Osyp ZINKEVYCH
YOUNG POETRY IN UKRAINE
The Older Generation of the Sixtiers
After the Second World War, there was almost no noticeable literary growth in Ukraine. This gap was filled by the middle generation, which both grew up and learned to write during the Stalinist era. A great deal of these poets’ work is marked by its formulaic nature, and their weakest aspect was their “ode-writing” in honor of Stalin, the Russian people, the Party, and every “distinguished” milkmaid and swineherd.
It was not until the 1950s that a young contingent entered literature in Soviet Ukraine. This primarily included Lina Kostenko, Tamara Kolomiiets, M. Klymenko, M. Som, Nadiia Prykhodko, V. Bondar, V. Luchuk, Yu. Petrenko, O. Stryzheniuk, and a few others who had not yet managed to rise above mediocrity.
Undoubtedly, Lina Kostenko is considered the most brilliant figure in this group; some in Ukraine see in her a new Lesia Ukrainka, and in the emigration, an Olena Teliha.
This group’s arrival in literature provoked an outcry in Ukraine from the Party’s political officers. They were not given the opportunity to publish, just as the very youngest are not allowed today. While the older and middle generations followed a well-trodden path, searching for something new and “different,” this group took the first steps: in their works, they introduced innovation—innovation of thought, innovation of ideas.
For this distinctive, still very timid innovation, from which panegyrics gradually began to disappear and in which profound human values became the foundation, the young poets were subjected not only to the traditional Soviet campaign of attacks, but the Party also began to attach “labels” to them (a “label” is the modern designation in Ukraine for “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism”).
When the young poets stood apart from political and public life, they were forced to get involved; when they refused to write panegyrics, they were told to “at least mention it in passing,” for otherwise their path into literature would be closed. Just recently, L. Novychenko (in “Literaturna Gazeta,” no. 8, from January 26, 1962), while reviewing a new collection of poems by L. Kostenko, demanded that she write more on topics of “civic and socio-political significance” and become more “active” in “public” life.
This older generation of the youngest poets has already secured for itself (though not without difficulty) its rightful place in the literature of Soviet Ukraine, as well as in Ukrainian literature in general. It is still young and has many opportunities ahead.
And although the prospects for the creative work of this generation, like that of the youngest, are not very rosy, we can still hope to hear much that is interesting, original, and new from them more than once.
The Youngest Generation of the Sixtiers
The youngest generation of the Sixtiers came to literature in exceptionally difficult circumstances: it was growing up while Stalin was still being glorified, and before its eyes the “cult of personality” was thrown into the mud, the names of cities and streets were changed, portraits of Stalin vanished overnight from university auditoriums, and his books from libraries. It did not yet have the courage to ask aloud: why, and what now? Before its eyes, M. Skrypnyk, M. Kulish, O. Dosvitnii, H. Epik, L. Kurbas, and O. Oles were resurrected, now honored by the very same people who yesterday had denied them, as Judas denied Christ.
This generation was evidently faced with thousands of questions, unsolved mysteries, and untold truths about the past. Thus, a rebellion was born within it, a rebellion against the past and against an unclear and mysterious present. It is no surprise that a large portion of this creative youth breaks free from Party influence and is lost to the ruling system and regime.
D. Pavlychko, speaking at the Third Plenum of the Union of Writers of Ukraine, sees that the defection of some of the (creative) youth, who have become disillusioned with reality and are pessimistically inclined, is a result of the cult of personality and the “loss of writers’ means of influence,” and not because “this youth has started wearing narrow trousers” (the influence of the West).
The young, talented critic Ivan Dziuba says that “one only has to imagine the very complex ideological and psychological atmosphere in which our youth was formed during the time of the cult of personality, and we will see what a huge field of activity there is for a writer. Some might say that one should not dig around in this old past. But how can we understand the present without having sorted out the past?” That is why I. Dziuba himself delves into the depths of the sources. From his speeches, we can learn that he not only knows contemporary Soviet Ukrainian literature perfectly, but also knows Western literature and has even reached the creators of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 30s! And he is only in his twenties.
As is known, the young poets’ drive for innovation and modernism became noticeable somewhat earlier in Russia. And this is understandable. The liberally-minded youth in Moscow had their own publication, “Yunost” (“Youth”), which was independent of the Komsomol, and its editorial board did not have a single Komsomol worker (!). In Moscow, young writers had what creative Ukrainian youth could not even dream of. The editor of “Dnipro” himself, O. Pidsukha, admitted that for many years he rejected the poems of one of the trinity of most prominent poets—M. Vinhranovskyi (“Literaturna Gazeta,” no. 91, November 17, 1961). The “Radianskyi Pysmennyk” publishing house had rejected a book of poems by I. Drach, and “Molod”—one by V. Miniailo. Many other young poets were denied space in a number of newspapers and journals simply because they refused to follow the well-trodden, traditional paths of the older literary generation.
And only in the spring of 1961 did a turning point come. The first steps in this direction were taken by Kyiv’s “Literaturna Gazeta,” followed by “Vitchyzna.” “Dnipro” remained in its old positions, adhering to a line that has recently been described as neo-Stalinist.
And so new, interesting names appeared in the literature of Soviet Ukraine.
Who are they, what interests them, and what do they want?
The most popular among the young modernists in Moscow are two poets of Ukrainian origin—Y. Yevtushenko (who wrote in his poem “The Fly,” in the journal “Yunost”—“she wore torn panties, read Hemingway, and approved of Picasso”) and Andrei Voznesensky, as well as the Russian Sergei Polikarpov. Last year, they were subjected to harsh criticism, accused of the “rotten influences” of bourgeois ideology, with which they supposedly wanted to corrupt Soviet youth with “nihilism and pessimism.”
In Ukraine, we have our own “trinity,” completely different from the one mentioned—Ivan Drach, Yevhen Hutsalo, and Mykola Vinhranovskyi. Then there is a whole group of young, interesting poets who have recently produced a number of interesting, new, and original works—these are, first and foremost, V. Korotych, M. Synhaivskyi, V. Miniailo, V. Shevchuk, V. Drozd, H. Kyrychenko, F. Boiko, and several other lesser-known ones.
It is interesting that they do not even try to imitate the Russians, but, on the contrary, have pretensions of being “luminaries” for the entire Soviet Union. This is noticeable in certain poems and even in the words of I. Dziuba about I. Drach: “I heard the voice of a new, contemporary Ukrainian poet—truly contemporary, truly Ukrainian, truly a poet. And it seemed to me that precisely such a person could, in the future, speak through our Ukrainian literature (is it not worth hoping for?) that vital, contemporary word for which readers throughout the entire Union are so thirsty—would that not be a happiness for us all?” (“Literaturna Gazeta,” no. 56, July 18, 1961).
In the emigration, this new, truly new poetry goes almost unnoticed (is it not out of fear of being accused of “Zminovikhivstvo” or “Khvylovism”?), but in Ukraine, it does not pass without a trace. At the Third Plenum of the Union of Writers of Ukraine, O. Honchar (read his “So That the Light Might Glow”) spoke of this poetry: “There are many disputes and discussions now about this our young, exuberant poetry. Some accept it unconditionally, as something new, unusual, long awaited by the thirsty reader’s soul, while others are inclined to see in the young poetry only fruitless artifice, pseudo-innovation, and some have even started trying to apply labels to the young poets out of old habit. The broad reading public has also noticed this unusual phenomenon in our poetry, has begun to buzz, to argue, and this fact in itself is significant... It [criticism] correctly notes in the work of the young elements of true innovation, the tension of a young, diligent mind that strives to understand the most complex questions of life, to distinguish true ideals from false ones, to determine its own, human place in society. One cannot fail to note in the young poets the persistent search for new artistic form, new rhythms, new music of the word. Young poetry is in some ways truly a continuation of the early Tychyna, when he was perhaps the first of our poets to gaze into the cosmos and hear its wondrous music; the monumentality of Dovzhenko, his brilliant cinematic frames and frescoes, also inspires the young. One can feel that such models inspire them. We are also gladdened by the fairly high culture, intellectuality, and also the demandingness and attention to the word in their poetry, their undisguised aversion to cliché and formula.”
O. Honchar’s words are the most characteristic, sound assessment of the young poets.
When it comes to the youngest poets (with I. Dziuba and I. Drach as spokesmen), they are, supposedly, uncompromisingly opposed to the older generation, accusing it of the traditionalism of the “cult of personality” era, of dogmatism, and of creating, both in the past and even now, a so-called “epidemic literature”—paeans of praise on various occasions, in honor of Party leaders, etc. (a completely new expression), of being cliché and formulaic. They, it is said, completely negate the older generation, and even the middle one, and instead turn to the early works of some of the older writers and to those who were liquidated in the 1920s and 30s. Defending themselves against attacks, the young poets declare that in modernizing their work, introducing innovation, and speaking out against dogmatism and traditionalism, they are not doing it to destroy socialist realism, not to attack it; this, they say, is not inspired by the ideas of the West, but all comes from the depths of a living person's soul in the name of something magnificent, the clear outlines of which they themselves, perhaps, do not yet see.
Some Thoughts on the Young Poets
S. Kryzhanivskyi: “It [the poetry of the young] provoked not only murmurs of praise but also cries of condemnation against the young poets... Their desire to speak in their own voice, to feel and reflect the rhythm, the music of the new era, deserves all approval; their philosophical, aesthetic-poetic conception of the world arises under the predominant influences of life, which is what defines their innovative, not epigonic, development.”
Mykola Sheremet: “The effort to write differently from others stems not from an abundance of strength and knowledge, but, on the contrary, from immaturity. Instead of uncritically praising the first exercises of a talented poetic youth and being indifferent to their writing style, it would be very fitting for our criticism to point out the muted ideological tone in the verses of many young poets, and even a clear lack of ideology (that is—the absence of communist ideology.—O.Z.). I welcome the young poets for their searching, for their attention to contemporary problems, for arousing a reaction and stirring the calm, quiet surface of our poetry of recent years, for forcing us to argue and fight for the vital, contemporary word, but I will be irreconcilable to tricks and gimmickry, to the mockery of the image, of the logic of thought... A writer should not forget that his works must first and foremost be ideologically saturated.”
“Literaturna Gazeta,” editorial: “The verses of young poets, especially the very youngest, are often seen as part of a single creative stream, works of hyperbolic-cosmic character. In reality, flamboyant hyperbole is only one of the features of this poetry... What most brings the youngest together is something else, namely their search for a poetry of highly intellectual thought, a poetry of active volitional tension, and their generous assimilation of the traditions of national and world classics, including some of the best achievements of contemporary Western European literature.”
K. Volynskyi: “Did the young really manage to convey everything new in life, the spirit of the age, the spiritual state of our contemporary most fully? It is difficult to agree with this... The youth should more often ask themselves the question: will people, the broad readership, understand their poems? Then the young poets would probably not publish such things as, for example, the poem ‘The Trees’ (M. Vinhranovskyi) or ‘Ukrainian Horses Over Paris’ (I. Drach).”
O. Pidsukha: “In past years, very many first books of poetry were published. But no disputes unfolded around them. Everything there was clear and simple. And such a great, serious conversation as the one we are having today could not have arisen. There are rumors that the younger generation is setting itself in opposition to the older ones...”
I. Dziuba: “The meaning of the young poets’ debut lies not only in free verse. In their poetry, complex associations play a large role. The young have a refined imagination, and for them poetry is not the popularization of syllogisms, but a way of thinking.
The young poets are people of considerable culture. They win over readers with their culture.”
Here are a few lines and thoughts about the emergence of a group of young poets in Ukraine. There are many more, but it is impossible to include them all here. Among these thoughts are positive and negative assessments of the young poets. We believe it is too early to make any prognoses. But the very fact of a group of new, young, and original poets entering the literary arena should be regarded as a positive phenomenon.
We believe this is only the beginning. Therefore, we do not want to say our final word on the creative work of the young poets in Ukraine. We will surely return to these problems again more than once.
* Article by O. Zinkevych, published in 1962 in the journal “Smoloskyp.” Reprinted in the newspaper “Literaturna Ukraina” No. 8 (5296) on February 26, 2009.
Osyp ZINKEVYCH
The Party’s Offensive Against Young Poetry in Ukraine
Today it is difficult to predict which paths the development of young poetry in Ukraine will take. One can already doubt whether the small cluster of young poets will be able to hold their ground at the pinnacles of their creative spirit, to rise to even higher levels of their poetic flight. But however it turns out, the year 1961 will leave a significant mark on Ukrainian literature, pointing to the strength and vitality of the Ukrainian nation, the invincibility of its fettered spirit, and will inspire new Ukrainian generations with optimism and faith that even in the most unfavorable circumstances, we are still capable of producing creators of exceptional scale, who can not only equal but also surpass the work of poets from other nations of the world.
What happened in literary Ukraine in 1961 may remind us now of the extraordinary years of the Ukrainian renaissance of the 1920s, with its fervent literary disputes, new slogans (can one forget “Away from Moscow!” by Mykola Khvylovyi?), new hopes, and that Promethean strength with which Ukraine awoke and dared.
How much is similar, and how many parallels can be drawn between then and now!
And how quickly it happened. The group of young poets—Ivan Drach, Mykola Vinhranovskyi, Yevhen Hutsalo, Vitaliy Korotych—before they had even had time to spread their creative wings, fell under the blows of Party criticism. The most hurtful was the behavior of O. Pidsukha, the political officer at the editorial board of Kyiv’s “Dnipro,” who tried with all his might to kill the creative inspiration in the young poets by rejecting their poems submitted to the editors. He spoke about this: “As editor of the journal ‘Dnipro,’ I once received many poems from M. Vinhranovskyi. We published none of them. A powerful imagistic force was noticeable, but the author could not break free from its captivity...” (“Literaturna Gazeta,” no. 91, 1961).
Other journals and newspapers also did not publish the works of the young poets, specifically the works of this small group. And it took a long struggle to get onto the pages of literary publications. It is characteristic to note here that a panic arose among the Party leaders of literature in Kyiv: they simply did not know what to do with this group of young poets, where, how, or whether to publish their works at all... A telling fact of the existing situation in Ukraine were the speeches regarding the young poets at the last congress of the Union of Writers of Ukraine, where it was said that their works were passed from one person to another, and no one knew what to do next..!
From further voices, one can conclude that a specific tactic was applied against the young poets to break their backbone, to tame them and to switch them from genuine, artistic work to Socialist Realist creativity.
On the one hand, the young poets were granted privileges: Ye. Hutsalo and I. Drach work on the editorial staff of the newspaper “Literaturna Ukraina,” and M. Vinhranovskyi at the O. Dovzhenko Film Studio as an actor and screenwriter. On the other hand, a campaign of attacks rained down on them; their appearance provoked “not only murmurs of praise,” as S. Kryzhanivskyi wrote, “but also cries of condemnation...”
Liubomyr Dmyterko, who became the spokesman for the organ of the Union of Writers of Ukraine, “Literaturna Ukraina,” in the first issue of this newspaper under its new, above-mentioned title, wrote about the young poets with a sense of regret: “‘Literaturna Gazeta’ gave whole pages to several, generally capable poets. That is very good. It is worse when, alongside genuinely interesting, talented works (which followed the Party line—O.Z.), some of Ivan Drach’s and M. Vinhranovskyi’s still immature poems appeared in our newspaper’s publications, or helpless, pretentious short stories, like the sketch by Yu. Koval” (“Literaturna Ukraina,” no. 14, February 16, 1962). The young, promising critics I. Dziuba and Ye. Sverstiuk also did not escape L. Dmyterko’s article, who, he said, preach “abstract psychologism” in literature, attach more importance to “psychological works” than to “artistic idealization,” and who... already have a whole pleiad of followers! L. Dmyterko asks, “Is this not that [psychological literature] which is rotting in the back alleys of the capitalist West?,” accusing them of imitating Freudian-Joycean psychologism and negating the “experience of progressive Russian and Ukrainian revolutionary (that is, communist.—O.Z.) literature.” When asked what these two critics accept from contemporary Soviet literature without reservations, with both mind and heart, Ivan Dziuba answered: Borys Antonenko-Davydovych’s work “Behind the Screen.” (B. Antonenko-Davydovych, a long-term prisoner of Bolshevik prisons and concentration camps, was rehabilitated in recent years and was allowed to return to Ukraine and publish again – O.Z.) He replied: “Only one thing can be said with certainty: B. Antonenko-Davydovych's gloomy work can be neither a model nor a standard for contemporary Ukrainian prose... we need,” Dmyterko continued, “works ‘illuminated by the grand ideas of the era’ (of Communism).”
And this is clear. From the very beginning, Dmyterko needed to deal not only with the young poets and prose writers but also with the critics. To seek out things that the young critics perhaps had not even thought of, to attach a new label to them, this time not nationalist, but “Freudian-Joycean.”
Despite various accusations, these young creators have now become the most popular people in Ukraine! The public began to talk, to stir. After their debut, Kyiv’s “Literaturna Gazeta” received so many responses, a number it had not known in the entire history of its existence. While in 1946 the editorial office received a total of 400 letters, and in 1956—3,069, in 1961 there were as many as 9,635! This record number is one of the signs that the people are still thinking, living, perceiving, and reacting.
A characteristic event in the Party’s offensive against the young poets was the last, XIX Congress of the Komsomol of Ukraine, where a great deal of attention was devoted to the matter of young literature. Dmytro Pavlychko, who was supposed to play the role of a political officer among the young, delivered a report. After praising the young poets “for appearances’ sake,” he unleashed a whole torrent of accusations. The Polish poet Julian Tuwim served as a good starting point for him, whom Pavlychko quoted and recommended to the young as an example: “I am a poet,” Tuwim was supposed to have said, “not a politician, but politics is a function of my heart.” Correct? Correct! And Pavlychko on this: “A certain inattention to politics (among the young), that is, to the struggle that has been waged since time immemorial between the two worlds, causes sad unease. The blood of Kirov, the blood of Halan, the blood of Lumumba should beat in our poetic hearts...” And does this blood beat in the hearts of the young poets? Instead of an answer, let us give the floor to this same Pavlychko: “Have these people gone through the spiritual school of the Komsomol? They are wonderful. But can they be called pupils of the Komsomol? One can, if we consider that they more or less regularly paid their Komsomol membership fees... No, there are no Komsomol poets among them,” Pavlychko despairs, “for whom the Komsomol theme would be higher and dearer than anything else... The young artists are rare guests at the Central Committee of the Komsomol...” Is more needed? Clearly, neither the Komsomol nor the Party was, nor remains, a stimulus and inspiration for the young.
Will the Communist Party succeed in breaking the young poets? The next step has been taken in this direction: on March 20, a Komsomol Organization was created in the Union of Writers of Ukraine. As payment for their membership in the Union of Writers, the following had to become members of this section: Ivan Drach, Mykola Vinhranovskyi, Mykola Synhaivskyi, Robert Tretiakov, Petro Skunts (he is the youngest, born in 1942, from Zakarpattia), Volodymyr Drozd, Yevhen Hutsalo, and Vitaliy Korotych. The eight youngest.
Will they hold out? What fate awaits them? That of Khvylovyi—or Korniichuk? Of Kosynka, Falkivskyi, and a whole pleiad of others—or of Tychyna, Sosiura, and Rylsky?
“Smoloskyp,” May–June, 1962; reprint: “Literaturna Ukraina,” No. 14 (5302). – 2009. – April 9.
Osyp ZINKEVYCH
The Crushing of Young Literature in Ukraine
What was to be expected has happened: the crushing of young literature in Ukraine has come. The short-lived revival of the young creative word has once again found itself under lock and key.
We had a revival (the “cultural renaissance”) in the 1920s. At that time, young artists, who were also just over twenty years old, entered the literary arena. At that time, they stirred up Ukraine. Various literary groups of different orientations were formed, slogans were proclaimed, and literary disputes took place in university auditoriums.
Today, we call that also short-lived period the Executed Renaissance. Its creators were destroyed by the bloody occupier. Those who remained were those who paid for their lives by writing odes in praise of the ruling regime.
The events of the past repeated themselves once more: under the same regime, in almost analogous conditions. In 1960, after a long period of negation, a group of young poets came to the literature of Soviet Ukraine. Poets who, with the sweep of their words, not only stirred Ukraine but also broke through its shackled borders and reached beyond them.
The years 1961-62 were years of great disputes surrounding young creativity. Years of struggle between two worlds, the young, joyful, vibrant, and above all new, with the world of the old, backward, saturated with dogmatism, conformism, marked by spinelessness, a struggle to stay afloat at any cost.
And so came the year 1963. A year about which the historian of Ukrainian literature will one day write as the year in which young Ukrainian literature was crushed. For us, this period will forever remain a crushed renaissance. As yet another proof that a creator (his age is not important!) will be able to feel the delight of free creativity only, and only in a free country. And as long as the party or the “leader” is meant to be the inspirer for creators, free creativity is unthinkable, the word will be under lock and key, and hack work will triumph, while a soulless caste of ode-writers will be held in “honor.”
Thus Came the Crushing
Anyone who is even slightly interested in the Soviet communist system could have foreseen that sooner or later, the crushing of young creativity had to come. And precisely because the goals and far-reaching aims of the Russian communists have not changed. Only the tactics have changed, which have become more deceptive, more insidious.
Khrushchev’s and Ilyichov’s statements that there can be no coexistence between ideologies—the Bolshevik and the Western—were the first signal for the pogrom. In the understanding of the communist leaders of the USSR, all creativity must have a political coloring and must serve one goal—the Bolshevik domination of the world in all its manifestations. When the young creators who entered literature and art threw out the slogan of innovation and began to apply it in practice, depoliticizing their work and striving to achieve and perfect their artistic merits, then the crushing began.
The crushing was preceded by signals that this very young literature was gaining great, unprecedented sympathy and admiration among the population and especially among the youth. Organized evenings of young poetry attracted crowds of interested listeners. The young poets were met with enthusiasm. One of them said to M. Chabanivskyi: “You know, there was such an ovation... They almost carried me on their hands...” (“L.U.,” no. 3, 1963).
About such poetry evenings, the editor of Kharkiv’s “Prapor,” Yu. Makhnenko, wrote: “But then, at the city lecture hall on Teveliev Square, they tried to organize an evening of poetry. One, then another. None of the speakers had even a crumb of so-called scandalous fame. But a crowd stood before the entrance. The most agile couples waited right at the corner under the famous Yakovlev clock, asking passersby for a spare ticket” (“Prapor,” no. 1, 1963).
Clearly, such a thing had never happened before. Just as in Kharkiv, such evenings were held in other cities of Ukraine with performances by L. Kostenko, M. Vinhranovskyi, I. Drach, V. Korotych, and many others.
While Kyiv journals treated the work of the young with greater caution, provincial ones took the initiative, and more and more new works began to appear on their pages. Kharkiv's “Prapor” was flooded with new works, and in response, Yu. Makhnenko wrote in his letter to the readers: “I am confident that such a rich harvest, in turn, appeared due to a real life need, the insistent demand of the reader.”
He wrote these lines back in October for the January issue of the journal, which lay in the hands of the censors for a full four months (from October 20, 1962, until January 24, 1963). In the end, the issue was printed with a great delay with a circulation of 7,800 copies, but at the same time it became the basis, the pretext for the complete crushing of the young poets. After its appearance, it was instantly sold out, and the very next, February issue appeared with a circulation of 8,000 copies, but it was already different—young names were disappearing from the pages of Ukrainian literary publications, and if any appeared, they were either there by chance or were reminiscent of the well-known poems of the Stalinist era.
After Khrushchev's visit to the art exhibition in Moscow and after Ilyichov's speech (December 26 of last year), a campaign against young creators began both in Ukraine and in other republics of the USSR. M. Rylsky was one of the first to address these issues (“Vechirniy Kyiv,” January 26, 1963). He wrote then: “The fact is that abstractionism and formalism in general in its various manifestations are no longer a style, a manner, or a handwriting, but a worldview, an ideology. And there can be no ‘peaceful coexistence’ of different ideologies in our country, where communism is being built.” Having given a whole discourse on art, without naming any of the young poets personally (in the 1920s Rylsky was also young! And the poet atoned heavily for that youth), he writes: “It would be very sad if we started to draw swift, ‘hasty’ ‘organizational’ conclusions from the Moscow meeting and from the responses to it in the press: for example, if the heads of our conservatories or art institutes began to ‘expel’ (a purge?—O.Z.,—such cases probably took place) from the student ranks young people who, in their enthusiasm for searching, are taking, in the opinion of these leaders, erroneous steps. In such cases, it would be much more useful for the heads of educational institutions to look back at their own previous pedagogical path and to ponder the question: ‘And how did it come to be so?’ And, of course, to look more closely at those young ‘dissenters’... Likewise, our editorial offices and publishing houses should be guided as little as possible by the principle of suspicion towards everything unusual, unexpected in young writers, towards everything that does not fit into the pre-defined framework of literary good taste...”
Threats and Intimidation
But not everyone, not even his own countrymen, heeded this good advice from the old Ukrainian veteran-poet. It did not take long for thunderbolts to rain down on the young poets from the pages of Soviet Ukrainian publications. Among these speeches, the speech of P. Tychyna should be noted (“L.U.,” no. 23, 1963), who, although he did not name names, was already making threats. The editors of “Literaturna Ukraina” (when D. Tsmokalenko became editor-in-chief) also joined in these threats, writing: “Now the leaders of the imperialist world are trying by all means to intensify ideological sabotage, in particular, they would like to set the generations of Soviet people against each other. Therefore, the attempts of individual representatives of the creative intelligentsia to play at ‘independence’ from society, to neglect the healthy tastes of the people, deserve the severest condemnation. It is cause for concern that the works of some of our young poets are eagerly reprinted by the reactionary émigré press. This is proof of the ideological shakiness and immaturity of the young authors, proof of the erroneous position of the editors of some of our periodicals. From this point of view, the January issue of the journal ‘Prapor’ deserves condemnation, in which, under the high motto ‘We live in a great family,’ ideologically erroneous poems by I. Drach, Ye. Letiuk, V. Korotych, and some other young writers found a place. The old and young loners who have gone too far, our healthy, mighty, multinational collective of Soviet writers warns: come to your senses before it’s too late. Do not disgrace yourselves completely: the Soviet people are patient, but there is a limit to everything!” (“L.U.,” from March 19, 1963).
Here it was said clearly and unambiguously—it could not be said more clearly: if the young do not repent, if they do not become will-less ode-writers, then tribulations, and perhaps even liquidation, await them, as happened analogously in the 1930s. At the same time, declarations of “loyalty” to socialist realism and condemnations of “abstractionism” and “formalism” were published by a whole range of writers of the older and middle generations, and among them, we find the name of Volodymyr Gzhytsky (author of the famous “The Black Lake”), who was known, persecuted, and imprisoned in concentration camps for many years.
The atmosphere of unceremonious attacks culminated on April 8, when a so-called “conference of the creative intelligentsia and ideological workers of Ukraine” was held, which became the consummation of the crushing. The speakers at the conference were primarily representatives of the middle generation, whose talents blossomed in Stalin’s times. There were various speeches at the conference, but they were all in the spirit of Mykola Sheremeta, who back in 1961 was a spokesman for the Stalinist attitude towards the emergence of young poets in Ukrainian literature.
Of all the speeches, we will single out the speech of Oles Honchar, who gave all the young poets the figure of Oleksa Vlyzko as an example, as a warning, and for thorough reflection. He said: “Our young poets always emphasize that they love Soviet poetry of the 1920s. I love it too... The poet Oleksa Vlyzko was twenty-six years old when he wrote his ‘Ninth Symphony.’ This young man was physically deaf... In his youth, he was slandered, executed... Vlyzko is also a peer of our young poets, and one wishes for them to feel once more how the cheerful force of youth, optimism, an indomitable faith in his people, rages in his poetry... In calling on our young writers to be ideologically precise and clear in their creative work, in warning them against fascination with formalist experiments, we at the same time do not lose faith in our creative youth, who now have something serious, very serious to think about” (“L.U.,” no. 29, 1963).
The example of O. Vlyzko’s fate is indeed very characteristic. For did Vlyzko, Kosynka, Falkivskyi, Shkurupii think in the exciting 1920s that they would be shot? Did Rylsky and Sosiura think that the authorities would put them in a madhouse? Did Khvylovyi think that he would have to commit suicide?
Honchar, perhaps consciously, placed the majestic image of the 26-year-old Vlyzko before the eyes of the young, adding: you now have “something serious, very serious to think about.”
And surely, the young people themselves are asking the question: which way to go? (And a few years ago, Drach asked himself: “Why me? Where is my road?”). It will probably not be easy for the young creators who believed in the changes that were permitted by the regime to find an answer to this question, permitted only to reveal the immortal spirit of the people and, once again, to inflict brutal blows upon it.
“Smoloskyp,” July – August, 1963; reprint: “Literaturna Ukraina,” No. 14 (5302). – 2009. – April 9.