Mykola Khvyliovy’s European Choice
Mykola Khvyliovy’s personality is one that will always arouse the keen minds of his descendants. He soared over Ukraine like a shooting star that faded untimely but never completely disappeared. That so many people attend soirees in his memory is irrefutable proof of this. The vital ideas that Khvyliovy cast on Ukrainian society still reverberate and will obviously remain part of the Ukrainian spiritual heritage forever. These ideas will continue to provoke debates, reappraisals, any kind of dynamic processes that make up the essence of national identity.
Clearly, it is only possible to understand the gist of this person’s views against the backdrop of the epoch he lived in. During the revolution and civil war, Ukrainian society experienced a national rebirth and brought forth a qualitatively new generation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia aware of their national roots. It is representatives of the advanced Ukrainian intellectuals who, at first aided by older national communists, such as Mykola Skrypnyk, marched in the first ranks of those who championed Ukrainization (a policy designed to make the communist regime more Ukrainian and thus acceptable to most people here — Ed.) in the 1920s. They believed they were in the vanguard of a struggle for a new and just society, in which Ukraine would take its rightful place as a free and equal state among other countries.
Mykola Khvyliovy was a leading figure among the prominent intellectuals of this Ukrainian Renaissance, of those who tried to combine their views and the idea of Ukrainian national emancipation. He came, well before others did, to the line that every honest Ukrainian was destined to reach and ask himself who he must serve after all. But Khvyliovy remained possessed with the idea of wonder commune beyond the mountain, which he thought might be a synthesis of two — national and communist — philosophies. All that Khvyliovy was worried about was the slavish complex of the typical Ukrainian whom he wanted to turn into a full-fledged nationally conscious person. He was aware that long captivity left a stigma on the Ukrainian nation’s soul. This in turn arouses the feeling of Ukrainian cultural inferiority. Therefore the artist frantically tried to cleanse Ukrainian culture from the feeling of being slaves and second-rate.
Mykola Khvyliovy put forward the ideal of a European, a citizen, a creator of cultural, social and political values, a person who moves History. He counterpoised this ideal to that of a provincial who can only rise to the level of prosvitianstvo (village self-education societies). With this in view, Khvyliovy urged Ukrainians to orient themselves toward the cultural processes of Europe, not Russia. In his words, “not only the Little Russian spirit, Ukrainophilia and prosvitianstvo but also worthless Moscowphilia” had come to an end. Khvyliovy treated this as an ideological breakthrough in establishing the philosophy of a nationally conscious Ukrainian who, instead of being an epigone of Moscow’s culture, would rather create values of his own, simultaneously drawing on the rich treasury of Western European culture.
He held that Ukraine must look to Europe, rather than Moscow for the model of its own future. Of course, Khvyliovy was not alone in his quest for independence. Incidentally, even those who closely guarded their true feelings heeded such creators as Pavlo Fylypovych, Mykhailo Drai-Khmara, Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Mykola Kulish, Mykola Zerov (and many others — Ed.). Under their influence, many of our compatriots managed to throw out the malevolent phantom of all that was slavish and become true Ukrainians who sensed people’s power latent in the Ukrainian countryside.
Events of the 1930s make it impossible to maintain that this symbiosis, or the combination of the countryside as a guardian of the Ukrainian spirit and the Ukrainian intelligentsia, which made unprecedented efforts of national rebirth in the 1920s, offending those in power in Moscow (on April 26, 1926, Stalin sent a letter to Kharkiv condemning Khvyliovy by name — Ed.). In order to stem this all-embracing tide of national revival, the latter decided to behead the nation by wiping out its intelligentsia as the people’s leading element and then the countryside as its nutrient basis. They thus tried to kill the Ukrainian spirit altogether.
Frustrated over the tragedy of ethnocide, manmade famine, and suppression of a free reborn Ukraine and its own way of social, economic and cultural development, Khvyliovy committed suicide. He killed a dreamer who had inspired thousands to tilt at the windmills of an uncertain future. Shooting himself in the head, Khvyliovy broke the communist deadlock he himself had made in his ideological enthusiasm, forgetting the eternal human values. He also forgot the feelings of Good and Evil. Sacrificing his life for the unattainable ideals of his wonderful commune beyond the mountain, Khvyliovy thus defended not only his own but also his nation’s dignity in the eyes of history.
THE DAY’S REFERENCE
Mykola KHVYLIOVY (Nikolai Fitilev) was born in 1893 at the village of Trostianets, Sumy province, into a teachers’ family. He was expelled from the Bohodukhiv High School for being member of a clandestine society during the Revolution of 1905, saw action at the front lines of the First World and Civil Wars (he fought against Denikin’s troops in the Red Army).
In 1920 Khvyliovy, worker at a Kharkiv plant at the time, began to write poetry. He achieved success in 1923, when he published a prose book Blue Etudes. His work I (Romantic), Sanatorium Zone, From the Laboratory, Woodsnipes, and others actually opened a new page in Ukrainian literature. The public opinion about Khvyliovy’s creative work ranged from unconditional support to utter rejection (although a 1926 survey of book-lending institutions showed him to be far and away the most read Soviet Ukrainian writer — Ed.).
In 1925-1928 Mykola Khvyliovy was in the focus of a debate over a conflict in the ranks of writers who tried to find a golden mean between mass elite culture. He penned such highly polemic pamphlets as Quo vadis, Thoughts against the Current, and Ukraine or Little Russia? The writer was always under secret police pressure and surveillance. He remained a revolutionary romanticist and simultaneously the motive force of national revival (one of the great promoters of Ukrainization) to the end of his life. The slogan, “Away from Moscow!” which he put forward was in fact a sentence that Mykola Khvyliovy carried out with his own hands on May 13, 1933.
