Mykhailo Drai-Khmara and Ukrainian national idea

Mykhailo Drai-Khmara’s literary and scholarly heritage — particularly his monograph Lesia Ukrainka. Zhyttia i tvorchist (Lesia Ukrainka: Her Life and Works, 1926) — is proof that he paid serious attention to the national aspects. In fact, this monograph was promptly noticed and put on record by the NKVD, as evidenced by Soviet secret police archival files. The fabricated interrogation records of Mykola Zerov read that Drai-Khmara, as the author of historical and literary works (e.g., those on Lesia Ukrainka) “propagandized nationalistic views, emphasizing nationalistic motifs in the works of Ukrainian writers, without ever trying to explain their class essence…” Some of this is true, some isn’t. At the time Marxist critique was gaining momentum, claiming the status of the only correct point of view, using Lesia Ukrainka’s name as that of a precursor of socialist ideas that were being allegedly implemented under the Soviets. In the 1920s the journal Chervony shliakh (The Red Path) and other periodicals carried a number of archival materials about Lesia Ukrainka (e.g., B. Yakubovsky) and articles by Marxist critics (A. Muzychka, V. Kovalivsky, S. Shchupak, and others) dedicated to her creative work.

Drai-Khmara also had something tangible to say on the matter. For him, Lesia Ukrainka was a poet rooted in the national tradition, although he noted in his research that she worked with an eye to the European and world literary traditions. He introduced new facts relating to her biography (e.g., Lesia Ukrainka’s work for the Kyiv-based Prosvita Society in 1905 — 06, considering that it was an out-and-out nationalist organization that was promptly disbanded by Soviet authorities) and claimed that her uncle, Mykhailo Drahomanov, had quite an impact on her worldview.

Drai-Khmara’s assumptions concerning Lesia Ukrainka were based on research done by scholars (M. Yevshan, M. Fediushko, L. Starytska-Cherniakhivska, D. Dontsov, A. Nikovsky, and Zerov), which was eventually discarded by the Soviet government, and on articles published by the newspapers Rada and Ridny krai, which also added fuel to the fire. His monograph contained a number of statements that ran counter to the official Marxist evaluation on Lesia Ukrainka’s poetry. Thus, in her Dosvitni vohni (Predawn Lights) he found narodnik motifs, especially in these concluding lines: “Arise, living souls who nurse thoughts of rebellion! / The hour for work sounds the clarion! / And fear not the dark before dawn — / You turn those predawn lights on, / If the sunrise has not yet broken” [Translated by Gladys Evans, Dnipro Publ., Kiev, 1975.]

One ought to bear in mind that this particular poem was held up by the Soviet researchers of Lesia Ukrainka as one confirming the growing might of the proletariat. Drai-Khmara further came up with the original concept that Lesia Ukrainka recognized Taras Shevchenko as only a national poet based on his observation that she did not write “a word about the social significance of his poetry” at an early stage of her poetic career. Or take his interpretation of Ukrainka’s well-known poem “Why, my words, aren’t you cold steel, tempered metal…” as one that was created at a time when every seemed deaf and mute — and of her all poetry as being aimed “awakening the dead and bestowing life on those in the coffins.”

Drai-Khmara wrote, “It was the kind of fire that was to burn down the walls of that big prison of peoples, while at the same time burning out the old rusty downtrodden servile spirit.” His understanding of Lesia Ukrainka as a poet who upheld individualism, which was aimed at a “struggle to help man out of his cultural shackles,” was obviously outlandish at the time, True, he noted that Ukrainka’s individualism “is absolutely original and imbued with social content.”

Drai-Khmara’s concept of voluntarism, a strong and spontaneous willpower that he found in Lesia Ukrainka’s works was in sharp contrast with the stand adopted by officially established critics (such as S. Pylypenko, Ya. Savchenko, and V. Koriak), who focused exclusively on the social background of literary works, looking for signs of internationalism and demanding that they be viewed in accordance with the “Marxist method.” Drai-Khmara wrote:” What is characteristic of Lesia Ukrainka is neither rationalism or Utopianism but voluntarism.”

Likewise he struck a discordant note in the music of the times when he came up with the idea that Lesia Ukrainka’s favorite topic in her second creative period — in the 1890s — was “a decline of a vanquished nation” as portrayed in her Vavylonskyi polon (The Babylonian Captivity, 1903), Na ruinakh (Upon the Ruins, 1903), and Boiarynia (The Boyar Woman, 1910). Her dramatic poem Orhiia (The Orgy, 1912—13) is described as one that raises the issue of national culture. According to Drai-Khmara, this poem highlights Antaeus as an impoverished singer in Greece under Roman rule (an allusion to the Russia/Ukraine antinomy). Toward the end of the monograph there is a metaphorical statement that reads “blood is the only price to be paid for the re-establishing of the power of classes and nations.” These and other statements would eventually be exploited to charge the Neoclassicists with propagandizing fascist ideas.

Noteworthy national aspects are also found in Drai-Khmara’s article “Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka (Excerpts from 1890s’ Debates)” carried by the journal Zhyttia i Revoliutsia (Life and Revolution, No. 5, 1926, pp. 109—115). The debates between Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka were the ones held between like-minded people rather than enemies. They boiled down to substantiating one’s stand with regard to a propaganda effort among the masses. As a disciple of Drahomanov, Lesia Ukrainka adopted a radical stand with regard to the propagation of socialist ideas. She qualified Ivan Franko as a public figure who had digressed from revolutionary socialism and was content doing apolitical literary and scholarly work. Their stands on the matter of the main force of progressive movement also differed: the peasantry for Ivan Franko, and the intelligentsia (“the brain of the nation”) for Lesia Ukrainka.

The national issue and the problem of nationalism became the focal point of their debate. Franko regarded Lesia Ukrainka as one of “those Ukrainian radicals who saw themselves first as socialists and then as Ukrainians.” Reasonably, he asked her: “What does it mean that the Ukrainian radicals (i.e., those in Ukraine under Russian rule. — Ye.S.) do not believe in nationality? Do they think that there is no nationality whatsoever? Or maybe they think that political work should totally disregard nationality? Maybe their distrust extends only to the Ukrainian nationality while they accept the Muscovite one as a fait accompli?”

Borys Hrinchenko came up with a similar critique of the Ukrainian radicals in his well-known debate with Drahomanov (e.g., “Letters from Naddniprianska Ukraine”). According to Hrinchenko, the Moscow-subjugated part of the Ukrainian intelligentsia had “socialist intentions” that appeared to impress quite a number of people; they “talked a lot and did little if anything at all,” because these people were “unable to produce any positive results — precisely because they rejected nationalism… The radicals in Galicia [Halychyna] were building their cause on the national ground, so they were making headway.”

This is the key idea of Franko’s polemic articles. It is an established fact that, in the late 1890s, Franko started getting noticeably critical about socialist theories, particularly about the Marxist ones, which is evidenced by his writings “Toward the History of the Socialist Movement” (1904) and “What is Progress?” (1903). He also unequivocally supported the priority of the national idea — “A Survey of Ukrainian Literature up to 1906” (1907), “Beyond the Possible,” and so on. Franko firmly believed that no social work would save the Ukrainians from decay unless they focus on the struggle for social liberation. This topic is present in his articles “At the End of the Year,” “Ukrainian and Galician Radicalism,” and “Socialism and Socialist Democracy,” carried by the journal Zhytie i slovo (Life and Word; No. 6, 1896; No.3, 1897, No.4, 1897, respectively). These articles were left out of the 50-volume Soviet academic collection of Franko’s works.

Franko’s stand is also manifest in his assessment of Drahomanov’s activities. He thought the man “felt he was Russian in the first place and then Ukrainian.” Drai-Khmara’s article reads that, in the first volume of correspondence between Drahomanov and Franko in 1881–86, Franko felt critical about his teacher, “accusing him of a single-sided approach, egotism, and intolerance of ideas expressed by others.” The emphasis and the hints are apparent and transparent. This interpretation of the national aspects contradicted the Marxist dogmas and approaches to public and cultural life.

There is an ample source that helps describe Drai-Khmara’s national-oriented, patriotic stand —his dairy entries, notes, and letters published by Kyiv’s Naukova Dumka Publishers and entitled Mykhailo Drai-Khmara. Literaturno-naukova spadshchyna (Mykhailo Drai-Khmara. Literary and Scholarly Heritage, 2002, 590 pp.) Just read this entry in his diary, dated 08.13.1924: “In the course of the revolution the Ukrainian intelligentsia failed to become fully aware of the national aspect (these people failed to reinforce their positions); because of this they are disoriented when faced with certain social phenomena.” He debated the national aspects with the Jewish poet David Hofstein (executed in 1952) and expressed his indignation over Maxim Gorky’s written refusal to have his story “Mother” translated into Ukrainian by the Knyhospilka Publishers. Gorky signed his statement using the pen name “A. Peshkov” and bluntly referred to Ukrainian as a “dialect.” In his outrage Drai-Khmara did not bother to censor his emotional response: “Here is a glaring example of real undisguised chauvinism. So we want to make a ‘dialect’ a ‘language’! Isn’t this horrible for the Russian intellectual? Gorky believes that Ukrainians … should disown their mother tongue, their culture created by a 40-million-strong people over thousands of years for the sole purpose of not getting in the way of their ‘brothers.’”

His response to Danylo Shcherbakivsky’s suicide was heartfelt: “How sorrowful it is to see every man who has worked for the good of Ukraine go that way!” Special importance should be attached to Drai-Khmara’s scholarly and journalist publications carried by the Donbas periodicals, specifically his articles “The Main Phases in the Development of Post-October Ukrainian Literature” (1930) and “Why Donbas Proletariat Should Get Ukrainized” (1930). In them he raises the issue of de-Russifying the Ukrainian proletariat and Ukrainizing workers of Russian parentage and interprets the role of the proletariat as an honorable mission aimed at “conveying the Marxist-Leninist science about the liberation of humankind in the national Ukrainian format.”

The poet made a rather bold statement against forcing the issue of the international (e.g., Russian) language. He referred to both the classics of Bolshevism and Mykola Skrypnyk. Doubtlessly, the NKVD reminded him of these statements in the course of interrogations following his second arrest in 1935. He ended up serving the harsh five years of exile in Kolyma (the term was to expire on Jan. 5, 1940). New data indicate that the poet was arrested again on April 22, 1938. On May 27, 1938, the NKVD’s Far East Directorate resolved to sentence Drai-Khmara to 10 years in prison camps. The poet’s heart stopped beating on Jan. 19, 1939.

Drai-Khmara said he enjoyed reading Shevchenko’s Kobzar (he got a copy from another man, also in exile, a former student at Kamianets-Podilsky University (as evidenced by his letter to the next of kin, dated 07.24.1936). He also used the pen name Mykhailyk to his letters from exile. A genuinely Ukrainian first name (earlier he would end his letters writing “M.” or “Your M.”) In faraway Kolyma, he found himself increasingly homesick: “I wept on the guelder-rose bridge, / I saw once again the sturdy forbidding walls, / With a glimpse of the sky through the bars, /With the omnipresent eye in the peephole… / I’ll never again ride black stallions, / I’m stuck in this stone cul-de-sac…” He wrote this after receiving a bitter letter from his wife. But then he found himself aided by memories of folk songs and rhythms.

Drai-Khmara’s national affiliation is dramatically vivid. His whole life and creative effort are an example of patriotism and dedication to the national idea. It is anyone’s guess what torturing techniques the NKVD had to apply to make him admit complicity in “counterrevolutionary nationalistic activities.” The verdict, signed by Military Prosecutor Perfiliev of Kyiv Military District, listed the charges, including “recognition of individual terror as a method of struggle against Soviet power in Ukraine” — an obviously nonsensical accusation.

Drai-Khmara’s life story is another vivid example of the great tragedy that took place in the Bolshevik period when extraordinary, gifted, and absolutely innocent individuals fell prey to the system.