The two colors of Dmytro Pavlychko
On September 28 Dmytro Pavlychko celebrated his 80th birthday. For Den’s young journalists, who studied Pavlychko’s oeuvre as classics at school, the very fact of meeting the poet is a great event. This is why seeing him at our editorial office on that day was of paramount importance for us. Pavlychko simply decided to come to the editorial office in person in order to hand out invitations to his jubilee soiree – it is an eloquent touch to the portrait of this outstanding, openhearted, self-ironic, energetic, wise, 80-year-old and, at the same time, very young personality.
Those who know the poet, his oeuvre, and civic activities from sources other than textbooks could say much more about him.
Pavlychko’s work can be amply characterized by the word “grandeur.” Indeed, in the period from his first 1944 poem (which the poet recited at the jubilee soiree) to the latest works, Pavlychko has erected a magnificent poetic House, one of those in the State of Ukrainian Poetry that impress with architectural finesse and a fanciful and unpredictable interior. There will be a time when Lady History will put things in order in this House, and nobody seems to know what kind of order it will be. Something will not suit her or will seem unworthy of attention, but she will definitely leave very much as decoration.
At different times, Ukrainian litterateurs had to be guided not only by inspiration but also by the feeling of duty, from which they drew this inspiration. They had to redouble their efforts to save their literature from the “incompleteness” described by Dmytro Chyzhevsky and others. Hence a specific inner imperative which was typical of, for example, Ivan Franko with his cult of self-denying work.
Franko’s spirit has accompanied Pavlychko in all his lifetime. He highly esteems Franko’s universalism and the unexpected combination in one person of a “people’s tribune” and an esthete who appreciates better than anybody else the self-value of a perfect word and refined poetical forms. He is also a semper tiro – always a pupil, a pupil who is never tired of being thirsty for learning new things and “melting” in the hearth of his talent what his mind and heart have gained.
He has created masterpieces. The jubilee soiree’s program was based on songs with his lyrics, and all those who had gathered at Kyiv Opera sang Two Colors to the music of the composer Oleksandr Bilash.
What is also an undoubted masterpiece is The Mystery of Your Face, a collection of lyrical poems full of love passion and erotic fire that resembles natural elements. It was published in 1974, when Soviet society looked as priggish as can be. Pavlychko’s love was over and above time, for it belonged to heaven.
Before that, in the post-Stalinist times, there was a general rush for such poems as “When the Bloody Torquemada Died” and “Prayer.” “The tyrant is dead, but the prison is still standing,” the poet wrote, reminding people that the dead may catch the living by the feet. At the time, poetry spoke in the language of allusions which was clear to all, including the successors of “Torquemada.” Pavlychko recited these two poems at the soiree. This means they are extremely important in his poetical record.
One of Pavlychko’s strongest poetic books is Granoslov (1968) followed by The Sonnets of Podillia Autumn (1973) and the above-mentioned Mystery of Your Face. By all accounts, the decade between the poet’s 35th and 45th birthdays was his hour of triumph. In the 1960s Pavlycko also made a contribution to Ukrainian “poetic cinema”: he wrote scripts for the cult films Dream (starring the young Ivan Mykolaichuk as Taras Shevchenko) and Zakhar Berkut.
Perhaps no other 20th-century Ukrainian poet has excelled in so many genres as Pavlycko has. His Ukrainian word has managed to tame rubaiyat, parables, terze rime, sonnets, and others. Original and translated sonnets are a major part of Pavlychko’s Poetic House — its ballroom, so to speak. Knowing a lot of languages, the poet ventured to create his own anthology — The Worldwide Sonnet — and managed to scale this peak. He also has books of poems — he has adhered to this genre for decades.
Franko’s spirit has always added verve to Pavlychko the translator. I do not know how many volumes would be needed to comprise his translational legacy. The poet has been mostly translating Slavs, but he could also cope with Shakespeare. Professor Mark Sokoliansky has mostly chosen Pavlychko’s Ukrainian translations for a worldwide anthology of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Also noteworthy is the poet’s contribution to literature studies. The year 2006 saw two volumes of Pavlychko’s articles and essays: one on Ukrainian literature and the other on the international world of letters. These include not only red-letter-day speeches (although there are plenty of them). There are brilliant studies here, which philologists and historians of literature will not leave unattended. I can remember the indelible impression made on Ukrainian readers by the Pavlychko-edited publication of the works of Bohdan-Ihor Antonych and his brilliant preface to the book of poems penned by this Lemko genius. It was a revelation — like an icon restored. Moreover, the author of the preface still remains a poet even in a literature research article. Leonid Novychenko once said this about his research style: with one stroke of a metaphor, Pavlychko can achieve a result that would take an academic several logical operations to produce.
Another page in Pavlychko’s artistic biography is editorship of Vsesvit in 1971–1978, when this journal became immensely popular. In fact, it was not only artistic work: Pavlychko was making an interesting journal and, at the same time, was raising the bar of national culture as such. He always had an extremely strong civic motif – perhaps even too strong, when it is about poetry.
I am deliberately saying nothing about Pavlychko the politician because politics also pervades his poems, especially those written in independent Ukraine. Almost all his recent books (e.g. Nostalgia, Psalms of Repentance, Auto-da-Fe, Memory, and Three Stanzas) have an enormous share of political writing, including a lot of fiery invectives against Moscow’s imperial reflexes, the submissive “khokhly,” and the ever-squabbling Ukrainian politicians. Pavlychko continues to believe that a word can cure, whip (with a good result for the one being whipped?), and stigmatize. He resembles a powerful radar that can spot everything. He can respond to the wars in Chechnya and Georgia or to a political “zigzag” in Kyiv. Who else can write: “My heart is like Tuzla?”
He may resemble a split tree, when he tries to reconcile the irreconcilable – in real life the former Orange Revolution leaders and in poetry Mazepa and Petryk whom he depicted on the Poltava battlefield as fighters for Ukraine, desperately “forcing” the rebellious Petryk to cover the no less rebellious Hetman Mazepa with his own breast.
Pavlychko’s first collection bore a characteristic and, as it turned out, absolutely apt title – Love and Hatred. He still remains a poet of contrasts and strong passions. His poetry of curses is as important as that of tenderness. It may even be the most important one, unfortunately. In any case, out of Pavlychko’s many books published in between 1990 and 2000, I most often open his Golden Apple and Thimble – his lyrical and philosophical poetry.
Of course, his political poetry may be inspiring to someone else…
“An epoch is going away,” said a poetess, one of the “Seventiers,” immediately after the jubilee soiree. Indeed, Pavlychko is an epoch-making figure in our literature (and not only in it). But, as is known, epochs go away only to stay.
