One of the nation’s great books is being written

From the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian History:

Lina Kostenko born on March 19, 1930, in the village of Rzhyshchiv (currently Kaharlyk raion, Kyiv oblast) – poet, culture expert, and public activist. She received the Shevchenko State award of the Ukrainian SSR in 1987 for the historical novel in poems Marusia Churai and the collection of poetry Nepovtornist (Uniqueness). Recipient of the International Award of the Omelian and Tetiana Antonovych Foundation, the Olena Teliha Award, as well as the Francesco Petrarca Award for the book of poems translated into Italian Inkrustatsii (Incrustations) (1994).

Graduated from a high school in Kyiv, her place of residence since 1936, studied in a  teacher’s institute. In 1952, she enrolled at the Gorky Moscow Literary Institute, graduating in 1956.

The Day publishes fragments of the foreword by Ivan Dziuba to the new edition of the historical novel by Lina Kostenko Berestechko (Kyiv, Lybid Publishers, 2010). The complete version of Dziuba’s text can be found on The Day’s website: www.day.kiev.ua.

Lina Kostenko published her first poems in 1946. Her subsequent collections of poetry, Prominnia Zemli (Rays of the Earth) (1957), Vitryla (Sails) (1958), Mandrivky sertsia (Heart’s Travels) (1961), confirmed the fact that a new and creative personality had joined the Ukrainian literary scene. An organic detachment from The Day-to-day life, and instead a sensitive perception for moral and social issues, the innocence of the lyrical world, the culture of writing, and an independent and creative personality – all these features immediately attracted the attention of readers thirsty for sharp and beautiful words. However, it also attracted the attention of officials. During the Nikita Khrushchev-initiated ideological campaign, wrongly called “the fight against abstractionism and formalism,” Lina Kostenko was accused of “ideology indistinctness.” The Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine Andrii Skaba, in his report at the Republican session of active creative intellectuals and ideological workers on April 8, 1963, mentions her name among three young poets (Mykola Vinhranovsky, Ivan Drach, Lina Kostenko), whose “formal pretentiousness of writing definitely leads to the distortion and shrouding of ideological and artistic meaning’s of works.” Since Lina Kostenko not only showed no intention to “improve,” but continued asserting herself as an independent creative and public person, her poetry became subject to political censorship. Despite approving and even enthusiastic feedback from the most authoritative masters of the word (Mykola Bazhan, Leonid Pervomaisky, Borys Antonenko-Davydovych), her works were seldom printed. For many years a non-official but severe ban was imposed. Collections Zoriany intehral (Star Integral) and Kniazha hora (Khight Hill) were removed from print, and the historical novel in poems Marusia Churai was delayed for many years. The book that followed Heart’s Travels, Nad berehamy vichnoyi riky (Over the Banks of the Eternal River) appeared only in 1977 – after 16 years!  

The rich and disturbing spiritual world found in the lyrics by Lina Kostenko bears the seal of strong emotional experience. The words pertain to destiny, not biography. And destiny speaks the language of eternal questions of being and human spirit. And the eternal is always urgent and topical.

In the first poetry collection Rays of the Earth (1957) one can still feel a certain pressure of social stereotypes, but also the beginning of liberation from them. Everything good done on the Earth illuminates it with rays, sending signals throughout  the Universe, and the most important brightest ray is a Human. In 1958 her second collection Sails was published. When compared with the heights Lina Kostenko reached in her later creative works, one still sees traces of poetic rhetoric characteristic of the early post-Stalin thaw. However, when taken in chronological order, one is forced to admire the spirit of democracy and respect of human individualism, reflected in the poems about workers (Novobudova [New Building], Poshtova skrynka [Mail Box], Vynohradar [Wine-grower], Oburennia [Indignation]). The war-time recollections are somewhat intimately mentioned in the poem Snopy (Sheaves), where among other crimes the most ordinary, and by this even more horrible, memory emerges: with sheaves of wheat strangers pave their way, throwing them under wheels, tracks, and boots. “And spikes drowned in mud.” But here one stranger “bent over a pothole. // Brushed away a tear. // Must be a peasant. // There wouldn’t be wars any more, // if many cried like this.” Later, she will avoid directly addressing such themes, compromised too soon by conjuncture “progressive” poets, but the opposition to philistine snobbishness towards everyday reality will remain and become even more profound.

Sparks of other motives will develop over upcoming years, to be discerned in the formation of her worldview. This is, so to say, the objectification of poetical language – a prototype of future wealth of emotional-imagery and aphorism. One finds an inclination for the hidden significant, and not the obvious present: “And only those sources are unnoticeable, // Which create a deep riverbed.” A further dimension is the exploration of innocence when faced with various experiences and ordeals: “the purest soul’s basis // (the purest of what you possess);” “And nothing seemed accidental, // for it left traces on the heart.” There is a wanderlust thirst for knowledge and spiritual cognition of the world’s infinitude – it is finalized by returning to one’s origins, because “even floating flowers // have their root in the ground.” The poem Lidia Koidula na chuzhyni (Lidia Koidula in a Foreign Land) brings about one more motive that will become the most characteristic and productive in Lina Kostenko’s work: the motive of being alone in experiencing the fate and self-sacrificing mission of a poet who became the voice of oppressed or despised nations.

A few poems of intimate character very delicately, carefully and sometimes indirectly, outline the “contours” of love. Behind it one can recognize internal tenseness, inevitable controversy of spiritual self-designation in collisions of choice, and waiting for the one.  The maturity of sense and definiteness of the right to be herself will give an ethical power to the later works by Lina. But this is the definiteness of multiple capacities, behind which there is a broad palette of disturbing feelings. There is also a vagueness regarding herself: “Don’t ask if I love forever. // I’m not sure myself, // where the rivers come from, // where the sea meets those rivers.” There is a doubt in HIM, bred, perhaps by unpleasant shrewdness: “People in love are very beautiful. // Darling, why are you not very beautiful?” (in other words: do you really love me?). There is an attempt to persuade herself: “I’m calm. // I’m happy with another. // I don’t love you at all.” There is inner dialog in the form of a mental dialog with HIM, present in ANOTHER, signifying possible revocation of the complicated love plot: “You know, the third appeared, // the third one, // the odd man out. // He’s very much like you. // Your voice. // Your face. // Don’t peer into, do not! // Perhaps that’s you. // Not the one I loved, // but the one who becomes unloved.”  A superficial reading of these poems can lead to thoughts about – pardon the modern jargon – “multilateralism” of feeling. But in fact this is a sorrowful voice of a one-man woman: it is addressed to the same person in different images, and no one knows – this is a mystery of fate – whether he will be worth CHOOSING.

Actually, the peculiarity of Lina Kostenko’s love lyrics lies in the intrigue of feelings developed in reflections, symbolized by pictures of everyday situations and sincere relations (“The dial plate of a clock in the corner // is covered with snow of snowstorms. // We must be going different ways, // for we went but arrived nowhere.”).

One more peculiarity of those love lyrics is a painful measuring of what happened by what didn’t come to be, a painful sense of the heart’s mistakes, and what didn’t happen as love’s offense: “It’s better to never know a minute of love, // than offend the beginning with such an inhuman end” (to say “I don’t love” is most difficult).

I’ll allow myself to quote a real masterpiece:

In the days lived sadly and simply,
Everything was as pure snow.
As a dark-eyed wonderful guest
I waited for you from roads.
You were late, came not soon.
I whiled away the time in sorrow,
And in times not good for the heart
I told someone: “I love you.”
Someone lifted me into the sky.
I inhaled, it was blue…
And didn’t dream of you anymore.
And sometimes I stopped,
Spread my hands speechless,
As if waiting for wonderful news
From the land no one knows…
There is heart’s expiation –
To forget evil is easier,
Than what was supposed to be
But never happened in life.

In this book Lina Kostenko also demonstrated her interest for parable narrative (as in Duma pro try kameni [Ballad about Three Stones]) and in rich, distinctly written plots – the latter portended her future poetic epics. I mean her poem-legend Kazka pro Maru (A Tale about a Ghost), some “helpless woman,” who perhaps “wasn’t righteous enough,” “found an inhuman child.” The girl’s face was charming from one side, and from the other side – ugly. People were afraid of her. Growing up she tries to get rid of her ugliness by all means, looking for help from different fairy tale characters. But it turns out that evil can’t be just discarded by passing it on to someone or something else: one must tame it. This is explained to Maria-Mara by the last man who could help her – a Fool Man (he was called so because he gave all his property to the others and lived in the forest with animals, birds, and insects): “I will remove all this ugliness for an hour. // But what shall I do with it?” – it will breed evil everywhere. So, the tough choice: either “driving the ugliness to the soul,” then “you’ll be beautiful from both sides. // However, your soul will be ugly;” or “I will urge on your beauty // to move to your soul forever,” “then your soul will be beautiful.” Though the girl hesitated, she chose beauty at the cost of the soul’s kindness. She became different right away: wicked, but beautiful outside. Guys were fond of her beauty, but after getting to know her they turned away. The one for the sake of whom she wanted to become beautiful returns to his fiance: “Halia’s soul is as the sun, // and yours is black and envious.”

These excerpts can only give you a vague hint about the moralistic ideas of the poem-fairy tale, as its content is deeper: the dualism of the ostentatious and innermost is shown in the well depicted fantastic and symbolic episodes and, overgrowing with light poetic maxims, it doesn’t become didactically imposing. Lina Kostenko will sometimes use similar stylistics later as well.

In Sails there is a poetic reflection, four acts of which are foretold in the beginning: “Everything has its proper time” – in an aphoristic briefness it reviews the repertoire of the personality’s possibilities which belong to a life conscious of its mission, and go through stages of self-creation, “to undertake, without hesitation, // the overwhelming burden.”

The next book by Lina Kostenko was the collection of poems Heart’s Travels. The title comes from a fairy tale of the same name. The motive of heart’s travels is found in the lyrical poems of the collection, which possess intimate-autobiographical character (meetings-partings with the beloved in space and time; the theme of Poland; here belongs the famous poem that became a song with the refrain: “No one should care, // that we love so much.”). An original overtone of the heart’s journeys is its disobedience. When the mind is inclined to disappointment with the beloved, the heart lives by its true needs (the poem Idol: “From memory he should be thrown // Right in the Pochaina river. // Let him float, drown in water. // But I fear it will not help, // that I’ll be running along the bank: // ‘Emerge, oh Lord! Emerge!’”) A comparatively restrained controversy is sometimes found in the conciliatory humorist perspective – the heart will win anyway, it is either wiser or is a master for itself: “A strict teacher, // The inexorable mind, // teaches the heart as a child. // Put grades. // Rebukes. // Forgives no slightest faults (…) And the heart pretends to listen. // And as a student looks into the windows.”

The author didn’t republish the eponymous fairy-tale Heart’s Travel, perhaps considering it a bit naive. But the motive of this tale, parallel with A Tale about a Ghost is rather specific to Lina Kostenko, and in a more refined form will live on in her works. In some miserable house “A CHILD WITH AN INCREDIBLY BIG HEART WAS BORN.” The beating of this heart provoked people’s alarm, and the boy himself, growing up, felt emptiness in his big heart which was to be filled with something more substantial than his daily troubles. And he started traveling the world, taking into his heart its life, misfortunes, and the sufferings and hopes of people, filling it with love to them. This motive of heart’s travels, cognition of the world and people through heart sounds, recurs in both lyrics and poems by Lina Kostenko. Marusia Churai walks through Ukraine (in the eponymous novel); Bohdan Khmelnytsky passes through the whole Ukraine (Berestechko); a nameless Greek sails the Dnipro (Skifska Odisseia [Scythian Odyssey]). Actually, fate gave that “incredibly big heart” to the lyrical character of Lina Kostenko in all her forms.

There are many deep parallels with great predecessors in Ukrainian culture – first of all with Shevchenko and Lesia Ukrainka – in the poetry of Lina Kostenko. There is a kind of collation with Shevchenko: “there were no epochs for poets yet, but there were poets for epochs,” or in another poem, about Shevchenko on Kos-Aral: “A tickling of manacles is just a usual accompaniment to a truthful song.” From the important theme of commonalities of Lina Kostenko and Lesia Ukrainka, I’d like to mention just a few moments. For example, the sarcastic portrayal of powerful human arrogance as the real vanity of life inexorably (Prytcha pro riku (Parable about river) derides Tsar Kir who punished the Diala river for disobedience, ordering to fill it with sand and change its riverbed. But centuries have passed and “the river restored its riverbed”: “There is no tsar. There is Diala river. // There is no Kir. But there is Diala.” Napys na ruini (Inscription on a Ruin) by Lesia ukrainka springs to my mind. Or the poem Klymena – about “the unlucky, faithful wife of Prometheus”: the theme of the forgotten wife-devotee of the famous person was discovered by Lesia Ukrainka. In Lesia Ukrainka’s poetry the motive of deep spiritual solidarity with the defeated, and not with the winners, often recurs, especially when the defeated don’t enjoy the winner’s favor. The internal dignity is stronger than brutal force – this concerns both personalities and peoples. Lina Kostenko is especially sensitive to those painful and irretrievable losses that humanity endured and will endure due to the victory of material force over spiritual dignity. (I ziishov Kolumb na bereh Ameryky vrantsi (Columbus Descended on the American Shore in the Morning); Kartynka z amerykanskoi vystavky (A Picture from an American Exhibit), and other poems from the collection Over the Banks of the Eternal River). These victories, obvious in their material consequences, are always objected by their ethical and human consequences, one has but to learn to see it. Lina Kostenko can, she was given the gift of being able to experience it and share with us. She can recognize forgotten, often tragic, historical events from some archaeological finding, cursory allusions, or seemingly accidental detail. Intuition, together with ethical feelings, give a push to the poetic imagination, or more precisely – a poetic vision of the unnoticed through the eyes of the human memory.

For instance, the poem Po lytsiu doshch (Rain-In-The-Face). It is a strange poem, taking on the form of mythological poetic thinking of Indians: “a great warrior of destroyed tribes,” “tall, proud and handsome,” “from the tribe that knew no betrayals.” He didn’t tolerate a dull death from “Christian” colonizers. And when “the jungles were burning, bamboo was falling down, when the native land remained ‘just under your feet,’ – was he crying? No, it’s Rain-In-The-Face… Rain-In-The-Face… Rain-In-The-Face…”

The motive of “destroyed tribes,” found in the poetry of Lina Kostenko and many other poets of the sixties, undoubtedly sound like a touching historical recollection. It was inspired by moral and political topicality, and this implication can be easily read. The extremely popular in the 60s, read during non-sanctioned performances and copied by hand, poem by Lina Kostenko Ima Sumak was perceived as a poetic metaphor of national resistance – actually, that’s exactly what it was. There are no more Incas in the world, “some were cajoled by gifts, some drowned in blood;” the memory was already “buried in graves;” already “the ear filled in with asphalts // knows not the name: People,” – however: “Where did you come from, Ima Sumak?” What force appointed you so that “the tribe, destroyed by battle, would be avenged by the singer’s voice?”

There will also be the poem Tsyhanska Muza (Gypsy Muse) – about the poet Papusha who wanted “to tell the entire world” about her people.

The titles of Lina Kostenko’s poetry collections are never randomly chosen or approximate – they are exact metaphors-mottoes, ethical and emotional keys to the variety of themes and motives. Over the Banks of the Eternal River – it’s already 1977. Sixteen years of silence. Not silence, of course, but censorship bans, “being blocked.” And the title sounded like a slighting, even bitter mockery of their bans: “are you, fugacious, able to ban poetry which is born on the banks of the eternal river?” I don’t know whether it was a conscious challenge to the extreme “politicization” of the very category of historical TIME, when “real” history started with “the shot of ‘Aurora’” (before that it was prehistory), and exactly then Khrushchev stated that “the current generation of the Soviet people will live in communism.” Perhaps Lina Kostenko didn’t adjust herself to this state-consumer attitude to TIME, as a clock dial of the party’s triumphs, but her TIME is a form of existence of ETERNITY. Only in human poetry is everything revealed:

Somewhere there is
Star dancing of galaxies.
And where are its beginnings,
Where are its ends?
It snows. More or less
Infinity.
A snowflake is melting
on my cheek.

Life joins the river of eternity and gets a flash of inspiration from it. Lina Kostenko deeply feels the infinity of time, but in her case this is not an amorphous half-baked thing. It has crystals of life making it transparent. There are deep poetic reflections on the works of art and images of artists (Van Gogh, Liszt’s Concert, a poem about Dante who is “only a thousand years old;” about a Scythian stone babas (stone images), a “stone laggard” who generously looks at variable human passions of centuries: “All this is progress. And you’re old as the world. // The baba laughs, the damn Scythian baba // laughs, holding her belly.”)

The same topic – the continuation of life among the ruins of times and despite them – is present in poems about people with strong family roots (Vesely pryvyd prababy [Cheerful Ghost of Great-Grandmother]), the soul’s endurance (Ota sama Yivha [The Same Yivha]). The destruction is also opposed by the nature’s beauty: “The Earth has so many years – a billion, a million, — // And it is still so beautiful!” Beauty comes from the human experience:

Pears are falling down,
As is from a slingshots,
The walnut beats in the
tambourines of fall.
Gardens, washed by the music
of memories.
Swallow the dust
Of roads between villages… -
As if the interstellar dust!

Can anyone resist this human language of nature’s magic?

The night glitters with
a pearl of Rastrelli.
Borychiv slope goes down.
And nightingales, the birds’
Minstrels,
Reduce the apple trees
all night
To tears.
The spring blossoms in
Young gardens,
The winds are whirring,
as guests
From a birthday party.
In such a blossom,
Volodymyr the Knight,
Isn’t it difficult to be
Made of stone?

The sixteen years between Heart’s Travels and Over the Banks of the Eternal River were full of work, meditations, joys and troubles in her personal life, tortures of censorship about which, in a broader sense, Lina Kostenko will tell in her famous lecture in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The theme of art means so much in this collection, as does the responsibility of the artist (the bitter overtone of which is the loss of “qualification” for the mission) – when instead of masters profiteers come:

And some impudent
pushful persons come.
Rubbing their hands,
Undertake everything.
While a genius stands,
Wiping tears,
The fidgety dullard,
Pastures his flocks.

The collection Over the Banks of the Eternal River is finished by the chapter “My love, I am in front of you.” This is a kind of intimate diary, where waiting was justified: HE came, HE is in everyday and every hour – but the palette of feelings didn’t fade, for “so many years I love you, and I fall in love with you every day,” and yet “I always keep my freedom with me.” This must be the talent of love from which all other talents are born […].