first point in the list of ideological mistakes in the verdict of Shamota and others was that in his book Shelest “dedicated too much ink to Ukraine’s past, the period before the revolution.” Moreover, the portrayal of the past lacks adequate “class analysis.” Similar in tone was a relevant KPU resolution, along with an article carried in Communist of Ukraine magazine (April 1973), whose wording was very similar to that of the “expert” conclusions.

IDEALIZATION OF PATRIARCHALISM OR REVOLT AGAINST APOSTASY?

I dwell in such great detail on all these seemingly personal matters of Soviet chiefs, on documents and publications, because without them it is difficult to picture the history of events in Ukraine’s literature of those days. With the ideological rebukes for “idealization of Ukrainian Cossacks,” mistaken portrayal of the history of Zaporozhzhian Sich, insufficient emphasis on the “favorable influence of Russian culture on the formation and development of Ukrainian literature, art, and music” reserved for Shelest, the former and seemingly invulnerable party leader of the republic, what accusations and curses remained for the Ukrainian intelligentsia? In the conclusion by Shamota, Babiy, and Shevelev, much like in the Communist of Ukraine article, three writers were named: Roman Ivanychuk, Serhiy Plachynda, and Ivan Bilyk. They were accused of “idealizing patriarchalism,” that is, they all embellished the past and even contrasted this past with the present!

This is a refrain of not only the ideological rhetoric of those days but also of literary criticism, since it was assigned the role of an ideological whiplash. Further reminder of this was the KPU resolution, On Literary and Art Criticism, passed in January 1972. Cultivated was an atmosphere of intolerance and suspicious and dogmatic search for enemies, including internal enemies. Esthetic criteria had given way to political and ideological criteria. The call “to reveal the ideology and practice of nationalism and Zionism,” prevent “liberalism in the evaluation of works by individual literati and artists,” and simultaneously step up “ideological education among creative intelligentsia” sounded like an incantation. These words have been taken from one of Shcherbytsky’s 1972 reports. However, similar rhetoric, heated up by the 50th anniversary of the USSR, became a daily ritual. The incantations heralded the establishment of a kind of shamanism, in the process of which life was ritualized.

Criticism of anything remotely relating to “patriarchalism” had been voiced before, especially in connection with Oles Honchar’s novel Sobor [Cathedral] published in early 1968. Meanwhile, in 1972-1973 Sobor was more hushed up than censured. Instead, an avalanche was set in motion, designed to crush many other works addressing Ukraine’s past. Thus a conflict did exist: a recurrent motif in Ukrainian literature was that of a warning against the danger of spiritual apostasy and loss of historical memory. And to those on top this seemed like heresy, because the official ritual demanded the severance of the part of national history or called for its so-called “class” interpretation, which appeared thoroughly absurd. For example, the monograph by Leonid Makhnovets, Hryhory Skovoroda , was reproached for being of a “low ideological and scholarly level,” because the author “does not follow the specific criteria established for issues relating to the abolition of Zaporozhzhian Sich,” since he writes “about the destruction by Catherine II of ‘the glorious Zaporozhzhian Sich’.” To this Oleksiy Honchar and Myroslav Honcharuk retorted that in the second half of the eighteenth century Sich was a “historical left-over!” Thus, first, it was no more “glorious” and, second, although the opponents of Leonid Makhnovets added that the empress proceeded from “quite specific class interests,” it was apparently not such a bad thing after all to destroy a “historical left-over” ( Radianske literaturoznavstvo [Soviet literature studies], 1973, No.6).

It was much later that Chengiz Aitmatov coined the term mancrutism , a synonym for the loss of historical memory, which would be then actively used by publicists. But in Fedoriv’s novel Turkish Bridge , and in Roman Ivanychuk’s novel Malvy [Mallows], and in essays by Plachynda and Kolisnychenko Neopalyma Kupyna [literally, a mound that cannot be scorched], and in individual works by Borys Oliynyk the spiritual revolt against that same mancrutism was clearly discernible. The rigidity of moral imperatives in literature originated in response to challenges of a reality that was far from harmonious. Ivanychuk’s novel Malvy was initially titled Janissaries . And, of course, the problem was not only that a major part of the plot is a story of a sultan’s infantry guard Janissaries . Ivanychuk fills the motif of Christian youths impressed into the elite army of Janissaries with a moral content. The hardships of Mariya, a Ukrainian woman sold together with her daughter and two sons into slavery, are described in such a way that she symbolizes Ukraine’s hardships throughout history. Ivanychuk, relying on both historical documents and folklore (stories of the real Roksolana and imaginary Marusia Bohuslavka echo in Malvy ), created a novel-ballad, in which the dramatic effect of events is combined with an epic narrative and simultaneously with a deep lyricism. Mariya wants to return her children to Ukraine at any cost, but for this she needs a magical charm, since now she is the wife of Khan Islam-Girey and mother of Janissaries. The theme of apostasy and the healing of crippled souls is intense in Malvy.

A similar motif runs through Fedoriv’s story The Turkish Bridge , which ends with a poignant insert novel about the miserable failure and traitor Hetman Yury Khmelnytsky, who ruins his father’s glory, Ukraine’s freedom, and his own soul. In Fedoriv’s story one can easily spot an excess of the publicist, especially in the monologues and letters of history teacher Vasyl Dobrochyn, who preaches “a filial feeling for his own land” and rejects the unwise life philosophy of a rolling stone. The author’s connotations are highly emotional, and sometimes convey a touch of pathos. Engineer Bohdan Dobrochyn, engaged in the construction of the Burshtyn Hydroelectric Power Plant, duly continues the spiritual work of his father and teacher; the elevated style of scenes filled with pathos contrasts sharply with the low style, when the narrative moves on to Tymko Sherhsun, a migrant laborer indifferent to his roots. A Gypsy smith Todorko suddenly mentions the “guys from the Pentagon.” All of this can cause a smile. However, the story also has something that compensates for a certain rigidity of artistic solutions and the tribute — perhaps even unintended — to the “correct” socialist patterns. Fedoriv’s prose gravitates toward folklore poeticism. Historical songs with their peculiar rhythm, symbolism, and refrains appear unexpectedly albeit quite organically in the chapter about Yury Khmelnytsky. His prose takes you back to the dim and distant past with its poignant moral alternatives and connotations. Yury is punished for his apostasy in keeping with folklore tradition: the earth would not accept his skull. Even the harem trollop Onysiya despises this turncoat. The Turkish Bridge is didactic prose with a black-and-white division of the tones, but this is only because Fedoriv founded his story on parable. Quite interesting is the conflict connected with the characters of Yury Khmelnytsky and poet Yakym Dobrochyn, whom Bohdan Khmelnytsky orders to be “the conscience and voice of the common people” under his son, to tell the young hetman the truth and keep him safe from temptations. In Fedoriv’s prose the opposition between the power and the artist is the opposition between the temporal and the eternal. The poet’s mentoring of the hetman ends tragically: the weak (Yury) kills the strong (Yakym Dobrochyn), yet the former does not succeed. “If the rulers execute the poets, then the throne is shaky under the sovereign,” Yakym says before his death. I wonder how these words of the hero of The Turkish Bridge were received when the story appeared in print for the first time on the pages of the Dnipro magazine. In that period, those in power eagerly deported unruly poets to concentration camps in Mordovia.

THAT VERY ALEKSANDR YAKOVLEV

The article by Aleksandr Yakovlev titled “Against Anti-historism” (November 1972), carried by Literaturnaya gazeta [Literary gazette] and immediately reprinted by Literaturna Ukrayina [Literary Ukraine], played its role in the ideological justification of an unprecedented pogrom of works addressing Ukraine’s past. Its author, a Ph.D. in history, is the same Yakovlev, who thirteen or fifteen years later would become the architect of perestroika in the Gorbachev era. That same year, in 1972, he polemicized simultaneously with two groups of opponents, the supporters of the so- called global cosmopolitism and with the proponents of a “patriarchal Russia,” the neopochvenniks [literally, those standing on new ground]. He castigated the latter even more than the former. In fact, Yakovlev’s article, returned the literary — and not only literary! — thought to the old polemics among the Westernizers and Slavophiles, except that this time Yakovlev found his arguments in the arsenal of Marxism-Leninism. “In a class society, there is not and cannot be a national identity common to all,” Yakovlev claimed, although actual history can refute this postulate a thousand times over. In his polemic with Soloukhin, Kozhynov, Solzhenitsyn, Lanshchikov, and Yegorov, Yakovlev was quite probably right: Russian neopochvennichestvo of the late 1960s and early 1970s did deserve criticism, but what did Ukraine have to do with it? Meanwhile, orthodox methodology, along with Yakovlev’s warning against the “dangers of small-bourgeois nationalism,” and his criticism of the “concept of ‘roots’” were mechanically shifted onto Ukrainian literary reality, except that this was done in an even more orthodox and ideologically feverish manner.

The only Ukrainian work Yakovlev mentioned was Ivan Bilyk’s novel Sword of Ares : “In an attempt to glorify as much as possible the fictitious Kyiv Prince Bohdan Hatylo, Ivan Bilyk went as far as to claim that, allegedly, this was the name assumed by Attila, the chief of the Huns.” Bilyk’s novel appeared in print in 1972. As he himself wrote later, he became interested in a theory of Pushkin’s contemporary O. Veltman, the author of Attila and Rus’ of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries , who believed that Attila was not the “son of the steppe Uluses,” but a “great Rus’ prince.” The little-known work by Veltman appeared in print in 1858, when romanticism began to give way to new literary movements. Its author, much like Yury Venelin, who tried to prove the Slavic theory of the Huns well before Veltman, with his study paid tribute to the then common Slavophilism. Subsequently, historians — from our Mykhailo Hrushevsky to Lev Gumiliov — treated the Slavic theory of the Huns with a great deal of skepticism, viewing it as childish games in the science of history. Hrushevsky perhaps recognized only some details that “might point to Slavic elements in the state of Attila.” Meanwhile, Gumiliov describes the Huns as mighty nomads, who in the middle of the second century began to move toward the West from Mongolia, reaching as far as the Volga-Urals region. Subsequently, they conquered Europe. Attila’s state stretched from the Rhine to the Caucasus and from the Danube to the islands in the Western Baltic.

Contemporary historians say that Veltman’s work can be viewed “not as a scholarly study, but more as a cultural and historical memorial of a certain ideology,” that is, Slavophilism (Yevhen Horokhovsky, Attila, God’s Scourge: a Historic Figure and Phenomenon of Culture Study , appearing in Khronika-2000 , Kyiv — 1996. p.62). But was it right to deny novelist Ivan Bilyk the right to treat Veltman’s work as a source of breathtaking historical fantasies?

LOSSES

Examples of increased attention to historical prose at the dawn of Shcherbytsky’s epoch are plenty. But during the campaign of 1972- 1973 the works about the tragic truth of the war (Yevhen Hutsalo’s Dead Zone , Dmytro Mishchenko’s Plainclothes Battalion ) or about the complex events in Western Ukraine (Roman Andriyashyk’s Poltva , Ivan Chendei’s Ivan , and novels by Borys Kharchuk) were also treated with suspicion. Yury Yarmysh, for example, fusilladed from the pages of Literaturna Ukrayina [Literary Ukraine] several children’s stories by Borys Kharchuk in his article with a characteristic title Contrary to the Truth of Life ( Literaturna Ukrayina , September 18, 1973), in which he pointed out that the title of one story, An Insurgent Horse , hints at the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Several weeks later, Yarmysh was joined by Konovalov with his “Anti-historical Exercises of B. Kharchuk” appearing in Literaturna Ukrayina, December 18, 1973.

The orthodox critics treated with as much suspicion all attempts to seek original artistic forms and unexpected stylistic solutions. It was not until 1984 that Mykola Zhulynsky could write that The Chronicle of the Town of Yaropil by Yury Shcherbak is “a chimerically ironic, and fantastically grotesque novel consisting of short stories,” which “recreates the actual events of history in the life of a small imaginary Ukrainian township. But the vivid imagination of the author produces historical digressions, as if taking the reader in a time machine to the distant and recent past, into the history and future of the good and evil, humanness and barbarism, and actualizes unexpected scientific theories and fantastic projects... All these fables, legends, and myths, along with the chimerical stories of an unremarkable town of Yaropil, as if written in the year 2000 by an aging witness, issued from Yury Shcherbak’s pen at a time when an active search was underway for new forms and means of portraying the world and man” (Mykhailo Zhulynsky, “The Law of Preserving the Good” // Yury Shcherbak: Znaky [Signs], Kyiv, 1984, pp.11-12). Meanwhile, after 1968, when The Chronicle of the Town of Yaropil appeared in Vitchyzna , this novel for a long time could not be published in a separate book, much like the novel by Volodymyr Drozd Catastrophe , in which the author artistically explored the psychology of an almost manic egoism, using in a quite interesting way the possibilities of internal monologue, which proved that he had drawn upon the experience of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky and that of Western European prose.

The consequences of the 1972- 1973 pogrom were detrimental for Ukrainian literature. They meant:

1) Taboo of separate themes relating to Ukraine’s past, phenomena, and figures in literature. Works that were officially labeled as “idealization of Cossacks” were wiped out most actively. Thankfully, the pogroms of those days somehow spared the historical novels by Pavlo Zahrebelny: in 1974 he even received the Shevchenko Prize for his novels Pervomist and Death in Kyiv;

2) Substitution of functions of literary criticism, which was reduced to ideological supervision of literature. Such odious characters as Shamota, Sanov, and Ravliuk were in great demand;

3) Encouragement of the banalities of Social realism, resulting in a quasi-literature. The Kremlin needed a faceless Ukraine, since, as was the case in the days of the rozstriliane vidrodzhennia [renaissance that was executed, the literary flowering of the 1920s —Ed. ], the national and cultural revival could also bring to life national and political aspirations.

4) Ruined creative lives of writers. Neopalyma Kupyna , a book of fiction stories by Serhiy Plachynda and Yury Kolisnychenko about Roksolana Hulevychivna, Feofan Prokopovych, Maksym Berezovsky, and Artem Vedel was prohibited “by decision of the KPU Central Committee and withdrawn from bookstores and libraries,” Plachynda wrote in 1993. “KGB agents would even steal copies from private libraries” (Serhiy Plachynda, “Postscript to the Second Edition,” Serhiy Plachynda, Yury Kolisnychenko, Neopalyma Kupyna , Kyiv, 1993, p. 278). Plachynda himself was fired and banned from publishing his works for many years. Also forced into silence were Ivan Bilyk, Roman Andriyashyk (after his novel Poltva ), Lina Kostenko, and Volodymyr Shevchuk. As a result, some suffered from protracted creative depression, while others were forced to urgently switch from writing about Ukraine’s turbulent history to singing praises to the pathetic present.

Ukrainian literature of that not so distant epoch was under close supervision of the Party and “literary critics” from the special services. The Literature Section was a division in the KPU Ideology Department. In October 1972, Shcherbytsky appointed Valentyn Malanchuk, who was the architect of the burial ground for everything living in the Ukrainian literary domain, the chief ideologist in Soviet Ukraine. The toiling masses were actively involved in literary pogroms. The year 1972 saw the arrests of writers Vasyl Stus, Ivan Svitlychny, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Iryna and Ihor Kalynets, and many others. Writers were deported to concentration camps for their creations. That same year saw the fabricated case against prominent film director Serhiy Paradzhanov, who was first taken to Lukyanivka Detention Center and later ended up in a prison outside Vinnytsia. Ivan Dziuba also faced a difficult choice. He was forced to publicly explain that he had nothing to do with the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, which looked like he was repenting. “The trials of 1972-1973 in Ukraine were court actions against human thought, against the very process of thinking, against humanness and manifestations of filial love for one’s own people,” Vasyl Stus wrote in his 1975 publicist letter, I Accuse.

All these tragic events reached their climax after Shcherbytsky came to power, whose 85th jubilee was marked last year by Ukraine’s leadership. That it was celebrated was not due to a lack of knowledge about Shcherbytsky’s epoch. Rather, this was an act of self-identification by those in power. They pay tribute to Hrushevsky and the heroes of Kruty. Yet, between Ukrainian National Republic Premier Volodymyr Vynnychenko and KPU First Secretary Volodymyr Shcherbytsky they choose the latter, for they feel nostalgic for what they find more understandable and closer. This is what determines one’s lineage. Meanwhile, Ukrainian society is surprisingly unresponsive to such ambivalence.