A Little About Myself
Була зигзицею, і Ладою.
Іван Світличний.
Ab ovo. I was born in Kyiv near Khorevytsia hill. My father was an architecture student, my mother a homemaker. I was baptized in the autocephalous Church of the Intercession in Solomianka.
My first visual impressions were St. Andrew's Cathedral and a two-hundred-year-old linden tree; my first auditory ones were Ukrainian songs, which my parents sang as a duet.
I learned to read very early. Books became a lifelong passion. The first poem was Oleksandr Oles's “The Fir Tree,” then Mykola Voronyi's “Yevshan-Zillia” [Wormwood]. A little later, I read for myself the inscription on the cast-iron slab over the remains of Ivan Mazepa's mother, Hegumena Maria-Magdalena. My mother had told me about her even earlier.
We would place wildflowers on the grave of Mazepa's mother and on the graves of the soldiers from the Bohdan Khmelnytsky regiment, who were shot by Muravyov. My father told me about the Battle of Kruty.
In 1929, the monastery was closed. I can still hear the bell-cry of the bells thrown from the belfry. In 1936, churches were being destroyed everywhere—the Church of the Pyrohoshcha Mother of God, the Epiphany Cathedral of the Brotherhood, the Church of the Nativity of the Theotokos where Shevchenko's funeral service was held... The church on Castle Hill and the wall around the monastery had been dismantled earlier.
The beginning of my schooling coincided with the Holodomor. Walking to school, I saw people who had died of starvation on the street (next to us was a commercial bread shop). Nearby was a “Torgsin” (“Trade with Foreigners”) shop, where my mother, to save her children from starvation, took our wedding rings, silver spoons, and even the oklad from an icon. My grandfather and many relatives died of starvation. A typhus epidemic began.
After the murder of S. Kirov, which became a pretext for the destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, I started reading newspapers; I heard my parents talking about the SVU trial; many of our acquaintances were arrested.
1937... The best teachers disappear, many students' parents are arrested, the children are taken to orphanages to the sound of triumphant marches celebrating the Stalinist constitution.
A parallel class from the Jewish school was transferred to our school, and students from the Polish and German schools appeared—in 1938, they were closing the national minority schools.
The pre-war years, the Finnish War... Young people are even mobilized from the universities. Tuition fees are introduced in high schools and universities; the poorer students have to drop out.
Queues for food, a disguised rationing system—bread and milk are delivered to apartments in limited quantities.
The first day of the war found me, a first-year student at the Construction Institute, on geodetic practice. A month and a half later, German troops were near Kyiv. Volodymyrska Street near the NKVD was covered with burnt paper. Everyone over 16 was herded “to the trenches,” which the Germans calmly bypassed. A week before the Germans arrived, the authorities swore they would never surrender Kyiv, even though Kyiv was already surrounded.
On September 20, 1941, the Germans came to Kyiv. Babyn Yar, hunger, looting, deportation for forced labor to Germany. To escape Germany, I became a student at the Medical, then the Hydro-Melioration Institutes—the only universities open under the Germans.
In September 1943, the Germans expelled the remaining population from Kyiv. We had no relatives or acquaintances nearby. After staying for a while in a crypt at the Baikove Cemetery, my mother and I returned home to Frolovskyi Lane. That road through an empty Kyiv, when anyone could have killed us, is one of the most terrible memories of my life.
In 1944, I continued my studies at the Construction Institute—this exempted me from mobilization into the army. The building was not heated. We were hungry, ragged—but we studied. And we still had to earn money, because a scholarship couldn't even buy a loaf of bread at the market. It was especially hard during the famine of 1946-47. The “second hot course”—kasha, which they gave in the student cafeteria, and a mug of milk that my godmother spared for me—helped a little.
In 1948, I graduated from the institute and was supposed to go to Krasnoyarsk-20. Graduate school was not an option for me, because I had remained in occupied territory.
By hook or by crook, I stayed in Kyiv and designed Kyiv's bridges (isn't it paradoxical: being in occupied territory was not an obstacle to this).
Later, I enrolled in graduate school at the Institute of Structural Mechanics. But it was impossible to work at home—so I worked at the “akademka”—the V. Vernadsky Library. There, like many of our friends, I met Ivan Svitlychny.
We spent our free time together—we went to concerts, to theaters and movies, discussed new books and journals.
We were planning to get married in 1955, but due to the death of Ivan's father, the wedding was postponed for a year. We had our wedding on January 30, 1956, in Starobilsk, in the newly built house of Ivan's uncle, because in the house where Ivan was born, there was no room to turn around.
For more than three years, we lived (or rather, slept) in my mother's little room, where besides us and my mother, my brother's family also lived—6 people in 14 square meters.
After finishing graduate school, I worked as an assistant at the Construction Institute, and Ivan as a junior researcher at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR. Together we earned about 1800 (180) rubles for the two of us, and we still had to help our mothers (Ivan's had a pension of 12 rubles, mine received none at all). With Ivan's thirst for books, there was no question of even thinking about any clothes.
But we were young, we were optimists. Ivan, with his characteristic charismatic leadership, was always at the center of all public events.
I was never a leader, but with the independence I had since childhood (I was already tutoring others in school), I provided a reliable home front for the family, I was the “guarantor of ‘we will be, we will endure,’” as Ivan wrote in a sonnet dedicated to me. Without such a home front, public activity suffered, and family disagreements were often used by the KGB.
After the arrests, I tried to help the families of the prisoners in any way I could. For a time, along with Vira Lisova and Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, we were the administrators of the Solzhenitsyn Fund in Ukraine. And, of course, I helped Ivan and Nadiyka, my mother-in-law, and Nadiyka's son Yarema, morally and materially.
After retiring, I was with Ivan in exile in the Altai Mountains. When Ivan had a stroke in 1981, I was with him in the hospital for 9 months, then for 18 months until the end of his term (he was not released on medical grounds, contrary to human and divine laws), I was by his side in a dormitory among alcoholics and prostitutes. In January 1983, I brought him to Kyiv. For the last three years, Ivan did not speak or move and required special care.
In 1989, together with Ivan, I prepared the book “A Heart for Bullets and for Rhymes” for publication, which came out in 1990. In 1994, I. Svitlychny was posthumously awarded the Shevchenko Prize for it.
After Ivan's death, together with his sister Nadiya, I prepared a book of poems, “I Have Only the Word” (published in 1994), and a book of memoirs about Ivan Svitlychny, “The Kind-Eyed One” (published in 1998). I submitted the book of letters from the camp, “Unwritten Letters Do Not Arrive,” for printing (Published under the title: Ivan Svitlychny. Voice of the Era. Book 1: Letters from “Parnassus” / Comp. L. Svitlychna. – K.: Sfera, 2001. – 544. – Ed.).
God willing, I still have many plans for compiling and publishing Ivan's creative legacy.
January 17, 1999.
P.S. Leonida Pavlivna Svitlychna was born on January 2, 1924. Her maiden name was Tereshchenko. She died on February 18, 2003. She is buried in the Baikove Cemetery (sector 33) under a single Cossack cross with her husband, Ivan Svitlychny.
Recorded by Vasyl Ovsienko on January 19, 1999. With corrections by L. Svitlychna.
Photograph by V. Ovsienko:
SvitlL, film 1097, frame 36, September 3, 2000. Leonida SVITLYCHNA.