Philosopher and warrior
OUN’s first ideologue Yulian Vassyian died 55 years ago
(Conclusion)
In 1930 Yulian Vassyian moved to the Galician city of Peremyshl. Driven by a sense of patriotic responsibility, he wanted to be at the center of the national liberation movement and be a part of its dynamic atmosphere. He edited Ukrainskyi holos (The Ukrainian Voice), a newspaper that earlier had gradually adopted the nationalist stand.
This was one of Galicia’s most outspoken papers, which reacted sharply to every onslaught of Polonization. Vassyian, however, was not destined to fully reveal his journalist talents. On Nov. 2, 1931, he was arrested by the Polish police in Brody, on charges of complicity in what was then known as the Congress Case, a reference to the OUN Congress that was held in 1929. Vassyian, together with a group of high-ranking OUN leaders, including Osyp Boidunyk, Oles Babii, Yevhen Zyblikevych, Stepan Lenkavsky, and Zenon Pelensky, was tried in Lviv in 1932 and sentenced to four years in prison.
This was the first time the Polish public had come face to face with the OUN leadership, and the trial caused a great deal of emotional tension in the country. The trial was remarkable in that it revealed that all the OUN defendants were first-rate intellectuals and spectacular personalities, rather than common criminals, as they were habitually portrayed in the Polish press. Underlying the entire criminal proceedings was the moral courage displayed by the members of the Ukrainian national movement, which reflected the aspirations of the talented and well-educated younger generation of Ukrainians.
Vassyian served his prison term in Lviv and Drohobych. Zynovii Knysh, a high-ranking member of the OUN, recalls that he was a model inmate, who observed all the prison regulations. At the same time, he was very careful to observe all the rules of conspiracy, and he was a true comrade in arms. After his release from prison, he went to live with his father in Brody, while maintaining contact with the OUN underground and concentrating on his studies of philosophy and literature.
He was arrested again in 1939, when the Second World War began, and sent to the notorious Bereza Kartuzka prison camp in the Berestia area [the former Polesie Voivodeship, now part of Belarus trans.], where most of the prisoners were Ukrainian patriots. After his release, in the fall of 1939 he moved back to Brody during the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine. The OUN leadership, aware of the special importance of a philosopher to the nationalist movement, sent a group of fighters to Brody to bring Vassyian across the Ukrainian-Polish border so that he could continue working unimpeded.
Awaiting him in Cracow were a clean apartment and his neatly stacked manuscripts. When war broke out between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Vassyian returned to Lviv and Brody. During this period he wrote theoretical and propaganda materials for the OUN, which was headed by Andrii Melnyk. In January 1944 he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp near Berlin. Fortunately, Vassyian escaped the Nazi reprisals against OUN members and was able to emigrate in 1945. Until 1950 he lived in various Bavarian cities and finally settled in the United States, where he died on Oct. 3, 1953.
This is a brief biographical sketch of a scholar who should have headed academic departments and had access to well-stocked libraries and publishers. Instead, he denied himself all these opportunities for the sake of the national idea. He spent most of his life advancing toward this goal, disregarding all risks.
Vassyian was a fascinating combination of underground activist, ascetic thinker, romantic revolutionary, and exacting analyst of his age. His contemporaries noted his supreme impracticality: he was totally disinterested in creature comforts and was constantly immersed in his private dreams. His dedication to the Ukrainian cause was all-encompassing.
During his life, Vassyian never saw the publication of any of his works. After his death, small collections of articles were published in North America: Odynytsia i suspilstvo (The Individual and Society, Toronto, 1957) and Suspilno-filosofichni narysy (Socio-Philosophical Essays, Chicago, 1958). In 1972, a two-volume collection of his works, compiled by Bohdan Hoshovsky, was published by Yevshan-Zillia in Toronto.
Vassyian’s literary heritage consists of 10 volumes of manuscripts and outlines of articles and books that he was not destined to complete. In Ukraine only two of his works have been published: an article on the ideological foundations of Ukrainian nationalism and the historical and philosophical essay “Stepovyi sfinks” (The Steppe Sphinx; Khronika-2000, 1995).
Vassyian’s philosophical views may be described as a synthesis of Christian idealism and irrational voluntarism. He focuses on man and his perception of realities, which are deeply rooted in the traditionalist world view. He developed a solid concept to explain Ukraine’s historical fiascoes, which he summarizes in “The Steppe Sphinx”:
“We don’t think the way we feel; we do not desire the way we think – this is the form of the Ukrainian spiritual imbalance, the cause of which is the just mentioned emotional mediocrity that gave rise to this perceptual-individual human type, which is incapable of overcoming his own powerlessness by means of dynamic will as a method of effective life. Unlike the lasting energy of life, manifestations of will do not operate directly but reflexively, they are modulated, without an inner connection to life...the Ukrainian’s sensitive nature seeks its completion in theoretical formulas that lack content, and these, of course, by their formality, cannot produce sufficient life value. Hence, a mechanical way of thinking, susceptibility to the influence of noisy theories, constant changes of world views, a love of various types of utopias and all other chimeras born of the capricious human imagination.
“The Ukrainian soul perceives the real state of his life through emotions, but this can be changed only by an organic effort of will. Unfortunately, will does not function in it directly as a penetrating force, but appears indirectly in the form of changeable imaginings, images, dreams...Ukraine has experienced its historical destiny only with its heart, and this ineffectual and one-sided method of spiritual life has become locked inside some kind of vicious circle...Where there is lack of will, there is no history, which is above all a manifestation of character.”
Vassyian presents his axiom in his article “Boh i Batkivshchyna” (God and the Fatherland): “Between man the individual and God lies a great realm, the nation. One can raise oneself to God only with the soul, but it moves in this direction in its most dynamic form, that is, in a state of the highest subjective tension...One cannot face God with a wasted talent, as a lost, cowering individual-hermit; one must face Him in the loftiest might of one’s universal individuality. The fatherland is precisely that form of a soul’s dynamics which gives it feelings of self-confidence before the face of God the Eternal.”
Vassyian’s nationalism emerges not as a form of human aggressiveness, as it is generally perceived, but as a method of human growth. Through mutual awareness of the energy of one’s native land, the joint effort to come closer to the sacred, the mutual spiritual goal to create what is beautiful in the national sense (cultural intentions), every ethnic community receives a colossal ability to improve and develop itself endlessly. In contrast, a community that is disconnected morally, religiously, and culturally is only in History, it does not create it.
Vassyian did more than substantially expand the main ideological theses of Mykola Mikhnovsky, Dmytro Dontsov, Viacheslav Lypynsky, and Mykola Stsiborsky, who may be regarded as the classics of 20th-century Ukrainian nationalism. He formulated a solid concept of an idealistic world view linked to the political consciousness of the nation. In this sense, his philosophy became the most categorical Ukrainian refutation of the philosophy of materialistic socialism.
Vasyl Stefanyk was one of Yulian Vassyian’s favorite authors. The OUN philosopher dedicated a large series of essays to Stefanyk, which form a separate volume in his collected works. In Stefanyk’s creativity he saw the living spirit of the growth of the nation that springs from tradition, myth, and the sacred spirit of the land.
“Nazad do Shevchenka” (Back to Shevchenko) is the title of one of Vassyian’s finest essays, in which he offers an original interpretation of the Ukrainian genius: “As a creative personality, Shevchenko does not resemble the national heroes of other peoples because he did not have anything in common with them in terms of creative objectivism... Shevchenko’s relationship to his milieu (Ukraine past and present) has a very brief, barely noticeable “ray of objectivity.” Instead, the energy of direct feeling is formed through creatively nervous outbursts of passions, inspired statements and appeals that ring out like the sound of military fanfares; curses and invocations, passionate visions that draw the past into the present or foresee the future, as though they were being created in his own spiritual substance (e.g., Shevchenko’s “It is all one to me indeed...”), from the flames of love and hatred...In Shevchenko’s poetry a hot geyser breaks through from the sea of Ukrainian existence and flows in its entirety back into the depths of the sea, like its most legitimate emanation-wave (the word).
“In this parabolic, fiery flight of the meteor-genius, which after a brief but energetic role of creative self-expression dissolves back into his earthly fatherland, is brilliantly expressed the nature of Shevchenko’s emergence as a spontaneous improvisation and profound subjectivity, closed off from any methodological attempts at stylization, critical detachment, and systematics.”
Vassyian believes that this brilliant improvisation contains the minutest nuances of Ukrainian emotions, dreams, drama and tragedy, humor and optimism, and features of religious visions and emotions, while the aesthetics of Shevchenko’s poetry is firmly aimed at one single idea: Ukraine. Therefore, it is impossible to understand Shevchenko without being totally devoted to Ukraine and all things Ukrainian. In this sense, this is a uniquely closed writer, who is locked in his nation.
The republication of at least one volume of Vassyian’s selected works is long overdue in Ukraine. We need this thinker, who is an example of an organic philosopher whose vital ideas pulsate in and of themselves and whose slightest movement of observation triggers an entire whirlwind of cultural and spiritual generalizations. He is absolutely unfettered in his sense of the truths of existence; his theoretical judgments do not recognize any patterns or cliches. He is always focused on an idea that sparks and sows unrest. Vassyian’s idealism is a beam of Christian spirituality that alone can heal the nobility of nature in the age of pragmatism.
