I was born on January 25, 1940, in the small city of Kamyanske (which, unfortunately, is still called Dniprodzerzhynsk). My father came from the village of Semenivka in the Krynychky district of Dnipropetrovsk region, from a deep peasant lineage. Serhiy Zavhorodniy later became a writer. In 1948–1960 and 1966–1968, he headed the Dnipropetrovsk writers' organization. Before the Second World War, as he told me in the last years of his life, he once had to rush to Kyiv. At that time, during Stalin's repressions, he was saved by the manuscript of his novella *Anton Nehnybida*. Yuriy Yanovsky spoke favorably of this work. By 1939, almost all writers in the Dnipropetrovsk region had either been destroyed or repressed. Another important circumstance, I believe, saved his life. My father possessed considerable strength (he practiced wrestling, could nearly cross himself with a two-pood weight) and repeatedly told his friends: “If they come to take me, I will kill the first person who calls me an enemy of the people with a single blow.”
My father was a participant in the Second World War. He fought near Zaporizhzhia, on the Caucasian front... After the war, he worked for some time in the Krynychky district party committee, publishing many essays about rural laborers. Until the age of five, I lived in Kamyanske, started school in the district center of Krynychky, and then studied at the Lyubomyrivka seven-year school. At home, the Ukrainian language prevailed.
Later in Sicheslav (still Dnipropetrovsk), where I have lived since 1949, a very funny incident occurred. It seems it was even before the death of the “father of nations,” Serhiy Zavhorodniy, wearing an embroidered shirt, was giving a report at a meeting of the regional party committee. Suddenly, a woman fainted (it is rumored this happened to a functionary from Nikopol). People leaned over her and asked: “What happened to you?” Blinking in fear, she blurted out: “This is the first time I’ve seen a living nationalist!” My father always respected his native language, adored Ukrainian songs, and sent us children—my sister, older brother, and me—to a Ukrainian school in Sicheslav.
My brother Hennadiy, a student in the philology department of the local university, was “dragged” to the KGB from his first year for allegedly writing a new Ukrainian constitution. The young man who had inspired the small organization was eventually found all the way in Kazakhstan and brought back for investigation. But it was the Thaw—Nikita Khrushchev had “loosened the reins,” so no one was imprisoned, and they limited it to preventative measures.
I finished secondary school in 1957. Before entering the philology department of Dnipropetrovsk University, I worked as a laborer in a fruit and ornamental nursery and as a lathe operator at a pipe-rolling plant.
My mother, Yevhenia Merkuriivna, was from the Donbas; her maiden name was Petryshyna, and she was a journalist by profession. She was born on January 6, 1912, and passed away on February 4, 1997. My father was born on March 19, 1908, and departed this life on August 19, 1994. In 1968, when the frantic campaign against *The Cathedral* began, my father was prematurely removed from his position as head of the Dnipropetrovsk organization of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine.
The fate of one of my mother’s brothers was tragic. During a battle, he was captured by the Germans while unconscious. In 1945, he was liberated by the Americans, and then ended up in horrific Soviet concentration camps. His captivity lasted 10 years! My mother's brother, Volodymyr Merkuriovych, deeply impressed my soul. Around 1962, a tall, emaciated man came to visit us from the North, where he was already in free settlement. In a conversation with me, he said: “As long as I live, I will curse Stalin.” At that time, I was a second-year student in the philology department. My uncle told me about his years in captivity. It was somehow possible to escape from German captivity, but not from Soviet. At his height, he then weighed 47 kilograms. His phrase has stuck in my memory: “I’ve read Solzhenitsyn, but I saw things more terrible...” That very meeting with my uncle planted doubts in me about the system of that time.
In the summer of 1964, I went to Kazakhstan as part of a student brigade. For some reason, it was there, in a foreign land, that I began to think deeply about the state of the Ukrainian language in my native land. In Sicheslav, it was almost never heard; at the university, apart from the Ukrainian language and literature specialty, nothing was taught in Ukrainian. The groups of the Russian department of philology were merged with the Ukrainian ones, and we were told that the majority wanted to listen to lectures in Russian. Once at a general meeting, I couldn’t stand it and said: “What kind of philology department is this? We are graduating from the university, but our terminology in philosophy, political economy, psychology, etc., is in Russian; we are not organically mastering our native language; there’s some kind of mess in our heads...”
At that time, a wonderful film, *The Dream*, appeared, which was soon removed from circulation. Then a group of us students went to the regional party committee and handed a letter to some official demanding that the film's screening be restored. That civil servant listened to us and said: “You’d be better off keeping quiet, or you’ll have trouble.”
In September 1965, I spent a week at a creative youth seminar near Novomoskovsk. I had absolutely no idea that among us, my fellow young writers, there could be informers, and we actively distributed Vasyl Symonenko's *Diary* and an article about the fire at the Kyiv Academy of Sciences library. I had read things circulating in manuscript form even earlier. In October of that same year, I was taken directly from the editorial office of the district newspaper (in the town of Vasylkivka) to the regional KGB department. Of course, there were threats like, “You’re looking at a prison term, you fall under the article,” and so on. This was repeated several times; later, I was summoned to Kyiv as well, as it had become known that I had shown considerable interest in Ivan Koshelivets’s book *Contemporary Literature in the Ukrainian SSR*.
After Vasylkivka, I worked as a journalist for various factory newspapers. I remained unemployed because the reputation of a nationalist “trailed” me. My father was constantly harassed because of his sons, and once he let slip to my wife, Tamara: “Dry some rusks...”
In 1968, when my small poetry collection *Rejoicing in People* was published in Kyiv, I was unemployed. It was then I decided to go to Estonia. I had shown an interest in the language and literature of this country even earlier. The “witch hunt”—the anti-cathedral campaign—was in full swing. After being removed from his post, my father immediately left for the Caucasus, and I for Tallinn. Threats rained down on us in our wake; at a bureau of the regional party committee, Vatchenko bellowed: “The older one has skedaddled to the Caucasus, and the younger one is engaging in Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism in Estonia.”
Estonia welcomed me warmly because I arrived on the ancient land of Kalev with a firm intention to study the language and literature. Moreover, the Writers’ Union of Ukraine (Oles Honchar and Dmytro Pavlychko were especially helpful in this) wrote a letter to the leadership of the Estonian writers. By early 1969, I already had a small room. Before that, to earn a living, I worked as an expeditor at the post office, went with students to a kolkhoz, received a passport, and essentially became an Estonian citizen.
I became fascinated with literary translation during my student years (interpreting from French, Spanish, Polish), and from 1968, my translations of Estonian poetry began to appear. While living in Tallinn, I constantly wrote for *Literaturna Ukraina* and for Ukrainian radio, where the excellent radio journalist Anatoliy Hatinenko worked; he helped me survive when I became a freelancer.
I met Ivan Sokulsky in 1963, when he transferred to our philology department from Lviv University and became an active member of the “Hart” literary studio. It was in Estonia, from newspapers sent by Tamara, that I learned about the trial of Ivan Sokulsky. Today, many people try at all costs to squeeze themselves into history and claim co-authorship of the “Letter of the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk.” To my great regret, I had no hand in creating this painful document, because I lived far from Ukraine. I want to say to those who are trying to attach themselves to it that all of us who have not spent a single blessed day in the camps feel a moral guilt before such patriots as Ivan Sokulsky.
The famine of 1946–1947 is seared into my childhood soul for life. At that time, I lived with my parents in the district center of Krynychky. I saw people collapsing from hunger, how swollen people passed by our house.
I became a member of the Writers' Union in 1979. By that time, I had ten books and was a laureate of the Juhan Smuul Estonian literary prize. They wouldn't accept me earlier because I stubbornly refused to write anything against the “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” A warning for me was that I had repeatedly seen what happened to those who couldn't withstand the pressure and agreed to write a denunciatory article. The metamorphoses were striking: people either disappeared as creative individuals or started drinking heavily. Even after being accepted into the Writers' Union, in 1984 I was summoned to a general writers' meeting after an article by a certain man appeared in the newspaper *Zorya*. Our small Sicheslav group was accused of Ukrainian nationalism. I was threatened with expulsion from the Writers' Union and was demanded to write—to “cleanse myself”—but thank God, I didn’t utter a word in the press, and today I can look the gray-haired Ukrainian veterans in the eye without averting my gaze.
My intransigence, I think, is also a credit to my father, because I don't recall him ever writing anything of the sort. Of course, attempts were made to “twist” him as well. Towards the end of his life, he became more and more candid: he admitted that for over fifty years he had been a member of a criminal party; that the word *kolkhoz* could be used to frighten people because it was more terrible than serfdom; he considered Lenin and Stalin to be criminals. My father, Serhiy Zavhorodniy, certainly had his life crippled too. I don't remember writers often visiting our home. Our apartment was constantly watched by the “ever-watchful eye,” and the telephone was bugged. Sometime in March 1977, my parents, Tamara, and I were not home for about four hours. After we came back inside, we saw that holes had been drilled in the ceilings of three rooms. That same evening, Tamara and I took a hammer and a shovel and climbed into the attic, where I cleared away the slag, hammered, and from inside the rooms, we plugged and plastered the holes.
After the 1984 meeting and the article in *Zorya*, my manuscripts were rejected by “Veselka” and several other publishing houses. This continued for almost two years. But changes eventually came, and we plunged headfirst into the whirlpool of national revival. I will never forget how in July 1991 we stood guard by the national flag, raised for the first time on the square near the T. H. Shevchenko Theater. Deep in the night, the lights were turned off, and policemen ran at us from all sides. Our group was scattered, the flagpole was knocked down and cut up, and the pieces were thrown into a truck. Then the head of the regional Rukh, Ivan Polyk, and I came to my home at four in the morning. The order to destroy the flag was given by the then-mayor Pustovoytenko. The next morning, Ivan began a two-week hunger strike across from the city council. We took turns keeping watch day and night, distributing leaflets. That was a real Rukh headquarters! A month later, at the walls of the Verkhovna Rada, amidst an exalted crowd, we listened to the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine!
After reaching retirement age, I worked for another six years as a literary editor for the regional pedagogical newspaper *Dzherelo*. Essentially, it was survival. But despite everything, I continued to translate and write poetry, and compile *Selections from Ukrainian Synonymy*. In January 2001, a very sad event occurred: my parents' dacha on the outskirts of Sicheslav was burned to the ground. Even with “careless handling of fire by unknown persons” (as the investigators told me), a building does not burn to the ground. It was, undoubtedly, a deliberate arson.
The first time I was published in my native city was in the 21st century! In 2004, the Lira publishing house released my poetry collection *The Bird of My Life*, which was awarded the “Blahovist” literary prize. Before that, all my attempts had been futile, as the censorship and editors of the local publishing house constantly found fault with the themes of the poems, the form, and so on. As for me, the “ever-watchful eye” under the leadership of the ruling party was not without involvement here.
Throughout all the difficult years, my wife and selfless assistant Tamara was by my side, often having to pull the family plow by herself. She herself is from the Poltava region, born on the same day as my mother, January 6, 1947, on Christmas Eve. She graduated from the philology department of Dnipropetrovsk University. Under my influence, as she herself emphasizes, she became a fully conscious Ukrainian. When the struggle for independence began, she was among the first in the Ukrainian Language Society, in “Prosvita,” and in Rukh. In the months of special national uplift, Tamara sewed not only Ukrainian and Cossack flags in every free moment, but also Georgian, Lithuanian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani ones. She also worked as a leading editor at the “Sich” publishing house. Many historical works were first published in her translation. Among them are *The History of the New Sich, or the Last Host of the Zaporozhians* by A. O. Skalkovsky (1994), *The Liberties of the Zaporozhian Cossacks* by D. I. Yavornytsky (2002), *Bohdan Khmelnytsky* by M. I. Kostomarov (2004), *Memoirs on the History of Southern Rus' (16th c.)* (2005), and others. Renowned historians noted the high level of her translations and the accessibility of her writing. She was awarded the Dmytro Yavornytsky diploma.
We married in July 1970. We have a daughter, Olena, who graduated from the music college (bandura class); she works as an artist at the Taras Shevchenko Dnipropetrovsk Academic Musical and Drama Theater.
Oleksandr Zavhorodniy,
member of the National Writers’ Union of Ukraine, laureate of the Maksym Rylsky literary prize, the “Blahovist” prize, and two-time laureate of the Juhan Smuul literary prize of Estonia.
August 7, 2008.
THAT HOUSE IN MY NATIVE LAND...
(A speech delivered at the “Literary Prydniprovia” Museum on January 10, 2008)
With these words, which almost repeat a line from the immortal Ukrainian song with lyrics by Andriy Malyshko, I want to begin my story about the home of the unforgettable Kuzmenkos—Olena Fedorivna, Oleksandr, and their daughters Mariiechka and Oksanochka. Among the homes dear to my heart, there was one in my native Sicheslav where a path always led, in any season. To an ordinary little house, on the cozy Armiiska Street adjacent to the Botanical Garden, so many people hurried that it is impossible to count them all. In the small, bright room, during the suffocating and fearful times, it was always easier to breathe and to dream. Here, from the walls, a rebellious Taras and an equally rebellious Ivan Franko looked down at the guests, and the glow of Petrykivka painting made it warmer even in the fiercest winter.
Everything honest and defiant inevitably sought to visit this home, where, despite all adversities, the Ukrainian word, song, and bandura resounded, and where the unbreakable Olena Fedorivna smiled warmly, inviting everyone to the table.
Now, as the years have passed, it can be said without exaggeration that the Kuzmenko home was an ozone for the creative intelligentsia of our region for decades. Oleksandr Kuzmenko, despite not having a higher education, could discuss the work of the Kobzar on equal terms with a professor. Olena Fedorivna knew so many songs that she could have published a collection! This couple, having united their destinies in the distant North where there was little light, simply radiated it in a Sicheslav that was wary of any manifestation of Ukrainianness. Olena Fedorivna’s maiden name was Zolotiuk. Well, God certainly didn't make a mistake! She had a golden heart, boundlessly kind, yet steely and unyielding when it came to principles. As almost a young girl, a UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) liaison, she fell into the clutches of the punitive organs and, under inhuman torture, did not betray anyone.
At this evening, we are talking about Vasyl Stus—the conscience of our poetry. Oleksandr Oleksiiovych told me that he met him in Lviv during the Christmas holidays in the 1960s. And this meeting was not accidental. For both of them—the former member of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the future unbreakable prisoner of Soviet concentration camps—lived essentially the same way. It is noteworthy that the word *sut* (essence) is very consonant with the surname Stus!
I had the fortune of visiting the Kuzmenko home for over thirty years. Among the constellation of my friends and acquaintances, I remember with immense warmth and pain Ivan Sokulsky, Vasyl Skrypka, Havrylo Prokopenko, Volodymyr Sirenko, Viktor Savchenko, Mykola Bereslavsky, and many, many others.
In the late 1980s, significant changes began in the former USSR, because the people of the former union no longer wanted to live as if in a barracks. The Kuzmenko family rightfully belongs to those who contributed to the revival of the independent Ukrainian state. It would be fitting, of course, to create a museum of the Sixtiers in their former home, which would contribute to the patriotic education of our youth. Such an institution would become one of the visiting cards of Sicheslav. Given that Dnipropetrovsk is still simply cluttered with inappropriate ideological names of streets, alleys, etc., it is long overdue to rename Armiiska Street to Kuzmenko Street. My friends and I have been calling it that for a long time. And I also dream of a book of memoirs appearing in God’s world, titled *That House in Our Native Sicheslav...*.
Oleksandr Zavhorodniy, member of the National Writers’ Union of Ukraine, laureate of the Maksym Rylsky literary prize, the “Blahovist” prize, and two-time laureate of the Juhan Smuul literary prize of Estonia.
Prepared by V. Ovsienko on February 16, 2009.