Mykhailo Drai-Khmara and Ukrainian national idea

The name of Mykhailo Drai-Khmara is associated, above all, with the pleiad of the Neoclassicists, i.e., the group of Kyiv-based poets who developed classical forms of artistic thinking in Ukrainian literature in the 1920s. This group is usually considered to include, besides Drai-Khmara, Mykola Zerov, Oswald Burhardt, Maksym Rylsky, and Pavlo Fylypovych. At the time, critics believed that what attracted the Neoclassicists were remote times, such as Ancient Greece and Rome or French “Parnassism.” As Mykhailo Naienko rightly suggests, addressing ancient-time subjects was perhaps a poetic game with a hint of seriousness. Zerov believed that “only the form of his creative work is ‘remote,’ while the content is quite modern.” We would prefer to accept another idea of the scholar: “The poetry of the Neoclassicists is the poetry of passionate and total rejection of the alien Soviet power that poses a threat to man and the world as a whole.”

One of the manifestations of the Neoclassicists’ rejection of contemporary ways is the method of allegory, the most expressive sign of their artistic poetry. Ivan Dziuba is right to note that “reading poetic allegory in a sense that is politically undesirable and dangerous for the poet… turns critique into tattling.” This is exactly what happened to Drai-Khmara and, first of all, to his sonnet Swans.

According to the poet’s daughter Oksana Asher, Swans was written under the influence of a sonnet by the French symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme (“Oh swan, remember that you were and still are / The only beautiful one, / But there is no sense to rival in the desert…”). As is known, it was published by Mykola Khvylovy in the December 1928 issue of Literaturny yarmarok. The sonnet reproduced the oppressive moral and artistic atmosphere in which the Neoclassicists had to live and called for courage and faith in their esthetic ideal. The Neoclassicists’ adversaries interpreted the sonnet’s symbols in a political sense – as Drai-Khmara’s opposition to Soviet power and a call for his Neoclassicist friends to be courageous in this confrontation.

The NKVD, the ultimate punitive body of the time, showed this position in the report on the Neoclassicist Fylypovych: “We all knew Drai-Khmara very well as a Ukrainian nationalist who had occupied quite a prominent place in the nationalist circles owing to his nationalist literary works (poems and articles on history and literature). A characteristic moment in his activities is that in one of his works, Swans, Drai-Khmara called on nationalist writers not to give up their stand. When proletarian critics exposed the counterrevolutionary essence of this poem disguised as symbolism, Drai-Khmara published an untrustworthy explanation of this poem in the newspaper Proletarskaya Pravda.”

The overall linguistic style of this fragment amply proves how “true” Fylypovych’s confessions were. We can find the same in the defendant Drai-Khmara’s “petition” of Jan. 19, 1936, to the local NKVD department chief Samoilov. He attaches the label of “nationalistic” to the Neoclassicists’ literary activities and links Neoclassicism with nationalism, which he has resolutely “broken with.” A good result of the 1930s interrogation techniques! It is also there that Drai-Khmara allegedly defines nationalism: “What has stood between me and the social revolution for a long time is nationalism, which I mistakenly interpreted as serving my people.” The farce of this and other similar statements is obvious. A human (poet Drai-Khmara) could not have rejected what was his essence as a citizen and member of the Ukrainian community.

The Ukrainian national idea, in which a socio-humanistic linchpin united the national and the common human, dominated in Drai-Khmara’s life and oeuvre. According to Asher, Drai-Khmara felt he was a true Ukrainian in 1915–1917 in Petrograd, where he did Slavic studies at the local university as a professorial scholar. He confessed to his wife Nina that he had identified himself as a Ukrainian in the northern Russian city and, once he had embarked on this road, he would rather die than veer off it. This turned out to be a fatal promise: he prematurely died at a Kolyma prison dungeon on Jan. 19, 1939.

The poet began his Ukrainization with changing his name: Mykhailo Drai became Drai-Khmara because, for some reason, the name Drai sounded German in Petrograd. In Petrograd, he was a member of the association of Ukrainian students and attended lectures delivered in the Ukrainian language by Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s brother Oleksandr. “Father began to live and think in a new way,” Asher says.

In May 1917 he came back to Kyiv to take an active part in the national renaissance of his nation. In 1918–1923 he worked at Kamianets-Podilsky State University — first as associate professor and then as full professor at the Department of General Slavic Studies. The interrogation minutes quote him as saying that his activities were counterrevolutionary and his world outlook was nationalistic. “In 1918–1923 I was a professor at Kamianets-Podilsky University, where there were no non-nationalists.” He calls this university a bulwark of nationalism and a place for educating students in a pronounced nationalist direction. It is, in essence, a neat and right note!

The poet’s first published collection Prorosten (The Offshoot) comprised the poems written in 1919–1926. They reflect, to some extent, the evolution of the Neoclassicist poet’s views — from an undisguised escape from reality to a sincere aspiration to be imbued with the exalted idea of a new era in an industrial and socialist Ukraine. A desire to be part of a new era sounds in the poems “To M. Kvyliovy. Fields Like a Headscarf in Bloody Stripes” (1923), “In Khortytsia” (1930), “A City of the Future” (1930), “Donbas” (1930), etc.

It seems only natural that the new poems (of a Neoclassicist esthete!) contain industrial vocabulary, such as ‘electric age,’ ‘Dnipro station,’ ‘factories are rising,’ ‘iron-winged dreams,’ ‘iron stripes,’ ‘smokestacks,’ etc. Yet, from 1930 onwards, the motif of the future shows certain anxiety and caution (“A City of the Future” and “Nightmare”). This is why, unlike most of his contemporaries, he did not exactly succeed in singing praises of the allegedly achieved socialist ideal. Conversely, his patriotic poems are full of sincerity and heartiness. These are, above all, the poems dedicated to Ukraine without which the poet could not even imagine his further life (“Then I Saw that I Would Die without Her” (“I Cast No Curses on My Destiny”) and which he loved “from top to bottom” (“I came to love you / In the fifth, hungry, spring…”).

A number of poems are reflections aroused by reminiscences of his homelands, the time of childhood (“Cherkasy”), and memorable journeys across Ukraine (“At Rudansky’s Grave,” “In Khortytsia,” and “Chernihiv”). What stands apart are the sonnet “Kamianets” and the poem “A Winter Fairy Tale (Kyiv at Dawn from my Window”). Both have a noticeable subtext. In the former, an alarming mood is conveyed through associations: the bloody horrors of the Middle Ages and the dawns of the past and futures conflagrations). The sonnet was written in 1930. Dziuba says that “we find something different” in the 1930s. “A Winter Fairy Tale” (1935) describes the image of a fire hidden under the ice of pulsating arteries which one could clearly interpret as prophesies of the future. Also telling is the image of fire in the sonnet “Miracle” (1930): “Podil is on fire. Fire, fire, fire…”

What really strikes a chord is the poet’s memory of Podillia as Ustym Karmeliuk’s birthplace (“A Farewell to Podillia”), a place of fertile wheat fields (“I Dreamed I Saw Podillia Again”), the homeland of the writer A. Svydnytsky (“Cliffs”), and a phenomenon of nature (“Kamianets”). Of great significance in these poems are such figurative symbols as the sun, Karmeliuk’s knife, the hot earth, a little white church, and a rural house. The poet identifies himself as an admirer of Ukrainian old-time values and eternal Ukrainian sanctities. He expresses sad farewell feelings. In a few bold strokes, the poet describes the decline and even complete fall of the countryside (a prophetic intuition indeed):

“And where are the rugged roofs?
Only deep snowdrifts all around.
And not a single house in sight
As if the village is dead.”

The poet’s soul is tormented by the great sufferings that befell the Ukrainian people. Thus, the theme of the revolution’s tragic consequences is embedded in his poetry. In the poem “Light Fog over the Lake” (1926–1927), this theme is described via the images of a “black gallows,” “corpses,” and a “rotten attic”:

“A frosty and old sadness
Tormented my heart
Like the history of Ukraine…
It is a ghost, a demon
of gray-haired ruin.”

We can find similar things in the poems “Every Day Somewhere on a Streetcar” (1926), “Symphony” (1934), and “Spanish Ballad” (1934). Aptly enough, Drai-Khmara conjures up the image of Utopia (“Thomas More,” 1935) as a figure of deceptions and inevitable disappointments. This mood was also typical of the poet himself (“Nightmare,” 1930): “I am rushing to an abyss, a Gehenna, /Where non-existence rules supreme and dark chaos sleeps / All I can see is terrible eternal darkness…” The “fiery writing on the wall” (“mene, tekel, upharsin”) can also serve as a dire warning to the current powers-that-be. Biblical idioms thus reinforce the poem’s ideological message. And what sadness pervades the poet’s revelation: “Great souls do not blossom in this country, / Nor is Mahatma Gandhi our fighter!”

What seems ideologically motivated and artistically attractive is the abundance of traditional (national) Ukrainian colors — “gold” and “blue” — in the collection “The Offshoot.” This was also one of the typical features of the Neoclassicists’ poetic style. In a shrewd observation of Naienko, this was skillfully done by Zerov who used the colors of “gold” and “blue” to call for Ukraine’s national renaissance and thus showed his national identity. In Drai-Khmara’s palette of styles, blue and yellow colors occupy a prominent place: “gold-braided autumn,” “blue skyline,” “blue springtime,” “let the new day shine in blue,” “blue and golden thunderbolts,” “yellow and red dawns are on fire, a blue wine is bubbling,” “my boat is in a blue circle, and a golden oar sighs,” “blue banks and a gondola of gold,” etc.

The poet amply uses various ways of artistic expression in his landscape-related lyric to clearly show his innate, not acquired, patriotism and love of “dewy fields” (Dziuba). We can see the ideal combination of visual and auditory figures, a play of alliterations and intonations, and folk-song rhythms. This applies to the poems “Oh the Sun Is Aloft” (1922), “A Sweet August. The Fifth Sun”(1926), “Hello, Curly-Haired July!” (1926), “Early in the Morning” (1926), “The Evening Put On a Blue Veil’ (1927), “A Letter to Oksana” (1934), and others. The poet’s admiration for his homeland’s nature can be exemplified by a fragment that creates a beautiful symphony of sounds and colors:

“And why not write about
the grapes that ripen
in the garden
reaching out to the sun
as if a child folds his fingers
in a prayers?
About your little orchard, where
apples and pears are
already bursting
with sweet wine juice?
About the hives,
where golden honeybees
buzz around, bringing
over fragrant honey
on their legs from
milk-white buckwheat?”

Are the quoted words not the apotheosis of natural beauty? The worship of and admiration for beauty and “superb plasticity,” so inherent in the Neoclassicists and occurring in Drai-Khmara’s works, show the poetical features of an unconventional school. Latter-day researchers call this a version of renaissance modernism with such inherent features as allegory, a perfect artistic form, the use of a subtext, etc.

Drai-Khmara’s long poem “The Turn” (1922–1927) is what Dziuba called a true “passionate monologue of love for Ukraine.” The poet chose not to publish the poem, considering it “too abstract and melancholic.” It is easy today to read its “abstractness” and “melancholy.” The rejection of Soviet reality, so typical of the Neoclassicists, is amply revealed here by way of a subtext (allegory). The poem offers the horrible pictures of the post-revolutionary collapse of the Ukrainian lifestyle:

“The sea seems to be going yellow:
uncut rye is standing,
waving its empty ears
and waiting for reapers.
But they are not coming.
It is desolate here –
no hamlets, no trees,
only boundless steppes
all around.”

The earth is mother for a lyrical poet, and he, “Gaea’s son,” falls into “the embrace of motherly earth” and “fervently kisses her hot black bosom.”

Also present in the poem is the theme of Famine, the Holodomor. Depicting the horrors of this rural woe, including the pictures of cannibalism, is by far the strongest point in the poem. Asked by the narrator, peasants are telling him the story of Mount Terrible. This name is quite in line with what happened in the village. A half-mad woman, Solomia, killed her children and began to eat them. The villagers decided to subject her to a terrible punishment: they forced her to dig up a grave and lie down there alive. The biblical picture of Christ’s crucifixion on Golgotha (a guard by Solomia’s coffin, who refuses to give the “culprit” water, etc.), included into the poem’s plot, is so transparent that it loses its allegorical aspect and reinforces the poem’s chief idea — condemnation of those who (it is quite clear who) ruined the countryside and the chaos of the post-revolutionary era.

The national question is also an integral part of the poem. The peasants confess to the narrator that they are themselves to blame for the Ruin: “If you are lying idle, you will never build a state.” An inadequate feeling of national identity in fact caused a defeat of the national liberation struggle led by the UNR. The pain of the past losses is intensified by the image of an imaginary Cossack who asks painfully: “Tell me why, what for did they kill me?”

The poem ends in an optimistic key: the peasants believe that there will be “better days,” for “the blood was not shed in vain — it roused our consciousness.” In an apparent attempt to confirm these words, the author draws an impressionist picture of the landscape, which shows extremely convincing figures of “golden boats” that vanish in the “gray-blue air,” and the sun, “like a golden barrel,” is rising above the waking steppe in a radiant high sky. This metaphoricalness clearly characterizes the poet not as an apolitical individual but as an artist with a pro-Ukrainian etatist mood and a sense of self-assertion. The poet’s following vision is really striking:

“I will die
but what I believe in
will remain behind
and live on without me.
It will live on indeed!”