Mykola khvylovy, vaplite, and the ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s

The downfall of the Russian Empire after the First World War, the resulting abolition of imperial censorship, the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state (even if for a very short time), and the relative leniency of the Soviet regime in the 1920s all led to an astonishing renaissance of literary and cultural activity in Ukraine. Scores of new writers and poets appeared and formed dozens of literary groups that changed the face of Ukrainian literature. Perhaps the most charismatic cultural leader was Mykola Khvylovy, a prominent writer, publicist, and founder of the elitist literary organization Vaplite. Among Vaplite's members were a renowned playwright Mykola Kulish, a brilliant symbolist poet Pavlo Tychyna, an avant-garde poet and writer Maik Yohansen, and such writers and poets as Yurii Yanovsky, Arkadii Liubchenko, and Mykola Bazhan. However, the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s was brutally quashed by Stalinist terror of the 1930s. As a symbolic act of defiance and concern for his nation in the face of the man-made famine and the growing campaign of political terror, Khvylovy committed suicide in May 1933. The majority of Vaplite members, including Kulish and Yohansen, were imprisoned and executed. Others, including Tychyna, were forced to capitulate to the Soviet regime and begin producing works in the socialist-realist style which glorified Joseph Stalin and the Party. Nonetheless, in a very brief time of relative creative freedom, these writers managed to create a remarkable and lasting literary legacy.

Vaplite (full name: Vilna akademiia proletarskoi literatury [Free Academy of Proletarian Literature]). A writers' organization which existed in Kharkiv from 1925 to 1928. While accepting the official requirements of the Communist party, Vaplite adopted an independent position on questions of literary policy and supported Mykola Khvylovy in the Literary Discussion of 1925–8. Vaplite proposed to create a new Ukrainian literature based on the writers in its ranks who strived to perfect their work by assimilating the finest masterpieces of Western European culture. Joseph Stalin interpreted that goal as a betrayal of the aims of the Party and accused Khvylovy and Vaplite of working under the slogan Away from Moscow. The association rejected decisively the policy of mass participation in masovism proletarian writers' organizations, which were supported by the Communist party. Khvylovy was the actual leader of Vaplite; its official president was first Mykhailo Yalovy (Yu. Shpol) and then Mykola Kulish, and its secretary was Arkadii Liubchenko. Its members were Mykola Bazhan, Vasyl Vrazhlyvy, Ivan Dniprovsky, Oles Dosvitnii, Hryhorii Epik, P. Ivanov, Maik Yohansen, Oleksander Kopylenko, Hordii Kotsiuba, Mykhailo Maisky, Petro Panch, Ivan Senchenko, Oleksa Slisarenko, Yurii Smolych, Pavlo Tychyna, and Yurii Yanovsky. The association published the almanac Vaplite (1926), devoted mostly to literary problems, and five issues of the journal Vaplite (1927). Vaplite's position on literary issues was supported by the Neoclassicists (Mykola Zerov in particular) and by other Ukrainian writers.

The ideas of Khvylovy and Vaplite came under vehement criticism not only from their literary rivals and key Soviet leaders of Ukraine (eg, Vlas Chubar, Volodymyr Zatonsky, Mykola Skrypnyk, Teodosii Taran, and Andrii Khvylia) but also from the Communist Party of Ukraine. Neither the admission of political ‘errors’ by Khvylovy and others in December 1926 nor the expulsion of Khvylovy, Mykhailo Yalovy, and Oles Dosvitnii from Vaplite in January 1927 could save the organization. Khvylovy's novel Val’dshnepy (The Woodcocks, first part pub in Vaplite, no. 5, 1927) came under particularly severe criticism. The sixth and last issue of Vaplite, containing the continuation of the novel, was confiscated at the printing office and Vaplite was forced to dissolve. Members of the association continued their literary work in association with the journal Literaturnyi iarmarok and in the organization Prolitfront.

Hvylovy, Mykola b 14 December 1893 in Trostianets, Kharkiv gubernia, d 13 May 1933 in Kharkiv. Prominent Ukrainian writer and publicist of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s. Born Mykola Fitilev, he graduated in 1916 as an extension student from the Bohodukhiv Gymnasium. In 1919 he joined the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine. In 1921 he moved to Kharkiv, where he worked as a millwright and also joined a body of writers grouped around Vasyl Blakytny and the newspaper Visti VUTsVK. In 1921, with Volodymyr Sosiura and Maik Yohansen, he signed the literary manifesto ‘Our Universal to the Ukrainian Workers and Ukrainian Proletarian Artists’ (published in the collection Zhovten’). In the same year his poem ‘V elektrychnyi vik’ (In the Electrical Age) and his poetry collection Molodist’ (Youth) were published.

After his second collection, Dosvitni symfoniï (Twilight Symphonies, 1922), appeared, he switched to writing prose. His first short story, ‘Zhyttia’(Life), was published in 1922. His first collections of short stories— Syni etiudy (Blue Etudes, 1923) and Osin’ (Autumn, 1924)—immediately won him the acclaim of various critics including Serhii Yefremov, Oleksander Biletsky, the party critic Volodymyr Koriak, and the émigrés Yevhen Malaniuk and Dmytro Dontsov.

The ornamental, impressionistic style of these and later lyrical-romantic stories—which exhibited the influence of expressionism (including its inherent naturalism)—became paradigmatic for most young Soviet Ukrainian writers then beginning their careers. Khvylovy experimented boldly in his prose, introducing into the narrative diaries, dialogues with the reader, speculations about the subsequent unfolding of the plot, philosophical musings about the nature of art, and other asides. In his brief period of creativity (less than five years) he masterfully depicted the revolution in Ukraine and the first hints of its degeneration, using a rich gallery of characters, most of them members of the intelligentsia. The characters' initial infatuation with the revolution ends in disillusionment, and their expected rebirth of Ukraine reifies into a new embodiment of the ‘snout of the indomitable boor’ in such stories as ‘Redaktor Kark’ (Editor Kark), ‘Na hlukhim shliakhu’ (On the Overgrown Path), and ‘Synii lystopad’ (Blue November). A later cycle of stories consists of merciless satires of insipid philistines and the transformation of former revolutionaries into bureaucrats and parasites. From 1924 on, Khvylovy's stories depict life much more psychodramatically and tragically, as in the novella ‘Ia’ (I) and ‘Povist' pro sanatoriinu zonu’ (Tale of the Sanatorium Zone).

At the same time Khvylovy played a key role in the life of literary organizations. One of the founders of the proletarian-writers' group Hart in 1923, he soon became dissatisfied with its toeing of the official line and left it with a small group of writers to form the group Urbino. Later he opposed both Hart and the peasant-writers' group Pluh for promoting mass participation in literary work instead of striving for artistic quality. He initiated and inspired with his ideas the group Vaplite—the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature. Formed in November 1925, it numbered among its members the most talented writers, most of them former Pluh or Hart members. During Vaplite's brief existence (1925–8), Khvylovy tried his hand at large prose works. Around 1925 he began working on the novel ‘Iraïda,’ of which only one excerpt was published under the title ‘Zav'iazka’ (The Beginning). It reveals a change in Khvylovy's style: instead of being lyrical-ornamental and fragmentary, his narrative becomes balanced and more realistic. This change is also discernible in the novel Val’dshnepy (Woodcocks), of which only the first part was published (in the periodical Vaplite, no. 5, 1927); the second part, although it had been printed, was confiscated at the press by the authorities and destroyed. Despite diverse assessments of the purely literary aspects of the novel, Khvylovy's followers saw Val’dshnepy as the culmination of his literary work, while others, like Yevhen Malaniuk, considered it an ‘obvious failure.’

Khvylovy was a superb pamphleteer and polemicist. His polemical pamphlets provoked the well-known Ukrainian literary discussion of 1925–8. In the first series of pamphlets, published in the supplement Kul’tura i pobut to Visti VUTsK in April–June 1925 and later that year separately as Kamo hriadeshy? (Whither Goest Thou?), he raised the decisive question ‘Europe or "enlightenment"?’ using the term ‘enlightenment’ to refer to Ukraine's provinciality and backwardness under Russian oppression. And his reply was, ‘For art it can only be Europe.’

In the second series, ‘Dumky proty techiï’ (Thoughts against the Current), which appeared in Kul’tura i pobut in November–December 1925 and separately in 1926, Khvylovy further developed his argument against the ‘cult of epigonism.’ By adopting a psycho-intellectual orientation on Europe, he argued, Ukrainians can enter onto their own path of development. To this they have a perfect right, ‘Insofar as the Ukrainian nation sought for several centuries its independence, we accept this as evidence of its unconquered desire to manifest and fully develop its national (not nationalist) being.’ Again he underlined the necessity of overcoming its cultural backwardness and the psychological dependence on Moscow, in the belief ‘that a nation can manifest itself culturally only if it finds its own, unique path of development.’

The third series of pamphlets, ‘Apolohety pysaryzmu’ (The Apologists of Scribbling), was published in Kul’tura i pobut in February–March 1926, but not separately. The idea of a completely independent development for Ukrainian literature, oriented ‘at least not on Russian [literature],’ was developed further, and the idea of Ukraine's right to sovereignty was formulated as follows: ‘Is Russia an independent state? Yes, it's independent! Well then, we too are independent.’ His last, and probably most radical, polemical work, ‘Ukraïna chy Malorosiia?’ (Ukraine or Little Russia?), was suppressed by the authorities; only a few quotations from it that appeared in the official critiques—Andrii Khvylia's Vid ukhylu v prirvu ... (From Deviation to the Precipice ...) and Yevhen Hirchak's Na dva fronta v bor’be s natsionalizmom (On Two Fronts in the Struggle with Nationalism)—are known.

Khvylovy's prose, particularly Val’dshnepy, which Khvylia described as antiparty, counterrevolutionary, and even fascist, and his polemical pamphlets make him the central figure in the above-mentioned literary discussion, which by its very nature turned into a political discussion of the direction Ukraine should take in its development. The national-communist opposition in the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, led by Oleksander Shumsky, the Neoclassicists (particularly Mykola Zerov), and the entire nationally conscious, progressive Ukrainian intelligensia more or less openly sided with Khvylovy. On the opposing side were not only Khvylovy's literary opponents, such as Serhii Pylypenko, Samiilo Shchupak, and Volodymyr Koriak, but also the party leaders Andrii Khvylia, Lazar Kaganovich, Vlas Chubar, Hryhorii Petrovsky, and other members of the Politburo of the CP(B)U. Moscow's chauvinistic proponents of a great (unitary ‘Russian’) state—V. Vaganian, Yu. Larin, and Joseph Stalin himself—threw their support behind Khvylovy's opponents. In a letter to Kaganovich, Stalin warned the CC CP(B)U against adopting Khvylovy's Western orientation and condemned it as ‘bourgeois nationalism.’

Thenceforth Khvylovy was subjected to unrelenting persecution and was forced to move gradually from an offensive to a defensive tactic. To save Vaplite from forced dissolution, in December 1926 he was compelled to admit his ‘errors,’ and in January 1927 he, Mykhailo Yalovy, and Oles Dosvitnii agreed to expulsion from Vaplite. From December 1927 to March 1928 Khvylovy lived in Berlin and Vienna, and according to some accounts in Paris. In January 1928, before returning to Ukraine, he sent an open letter from Vienna to the newspaper Komunist renouncing his slogan ‘Away from Moscow’ and recanting his views.

Yet he did not truly surrender: on his initiative an unaffiliated journal, Literaturnyi iarmarok, was established in 1928, and it continued Vaplite's orientation. In it Khvylovy's satirical stories ‘Ivan Ivanovych’ and ‘Revizor’ (The Inspector-general) appeared. In 1930 Literaturnyi iarmarok ceased publication, and Khvylovy inspired one last organization, the Union of Workshops of the Proletarian Literary Front, or Prolitfront, which published a journal Prolitfront. None of his stories, but only his polemical articles refuting the hostile criticism of Nova Generatsiia and the All-Ukrainian Association of Proletarian Writers (VUSPP), appeared in the journal. When Prolitfront was disbanded in 1931 and many of its members joined VUSPP, Khvylovy no longer had a journal in which he could express his ideas. His attempts at writing on party-approved themes, as in the stories ‘Maibutni shakhtari’ (The Future Miners), ‘Ostannii den’‘ (The Last Day), and ‘Shchaslyvyi sekretar’ (The Happy Secretary), were dismal failures. Thus, by the early 1930s Khvylovy's every opportunity to live, write, and fight for his ideas was blocked. Since he had no other way to protest against Pavel Postyshev's terror and famine that swept Ukraine in 1933 , he committed suicide. This act became symbolic of his concern for the fate of his nation.

Immediately after his death, Khvylovy's works and even his name were banned from the public domain. Even after the post-Stalin thaw, when many other writers were ‘rehabilitated’ and selected works of some were published, the ban on his works and ideas has been enforced.

Khvylovy expressed in his works his own concept of Ukraine's renaissance spawned by the Revolution of 1917. Ukraine could overcome its slavishness and provinciality and ‘catch up to other nations,’ he believed, only by unreservedly breaking ‘away from Moscow’ and orienting itself psychologically and culturally on the progressive aspects of ‘Europe.’ As an alternative to both ‘Moscow’ and ‘Europe’ Khvylovy proposed the romantic idea of an ‘Asiatic renaissance’—an awakening of Asia and other colonial, underdeveloped parts of the world. This renaissance was to begin in Ukraine, situated as it was between the West and the East, and spread to all parts of the world. Like Mykola Zerov, he considered Ukraine's orientation towards ‘psychological Europe’ a necessary precondition for Ukraine to fulfill its messianic role in this renaissance. As a romantic writer and thinker, Khvylovy believed that a ‘vitalized romanticism’ (romantyka vitaizmu) would be the literary style of the first period of the Asiatic renaissance.

Kulish, Mykola, b 18 December 1892 in Chaplynka, Tavriia gubernia, d 3 November 1937 in Sandarmokh, Karelia region, RFSSR. The most famous Ukrainian playwright of the twentieth century. After his mother’s early death, Kulish spent most of his childhood in orphanages and charity homes. He finished his early education thanks to the financial support of distant acquaintances. He began writing satirical poems and plays as a gymnasium student in Oleshky. After graduating from the gymnasium in Poti (now in Georgia) in 1914, he studied history and philology at Odesa University. Kulish’s university education was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. He was conscripted into the Russian Army, took part in military campaigns as an infantry officer in Galicia, Volhynia, and Belarus, and thus came into contact with the Ukrainian national movement. In 1917 Kulish was wounded at the front and discharged. Later that year he served as head of the town council in Oleshky. He participated in the Ukrainian Struggle for Independence (1917–20), organizing a guerrilla regiment to fight the Russian Volunteer Army in Southern Ukraine and distinguishing himself as its commanding officer.

Under early Soviet rule, Kulish began working for in the Commissariat of People’s Education (NKO) in Odesa in 1922 and served as a school inspector in the Odesa region. After the dissolution of Odesa gubernia in 1925, he was transferred to Zinovivske (now Kirovohrad) to work as an editor of a local newspaper, and in the fall of that year, on the recommendation of People’s Commissar Oleksander Shumsky, he moved to Kharkiv, where he was appointed director of the NKO’s All-Ukrainian Drama Committee.

Kulish had joined the proletarian writers' group Hart in 1924, and after moving to Kharkiv he met many of the group’s other members. One of them, the famous writer and polemicist Mykola Khvylovy, had a great impact on Kulish’s writing and views. Kulish was also profoundly influenced by Ukraine’s leading theater director, Les Kurbas, who staged several of Kulish’s plays at his Berezil theater. In 1925 Kulish was elected to the presidium of the new writers' group Vaplite, and from November 1926 he served as its president. In 1926 Kulish also founded and headed the Ukrainian Society of Dramatists and Composers in 1926, and in 1927 and 1929 he took part in the famous Literary Discussion and Theater Dispute in Soviet Ukraine. After Vaplite’s forced dissolution in January 1928, he was a founding contributor to the literary and art journal Literaturnyi iarmarok. In 1927 and 1928 he was also a member of the editorial board of the prominent Soviet Ukrainian journal Chervonyi shliakh. In late 1929 Kulish became a member of the presidium of a new writers' organization, Prolitfront.

When the Soviet regime forced Prolitfront to disband in January 1931, it no longer viewed Kulish as a persona grata and did not allow him to join the only officially sanctioned writers' organization, the All-Ukrainian Association of Proletarian Writers. In June 1934 his plays were condemned as nationalist and harmful, and he was labelled a ‘counterrevolutionary’ and expelled from the Communist party. In December 1934 the NKVD arrested Kulish. Soon after he was tried as a member of a fictitious ‘all-Ukrainian terrorist center of Borotbists’ and sentenced to ten years in an isolation cell in an NKVD prison on the Solovets Islands in the Soviet Arctic. There he was murdered during the mass executions of political and other prisoners marking the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917.

Kulish wrote fourteen plays. Six of them were published during his lifetime. He became famous after the stage success in 1924 of his first play, 97, which is generally considered the beginning of Soviet Ukrainian drama and the first major play written in the USSR as a whole. It was, however, not staged as Kulish had written it, but was censored by first production’s director, Hnat Yura, who changed Kulish’s tragic finale to an ideologically correct, optimistic one. Kulish’s subsequent plays shared similar fates and were heavily censored or banned outright by the Soviet authorities. As a dramatist, Kulish initially devoted his efforts to portraying the postrevolutionary struggle among the peasantry of Southern Ukraine. Besides 97, the plays on that subject included Komuna v stepakh (A Commune in the Steppes, 1925) and, several years later, the final work in his ‘village trilogy’—Proshchai, selo (Farewell, Village, 1933). The Soviet censors forced him not only to revise the latter, but even to rename it Povorot Marka (Marko's Return, 1934), deeming the original title an allusion to the destruction of the traditional Ukrainian village by Soviet collectivization and the Famine-Genocide of 1932–3.

During the second phase of his dramaturgy, Kulish turned to writing comedy and satire. In Otak zahynuv Huska (That’s How Huska Perished, 1925) and Khulii Khuryna (1926), which harked back to Nikolai Gogol’s themes and motifs, he ridiculed the attitudes and prejudices of both prerevolutionary Russian imperial society and of the new Soviet bureaucracy. The culmination of his of demythologization of the Bolshevik revolution was his melodrama Zona (Ergot, 1926), which Kulish later reworked and renamed Zakut (Dead End, 1929). He also wrote a ‘linguistic comedy,’ Myna Mazailo (1929), where, in a manner akin to Molière, he satirized the political and social impact of the Soviet policy of Ukrainization.

During his most productive and creative period as a playwright and close collaborator of Les Kurbas and the Berezil theater, Kulish abandoned the style and tools of traditional, realist dramaturgy. Instead, he experimented with expressionist and avant-garde writing, often combining it with elements of the Ukrainian puppet theater (vertep) and school dramas popular of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His most important trilogy of that period—Narodnii Malakhii (The People's Malakhii, 1927), Patetychna sonata (Sonata pathétique, 1930), and Vichnyi bunt (Eternal Rebellion, 1932)—addresses the stark contradictions between Ukrainian national aspirations and Soviet reality and deals with the inherent conflict between an individual’s aspirations and a society’s principles. Besides depicting the disintegration of revolutionary idealism, the trilogy addresses the universal dilemmas of human existence in a manner similar to that of French existentialist drama of the late 1930s. Kulish’s portrayal of these universal themes is most darkly and pessimistically expressed in his drama Maklena Grassa (1933).

Apart from many productions of 97 and Komuna v stepakh, few of Kulish’s plays were staged during his lifetime. Khulii Khuryna, Zona, and Patetychna sonata were banned outright in Soviet Ukraine. The latter play was, however, translated into Russian and simultaneously produced at the Kamernyi Theater in Moscow by Aleksandr Tairov and the Bolshoi Drama Theater in Leningrad by K. Tverskoi from December 1931 to March 1932. A bowdlerized German translation, which attracted the admiration of Bertold Brecht, was published in Berlin in 1932. Perhaps the most important productions of Kulish’s plays were those Kurbas directed at the Berezil theater. However, the authorities only allowed Myna Mazailo to be performed for a longer time. Narodnii Malakhii was banned after several performances, and Maklena Grasa was banned a few weeks after its dress rehearsal, which was monitored by armed GPU officers.

At the time of his arrest, all of Kulish’s manuscripts were confiscated, and most of them were subsequently destroyed. Some of his plays were miraculously saved and smuggled into Western countries by Ukrainian refugees during the Second Wold War. Others were preserved only in Russian translation. Some, including Taki (Such Ones, 1934) and Kulish’s screenplay Paryzhkom (The Paris Commune, 1934) were irretrievably lost.