Yevhen Malaniuk: Contemplating The Poetry of Lina Kostenko
Judging by the archives of Yevhen Malaniuk, which are stored at the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences in the USA, the poet discovered Lina Kostenko’s poetry in the late 1950s, and immediately designated her leader of the group of Ukrainian poets known as the shestydesiatnyky [sixtiers]. One of the 14 cardboard boxes that hold Malaniuk’s home library contains clippings from Soviet Ukrainian newspapers and magazines with poems by Ivan Drach, Iryna Zhylenko, Vasyl Symonenko, Mykola Vinhranovsky, Vitaliy Korotych, and Lina Kostenko. When I was examining his newspaper clippings from Molod Ukrayiny [Youth of Ukraine], Radianska Ukrayina [Soviet Ukraine], Robitnycha Hazeta [Workers’ Gazette], Literaturna Ukrayina [Literary Ukraine], and magazine clippings from Dnipro, Ranok [Morning], Ukrayina, and Zhovten [October], I noticed an interesting detail: Yevhen Malaniuk had highlighted lines in poems by Ivan Drach and Mykola Vinhranovsky with margin notes that read “this is from Lina” and “Lina.” Later I noted that Malaniuk had collected Lina Kostenko’s poetry in the form of newspaper clippings, reprints, or handwritten copies. I even tried to compile a list of poems, which ran to more than four dozen titles that Yevhen Malaniuk discovered on the pages of the above-mentioned Soviet publications and in journals published in the Diaspora: Svoboda [Freedom] (New Jersey, USA), Ukrayinske Narodne Slovo [Ukrainian People’s Word] (Pittsburg, USA), Khliborob [Farmer] (Curitiba, Brazil), and Novi Dni [New Days] (Toronto, Canada). These publications included a selection of poems from Kostenko’s first collection Prominnia Zemli [The Earth’s Rays]: “V chasy vesnianoho rozryvu” [When Spring Is Bursting], “Nema komu skazaty” [Nobody to Tell], “Opadaye vyshnevy tsvit” [The Cherry Blossoms Are Falling], “Pershi kroky” [First Steps], or individual poems “Korabel” [Ship], “Ya dodomu pyshu” [I Am Writing Home], “Baba Vikhola” [Grandma Blizzard], “Kobzarevi” [To the Bard], and others.
Yevhen Malaniuk had a profound admiration for the poetry of the Sixtiers, proof of which can even be found in his poetic works. Moreover, the Sixtiers revived, albeit briefly, a living image of Ukraine in Malaniuk’s poetry. In my opinion, the secrets of his poetical thinking deserve further exploration. It so happened that in Malaniuk’s poetry of the second period the question of a globalized world completely overshadowed the Ukrainian question and pushed to the sidelines the dialog between the poet and his homeland, which was evident in Malaniuk’s poetry of the interwar period. This was partly due to the catastrophic outcome of World War II, which made the dream of Ukrainian statehood even more elusive. But suddenly, in his poem “Holosy” [Voices] (1963) he heard “an inexplicable cry — like a final sigh of desperation” from Ukraine. He first heard it “across the mountains, valleys, and oceans” in the late 1950s, but was afraid to jinx it. Even in “Holosy” he was restraining his emotions:
Unable to trace the melody or make out the sense
Of those words, muffled by spaces and distances,
The only thing you feel is that through the years, events, and dates
Somebody painfully dear, who was long thought dead,
Has miraculously survived!
In his awe and wonder the poet adds the final brushstrokes to the image of an awakened spiritual leader “whose sunken eyes are still ablaze / And the fire of life is not yet dead.” In the final stanza the image of the “tragic optimist” sounds for the first time in his poetry of the second period:
Mutilated and defiled is your body, my Homeland,
But the Spirit is still alive with storms of future days.
The poet was convinced that only through spiritual progress would Ukraine achieve a future of its own. He sensed the kindred souls of his younger brothers in verse, who were “painfully dear” to him: Lina Kostenko, Ivan Drach, Vasyl Symonenko, and Mykola Vinhranovsky. Another dominant idea in Malaniuk’s poem is his consciously accentuated concern for those who “survived” and whether their voices can last over time.
Malaniuk’s references to the Sixtiers in his prose works are filled with concern for the newborn spiritual leaders of the nation. He thoroughly understood the complete contradiction between the writers’ spiritual independence and the ideology of the totalitarian society in which they had to work. He even partially predicted the dramatic outcome of the Sixtiers’ spiritual uprising. Analyzing the “satanic sensitivity of the Soviet machinery of little Russianism” in his Malorosiystvo [Little Russianism] (1959), Malaniuk wrote: “A recent incident involving the poetess Lina Kostenko is very illustrative. After publishing only two collections of her poetry, she ended up with her mouth gagged. And not because of her poetic themes (a certain V. Tkachenko writes about love and nightingales all she wants without too much trouble), although Lina Kostenko was reckless enough to write about the sea, forgetting that naval subjects have been officially taboo for Ukrainians since the late 1920s. No, it was not because of the themes but because of her excessively confident tone, excessively independent intonation, and excessively brilliant literary culture, which, in retrospect, rose to the level of the Neoclassicists of the 1920s: Pluzhnyk and even Yanovsky. That’s a shame, for she is a real poet with her own style. This sealed her fate. She was smothered even before she could blossom.”
Yet the focus is not so much on Malaniuk’s unhappy prediction of the Soviet government’s persecution of Lina Kostenko (the 16-year period during which her works were hushed up was preceded by the publication in 1961 of her collection Mandrivka Sertsia [Journey of the Heart]), as on his unerring judgment: already in 1959 he had included Lina Kostenko in the ranks of the Ukrainian intellectual elite, the guarantee of the Ukrainian nation’s immortality. Malaniuk points this out in his passages about the “uninterruptible process” of Ukrainian spiritual culture. Malaniuk first touched on this question in his 1925 poem “Nepromynalnist” [Perpetuity]: “They oppress, cripple, and poison the people, // Curse and cast evil spells. // It seems that no trace has remained, // Only turncoats and janissaries. // But here go Stefanyk and Kulish, // Kotsiubynsky, Lesia — flowers of the steppe // Of a suffering land, // Independent children of the people!”
Then came the Neoclassicists, Pluzhnyk and Yanovsky. Yet, after a while it again seemed “that the last trace has been lost.” Then, a poetess with a mighty intellectual force and civic stance with her subtle sense of the poetic word, a genius of national conscience and rebellion, was born.
Neither of Malaniuk’s prophecies was wrong. He closely followed the critics’ attacks against Lina Kostenko. His archive contains numerous criticisms published in Ukrainian periodicals in the early 1960s (including a critical article by S. Telniuk (1964), written over with Malaniuk’s comments, and Lina Kostenko’s reply to this criticism). Despite the optimism of his “Holosy” [Voices], Malaniuk was aware that the imperialistic government was preparing to gag all the Sixtiers. In 1966 Malaniuk prepared another article for his column Knyhy Zvidty [Books from There] in the monthly Lysty do Pryyateliv [Letters to friends], which was published in New York under the editorship of M. Shlemkevych. This time he focused on Iryna Zhylenko’s first book of poetry entitled Solo on Solfa, whose poems “captured attention with their fresh imagery, non-hackneyed subjects, and independent tone.” Malaniuk was concerned about the unfair bad press that the collection received simultaneously from three authors in different publications — M. Rudnytsky, Yaroslav Mykytan, and L. Sapov. Malaniuk wrote: “The attack against poor Iryna is a concerted effort, much like the previous attack against the first small collection by Lina Kostenko. Its (“national”) form has changed, but the content has remained the same — “international” — in line with instructions from the Central Committee.”
He continued to follow the works of Lina Kostenko. His archive contains a small notebook with a number of quotes from Lina Kostenko’s poem “Zoriany Integral” [Stellar Integral] (1963) and other works, which he copied down with an unsteady hand. It later turned out that he made these notations during an airplane trip. On September 18, 1966, Malaniuk took Kostenko’s poetry on his flight to Toronto; his extracts clearly need no comment.
The epoch turned us into poets,
The epoch powered us with a current,
Connecting our electrified souls
To the grid of high-voltage thoughts.
* * *
An Ode to Enemies If I have muscles in my soul,
I owe it to clashes with you.
May you be praised for this!
But stay alert, and let me warn you:
If you bend me into arc,
It will probably be an electric arc.
* * *
I have chosen my fate.
* * *
The end of an integral
And higher mathematics of this age:
The sum of infinitely small things
Adds up to something infinitely large.
It was late 1966. Arrests and persecutions had already started in Ukraine, and Malaniuk was well aware of this. On the second to last page of his notebook he wrote: “September 18-19, 1966. Toronto. Their lives will follow a straight line — don’t waste your energy.” As if seeking consolation from the bitter awareness of the inevitable, on the last page Malaniuk once again luxuriates in the poetry of Lina Kostenko:
Grandma blizzard, gray-haired blizzard
Came flying in on a broom,
Knocking on doors and drifting through the village.
Would any kind soul spare a sieve?
To sift out white grain
For the fields that still lie fallow.
Frozen fingers — the rye is frozen cold,
I have no sieve, please spare one!
I was riding through the field, breathing down on earth.
White blizzard, grey-haired blizzard.
Meanwhile, another find in the poet’s archive indicates that Malaniuk was troubled by what he was reading. On September 20, 1966, he wrote on a separate sheet of paper:
“Even Drach has faint notes or undercurrents of slavery. And even others do. Even Rylsky and Khvylovy. Symonenko is a ‘ferocious scream of a slave who saw the light’ (an excerpt from Malaniuk’s poem “Shevchenko” (1925) — Author). Meanwhile, Lina is the child of war, much like Zerov, Narbut, Yanovsky, Antonenko, Bazhan, and Pidmohylny. And here is our goal: spiritual sovereignty, Ukraine in the hearts and minds. They will not forgive Lina for this.”
Bearing the latter statement in mind, I’m perfectly prepared to believe the story I heard in the town of Mount Laurel outside Philadelphia from the esteemed Mrs. Nataliya Danylenko. In 1967 the Philadelphia branch of the Association of Ukrainian Engineers of America invited Malaniuk for a soirОe. Malaniuk was staying with the Danylenkos, who told him that they were planning to visit Kyiv. He asked Mrs. Danylenko to find Lina Kostenko in Kyiv, kneel down before her, and say that it was the poet Yevhen Malaniuk kneeling before her, saluting her as the most outstanding poetess of Ukraine.
