Harvard UkrainianCreating Studies and36, no. Con 3–4ce (2019):aling 447–93.Modernism 447

Creating and Concealing Modernism: The Poetry of Pavlo Tychyna Reconsidered George G. Grabowicz

Ty chyna as Problem and Paradigm

he Tychyna problem can be stated succinctly. There is a gen- eral consensus that Pavlo Tychyna (1891–1967) is the outstanding TUkrainian poet of the twentieth century. This opinion emerged in the early 1920s and has solidified and remained in place despite all the changes and perturbations that followed; it is shared even by those who condemn Tychyna for his “betrayal of his Muse,” his “vacillations,” “errors,” patriotic or moral “bankruptcy,” and so on. Accompanying this is a widespread perception that emerged already in Tychyna’s lifetime, but became particularly marked in the half century since his death, that his poetry is radically discontinuous, that it divides clearly and neatly into the “early” and the “late”—suggesting thereby not just phases or periods, but essential hypostases, indeed artistic and existential antip- odes. The “early” poetry (the parameters here are vague, but it entails either his first three collections, Soniachni klarnety [Clarinets of the Sun, 1918], Pluh [The Plow, 1920], and Zamist´ sonetiv i oktav [Instead of Sonnets and Octaves, also 1920], or all of his poetry up to the end of the 1920s) is inspired and orphic and expresses with unprecedented power the national rebirth and tragedy of the revolution and civil war (more correctly, the Russian-Ukrainian war of 1917–1921), whereas the later poetry (the liminal moment here is often taken to be 1933–1934, and his poem and collection by the same name “Partiia vede” [The Party Leads], but earlier dates have also been proposed) is one of ever-greater conformism, support for the party linked to ever-greater timidity if not cravenness, and fundamentally nothing short of a lingering death of the poet. Two key questions that are begged here are the actual moment (if 448 Grabowicz such there is) of this transformation, and more importantly, the criteria by which this transformation is perceived and determined. To these we shall return. The canonic interpretation of Tychyna in the Soviet period was also clear-cut: the non- or anti-Soviet position was to stress and appreciate the “early” Tychyna and largely dismiss the “late” one; the Soviet posi- tion was to affirm the “late” (now redefined as “mature”) Tychyna while appropriating whatever was salvageable or pertinent from the earlier period (and what was not salvaged was ignored or directly censored). Paradigmatic of this approach was Leonid Novychenko’s 1956 study Poeziia i revoliutsiia (Poetry and Revolution), where Tychyna’s poetry is perceived precisely through the topoi of “maturation,” of acceptance of the revolution, and a shedding of what is confused, “abstractly human- ist,” and vacillating.1 Most revealing, however, are the postindependence developments. In effect, the Ukrainian literary establishment abandoned the Soviet position and mechanically (and opportunistically) accepted the earlier anti-Soviet one without, however, any deeper examination of the issues and criteria involved and without reconsidering or even noting various basic, underlying attitudes (populism, collectivism, ambient illiberalism, and so on; that no Soviet practices or modes of thinking were abandoned goes without saying). Characteristically, this new version of Tychyna, where his “early” period was now prioritized and his “late” period denigrated (and basically ignored), was written for a new history of twentieth-century Ukrainian literature by none other than Leonid Novychenko—the most articulate and assiduous spokesman of the earlier Soviet view.2 But although the “pluses” and “minuses” were now reversed (this was the default mode of the time, and the formula itself was widely satirized), the polarized perception of Tychyna remained. A detailed examination of Tychyna’s reception must be left for another occasion; here one can only note the bare outlines. His first collection, Sonia­chni klarnety, was received with universal acclaim. Mykola Bazhan, himself an outstanding poet of the late 1920s, described much later how reading this collection gave him an intoxicating sense of the power of the Ukrainian word:

Ніколи не забуду тієї безсонної ночі дев’ятнадцятого року, коли мій друг приніс мені книжку з рясними соняшниками на обкладинці. Ми з ним сиділи в лісі при багатті (бо виїхали всім

1. See Leonid Novychenko, Poeziia i revoliutsiia (Kyiv, 1956; 2nd ed., 1979). 2. See Istoriia ukraïns´koï literatury XX stolittia, bk. 1, 1910–1930-ti roky, ed. V. H. Donchyk (Kyiv, 1993), 183–203. Creating and Concealing Modernism 449

технікумом на заготівлю дров), і читали, і п’яніли, і кричали з радості, насолоджуючись красою українського слова, яке з такою, не чуваною нами досі музичністю грало, співало, бриніло, гриміло, лилося зі сторінок незабутньої тієї книги. Мені здається, що я стрибком рвонувся до глибшого розуміння владності й таїнства української поезії в ту далеку передосінню ніч у лісі біля Умані, де в хащах ще шуміли банди, і скакали вершники, і розсипалися раптом кулеметні черги, і шурхали вгору омахи багаття, освітлюючи глупу, темнолику ніч. А для нас тоді над усім уже заколивалися «Сонячні кларнети», віщуючи чистими променями своїми і день, і радість творіння, і ясність шляхів. До самої смерті збережу в пам’яті цю ніч, до самої смерті збережу в серці незмірну подяку Вам за Bаше слово, Ваш геній, Ваше серце.3

Similar responses were palpably true of other poets as well. In the leading journal of that time, Mystetstvo (1919–1920), where a number of Ukrainian poets were publishing their poetry, one can see the light- ning speed—in a matter of a few months—with which Tychyna’s poetry was affecting his fellow poets and reshaping their very idiom: poets as different from Tychyna as Mykhail´ Semenko were now attempting to sound like him.4 In a relatively short time his poetry was translated into other languages, beginning with Russian, Polish, and then Czech. The critical reception, which involved such leading figures as Mykola Zerov, Borys Iakubs´kyi, Andrii Nikovs´kyi, Iurii Mezhenko, and Volodymyr Iurynets´, was virtually unanimous in seeing Tychyna as not only the defining figure of the times (a znakova postat´ par excellence), but even as an unprecedented phenomenon in Ukrainian literature. Writing in 1928, and buttressing his arguments with a position taken by the academic critic Oleksandr Bilets´kyi (itself, basically, a statement of consensus), the philosopher and critic Iurynets´ considers Tychyna—in matters of form and technical sophistication—the superior of such can- onized masters as Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukraïnka.5

3. Bazhan’s letter to Tychyna, dated 25 January 1961 (and written in Kyiv) is clearly intended as a synthesizing encomium; see Spivets´ novoho svitu: Spohady pro Pavla Tychynu, ed. H. P. Donets´ (Kyiv, 1971), 16. 4. See Mystetstvo: Literaturno-mystets´kyi tyzhnevyk Ukraïns´koï sektsiï Vseukrlit- koma, 1919, no. 1 (May). 5. That is, citing Bilets´kyi, “Украинская критика отвела ему первое место на современном украинском парнасе, и его собратья по перу признают, что великие предшественники поэта—Шевченко, Франко, Леся Украинка в техническом 450 Grabowicz

The accolades, however, did not remain unchallenged for long. In response to the collection Viter z Ukraïny (Wind from Ukraine, 1924), with its seemingly uncritical acceptance of the Bolshevik Revolution and the new Soviet order, the nationalist and militantly anti-Soviet poet and critic Ievhen Malaniuk, then living in Warsaw, writes Tychyna off as morally and poetically defunct.6 Although still questionable in the 1920s, this judgment became widespread with the appearance of Tychyna’s collection Partiia vede (1934), which seemed to provide incontrovertible proof that the poet had become an official spokesman for, and in effect an accomplice to, the Stalinist regime. His accession to various official posts and honors—PhD in 1934, deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR in 1938, director of the Institute of Litera- ture of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences from 1936 to 1939, director of the combined Institutes of Literature and Language from 1941 to 1943, national commissar of education during the war years, chairman of the Supreme Council of the Ukrainian SSR in 1953, and in 1952, 1956, 1960, and 1966 member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine—provided ample proof of his utterly official cast; his membership in the nomenklatura—so the argument went—made every utterance and every line he was to write in this period moribund. The poetry of the late 1930s, Chuttia iedynoï rodyny (A Feeling of One Fam- ily, 1938), and the 1941 collection Stal´ i nizhnist´ (Steel and Tenderness, named with an obvious play on “Stalin”) were simply taken as retreads and continuations of Partiia vede; and the fact that his published late poetry (from the postwar years to his death in 1967) was indeed all but

отношении не могут с ним равняться.” Аnd then amplifying on it for himself, Iurynets´ writes: “справа йде не лише про техніку; техніка тут тільки претекст, символ чогось іншого; а власне того, що в Тичини вперше дуже широка школа культурних становищ знайшла свій дійсно поетичний вираз без усякої домішки проповідництва, яке так помітне особливо в Шевченка і Франка.” See Volodymyr Iurynets´, Pavlo Tychyna: Sproba krytychnoï analizy (Kharkiv, 1928), 19. 6. See his diptych, “Suchasnyky,” in Ievhen Malaniuk, Stylet i stylos (Poděbrady, 1925), the first part of which lavishes praise on Maksym Ryl´s´kyi and specifically references his collection Synia dalechin´ (1922). The second poem, entitled “Pavlovi Tychyni” and dated November 1924, begins as an encomium, but turns midway into a caustic indictment of the poet (“від кларнета твого—пофарбована дудка зосталась… / …в окривавлений Жовтень—ясна обернулась Весна”), which, by all indications, refers to the second poem of Viter z Ukraïny, “Plach Iaroslavny,” pt. 1 (“дикий вітер повіяв примару… / …Божевільну Офелію—знов половецьких степів”). In various subse- quent writings Malaniuk seems ever ready to fulminate against Tychyna, in effect to argue that his only good collection of poetry was his first, and even then it was written “irrationally,” almost as an “unconscious” medium. See Malaniuk, Povernennia: Poeziï. Literaturoznavstvo. Publi­tsystyka. Shchodennyky (Lviv, 2005), 279–80 and passim. Creating and Concealing Modernism 451 exclusively cast in his official voice only sealed the judgment. That which did not fit this exclusionary paradigm was largely ignored, with the only exception being the remarkably fine war poem “Pokhoron druha” (Funeral of a Friend, 1942), which over the years elicited its share of admiring commentary, if not close analysis. (For no critic that one can readily mention followed up on his puzzlement as to how it was possible that a poet who was presumably long dead, that is, a “living corpse,” could write such a powerful poem.)7 The issue, of course, is with the for- mula itself: the binary and a priori nature of the paradigm (“early” versus “late” Tychyna), with obvious and unmitigated inferiority attached to the latter, militates against any genuine, let alone sophisticated, exam- ination of the latter period, especially if one were to consider his entire corpus—that is, the unpublished poetry as well—of both periods.8 But what is also worth noting, and deserves further examination, is that this binary paradigm also militates against an adequate understanding of the “early” Tychyna. In effect, the splitting of the poet into two irrecon- cilably opposed halves imposes an essentially ideological reading that distorts and ultimately eviscerates the poetic content. Culminating the binary paradigm is a perspective that essentially condemns and occasionally eulogizes Tychyna as a poet who for most of his life lived the living death of official cant. The quintessential artic- ulation of this is an essay by the dissident poet Vasyl´ Stus, Fenomen doby (skhodzhennia na Holhofu slavy) (A Phenomenon of the Times [Ascending the Golgotha of Fame]), which was written in 1970–1971 and which in 1972, a year of massive repressions against Ukrainian intellectuals, served as the prime piece of evidence at Stus’s trial and conviction on charges of “anti-Soviet nationalism.” Stus’s essay takes the early/late Tychyna opposition to a new, all but metaphysical intensity: Tychyna’s tragic fate, he argues,

7. Forty years later, in his Suchasna literatura v URSR (New York, 1964), Ivan Koshe- livets´ is still prepared to accept Malaniuk’s lead. He also casts the whole generation of early Soviet Ukrainian poetry as defined jointly by Tychyna and Ryl´s´kyi, and, having spent pages writing about Tychyna’s genius in his earliest nationally minded poetry, he is willing to concede that in what follows Soniachni klarnety there are good lines here and there; “Pokhoron druha” has as many as four, but all the rest is “absolute (bezdohanna) graphomania.” Meanwhile, Ryl´s´kyi earns unstinting praise (ibid., 43–100; see, esp., 77–88 and passim). The fact that the two poets may be in entirely different weight categories, to borrow a term from boxing, does not seem to occur to him. 8. A major exception here is Iurii Shevel´ov’s “Styl´ politychnoï liryky P. H. Tychyny,” which appeared in Naukovi zapysky Instytutu movoznavstva, vol. 1 (Kyiv, 1941), 3–50, and which Shevel´ov later described as but a part of his dissertation on Tychyna. Neither the whole nor this extant part was ever republished by him. 452 Grabowicz

is to become an all-national (vsenarodnyi) poet, i.e., a state poet at a time when…his all-national fame had come to pass—but it is the fame not of a genius but a pygmy. In turn, the fame of the pygmy who was parasitizing on the genius was assured by a gigantic propagan- distic thrust….His calamity became our calamity….9

What was said by a highly talented poet at a time of the country’s severe ordeal, with genuine anguish, and in the face of imminent repres- sion (Stus served twelve years in the gulag and died there in 1985, on the eve of perestroika), has been repeated with various shadings of pathos, opportunism, and hypocrisy until it became the new cant. Within it, the question of Tychyna, especially a new, close reading of the poetry and a general reexamination of the poet and his path remain largely unaddressed.

The Modernist Paradigm in Ukrainian Literature: From Symbolism to Constructivism

Thankfully, Tychyna’s initial reception was not cast in an ideological mode and his first, perceptive critics focused on immanent, poetic moments and questions of style, technique, and simply the character and nuance of his lyrical poetry as such. These first responses, however, focused largely on the earliest phase of Tychyna’s poetry, particularly on his Soniachni klarnety, and the modality that was most often per- ceived as providing the essential frame of reference here was symbolism. (The later poetry was not so favored, and “ideological” commentary, ever more crude and instrumentalized, became dominant, and soon obligatory. Crude and “denunciatory” [donos] criticism could hardly do justice to Tychyna’s nuance. And almost a half of the poetry he produced then remained unpublished or published only occasionally.) Andrii Nikovs´kyi, in his 1919 brochure, Vita Nova, is one of the very first to examine—with unalloyed enthusiasm—Tychyna’s Soniachni klarnety. Nikovs´kyi does not expressly use the term “symbolism,” but his focus on Tychyna’s thematics, and particularly his poetics and technique clearly implies this. He notes the contrapuntal use of allusions from various registers (biblical, folkloric, and so on), synesthesia, reliance on the poetics of association, an unprecedented range of metrical and rhythmic forms, and especially the broad gamut of musical and acoustic

9. Vasyl´ Stus, Fenomen doby (skhodzhennia na Holhofu slavy) (Kyiv, 1993), 3. The translation is my own. Creating and Concealing Modernism 453 devices.10 Writing in 1924, however, Mykola Zerov, perhaps the most astute critic of his day, expressly speaks of a symbolist poetics in this first collection:

Поетика «Сонячних кларнетів», першої книги Тичини — чисто символічна. В основі її славетна теорія відповідностей, що дозволяє одні відчуття перекладати на мову других. Крім того, вона вся орієнтована на звук. Всі слова зважені й використані як звукові сполучення, ритми вишукані і розраховані так, щоб справити враження тонкими музичними ефектами. Тичина хоче впливати не так значністю вкладеного в вірш змісту, як суґести­ вною силою своїх звуків. А мова його хоче стати тим «крилатим серця звуком», що Хватает на лету и закрепляет вдруг И томный бред души и трав неясный запах.11

Zerov’s judgment, especially his sense of the systematics of technique in this collection (the “theory of correspondences”), is accurate and has become a leitmotif for many later commentaries and paraphrases. Much, of course, remained to be discovered, and many permutations on these insights were still to occur, but two ideas became entrenched. One is the sense that Tychyna is clearly a modernist, although of a very specific Ukrainian kind.12 The other, more deeply internalized, was the growing conviction that Tychyna expressed himself fully and quintes- sentially in his first collection and that everything that came later was some kind of deviation or devolution from this high point. In effect, the choices were narrowed to either Tychyna-as-symbolist or non-­Tychyna, and in later formulations, anti-Tychyna.13 The variations on this syllo-

10. Andrii Nikovs´kyi, Vita nova: Krytychni narysy; P. Tychyna, M. Semenko, Ia. Savchenko, M. Ryl´s´kyi (Kyiv, 1919), 21–58. 11. Mykola Zerov, “Nova zbirka Tychyny,” in Ukraïns´ke pys´menstvo (Kyiv, 2003), 417–18. 12. Iurii Lavrinenko postulates Tychyna’s deep continuity with Skovoroda and also counterposes Tychyna’s “renaissance” character to the conventional—not to say trite— notion of modernism-as-decadence. See Iurii Lavrinenko, Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia (Paris, 1959), 16. 13. Curiously, Zerov himself contributes to this perception by arguing in a 1925 arti- cle devoted to the poetry of Maksym Ryl´s´kyi that his (Ryl´s´kyi’s) path and that of Tychyna were somehow inversely proportional, and, more important here, that Tychyna somehow expended all his capital (“all his trump cards”) in his very first collection: “Навіть найоригінальніший з поетів двадцятип’ятиліття (1900–1925) Тичина починав так: в ‘Сонячних кларнетах’ відкрив усі свої козирі, а потім не раз був примушений до гри слабої і безкозирної. Натомість Рильський, виступивши в 454 Grabowicz gism are many and their examination and deconstruction must be left for another occasion, but two instances may suffice here. One is the already mentioned repudiation of Tychyna by Malaniuk, as early as 1924, for his “betrayal” of his authentic poetic muse in Viter z Ukraïny. Tychyna, who was still to write numerous, striking masterpieces in the mid- and late 1920s (shading off into his complex and highly chal- lenging middle period poetry: Chernihiv, Partiia vede, Chuttia iedynoï rodyny) was pronounced defunct, categorically. Ideological criticism, whether Soviet or nationalist, as in the case of Malaniuk writing in the shadow of his guru Dmytro Dontsov, was uniquely primed to pass such judgments: the totalitarian setting in the Soviet Union and the ascendance of nationalism in Western Ukraine clearly empowered this kind of discourse. The other variation, presumably a “positive”—that is, “supportive”—and seemingly more tolerant alternative, was the attempt by the poet Vasyl´ Barka, whose early work and poetic self-image is overwhelmingly shaped by Tychyna, to speak of all of Tychyna’s poetry as defined by his early “klarnetyzm.” 14 Barka’s book, a rhapsodic essay that in the Ukrainian context often passes for literary criticism, focuses on Tychyna’s first three collections, but characteristically subsumes them all under the paradigm of the first. The poetry that comes later is ignored; in effect, implicitly rejected as antipoetry. Already Pluh (1920), and Zamist´ sonetiv i oktav (also 1920), show a marked departure from the poetics of Soniachni klarnety, especially through the introduction (in Pluh) of rhetorical-polemical poems (for example, “Odyn v liubov” [One turns to love], “Pliusklym prorokam” [To Hollow Prophets], or “Palit´ universaly” [Burn the decrees]) where the movement away from subtly alluded “correspondences,” synesthesia, pointillism, impressionistic techniques, and the dominant idiom of Soniachni klarnety could not be clearer. Along with the appearance of plakat (or agitprop) content in both collections (especially in Pluh), and a rhetoric of slogans, and of the poet-narrator’s direct address to the

літературі поезіями явно слабенькими, суворим і ненастанним самовивірянням добився того, що з кожною новою книжкою його крок ставав упевненішим, а його тон все твердішим” (Mykola Zerov, “Literaturnyi shliakh Maksyma Ryl´s´koho,” in Do dzherel: Literaturno-krytychni statti [Kyiv, 1926]; cf. Mykola Zerov, Do dzherel: Istorychno­-literaturni ta krytychni statti, ed. Sviatoslav Hordyns´kyi [Cracow, 1943], 238). The wrongheadedness here is striking, but its effect, as we shall see, will be far-reaching. 14. Vasyl´ Barka, Khliborobs´kyi Orfei, abo kliarnetyzm, Biblioteka “Suchasnosty” 2 (Munich, 1961). This is further elaborated and mystified (with admixtures of putative “neobaroque” elements) by Iurii Lavrinenko in his Na shliakhakh syntezy kliarnetyzmu, Biblioteka Prolohu i Suchasnosty 122 (New York, 1977). Creating and Concealing Modernism 455 audience, there is throughout Zamist´ sonetiv i oktav, and in various key moments in Pluh, a focus on grotesque or apocalyptic scenes of violence and destruction, on the dark side of the revolution, depicted in a surrealist or expressionist key. While such moments do not neces- sarily contradict a symbolist poetics (a certain analogue here is Blok’s “Dvenadtsat´” [The Twelve]), they do set up a striking contrast to the lyrical, “pastel,” and generally soft-focus and arguably benign mood and feel of the earlier poetry and suggest that the identification of all of Tychyna’s early poetry with symbolism is more problematic than has been generally assumed. An extension of this is the fact that the first collection itself, Soniachni klarnety, has its own trajectory, moving from the limpid and pastel-like tones and modality, and a kind of implied harmony or “resonance,” of the opening poems to the harsh and apocalyptic notes of such later poems as “Odchyniaite dveri” (Open the doors), and “Viina” (War); and culminating in “Zolotyi homin” (A Golden Murmur) and its vision of cripples and the black eagle from the “rotten recesses of the soul.” Soniachni klarnety, in short, are not of a piece, and reflect a fraught and decentering internal dynamic. If there is a klarnetyzm at play here, it is darker and much more dystonic than it is thought to be. The presence of a futurist poetics in Tychyna’s early poetry has a certain currency in the literature, although Tychyna himself was not involved with the various shifting groups, publications, or manifestos of that movement.15 If anything—in terms of organizations—he gravitated towards Khvyl´ovyi’s VAPLITE, but in a rather restrained way. The issue, at most, is one of style and technique, not of “theory” or group affiliation. Parallels to, or indeed utilization on Tychyna’s part of futurist devices or perspectives are evident in various poems. I have already mentioned the recourse to sloganeering rhetoric and plakat poetry in Pluh (for example, in “Perezoriuiut´ zori” [They’ll outshine the stars] or the cycle “Psalom zalizu” [A Psalm to Iron]) and in some measure in Zamist´ sonetiv i oktav. The use of cosmic imagery, most often in tandem with plakat-type rhetoric or a general aura of revolutionary fervor, is another; see “Mizhplanetni intervaly” (Interplanetary Intervals) in Pluh or the whole cycle V kosmichnomu orkestri (In the Cosmic Orchestra, 1921). In essence, this tendency comes into full force in Chernihiv (1931) and is still felt in Partiia vede (1934). Viter z Ukraïny (1924) also shows

15. See Oleh Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism, 1914–1930: A Historical and Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). At one point Ilnytzkyj speaks of Tychyna as being depicted in a visual poem as a “foe” of the futurists (328). 456 Grabowicz this presence (for example, in the title poem or in “Osin´ taka myla” [Autumn is so nice], or “Povitrianyi flot” [Air Fleet]). In his essay Khliborobs´kyi Orfei, abo kliarnetyzm (Agricultural Orpheus, or Clarnetism), Vasyl´ Barka offers the hypothesis that Tychyna’s “clarnetist” poetry shows typological similarities to Khleb- nikov and his notion of budet­lianstvo, but apart from noting several Khlebnikov-like verbal constructions (“sonkhvylia,” “chervono-sy’- zele’-­duhasto,” and “kos-federatsiia”) adduces no further evidence.16 In fact, many more such constructions can be found, but whether they demonstrate a real link or simply parallels of some sort is still to be determined. A dramatically new stage in Tychyna’s stylistic and technical devel- opment is Chernihiv, which can be seen as a “missing link” so to speak in the transition from his “early” to his “late” hypostasis, though more correctly, perhaps, to his “middle” period.17 Reprinted in 1932, it was subsequently severely censored (in fact reduced to only two poems of the cycle’s original eight) and was “reinstated” in full only in the twelve-volume edition of his collected works begun in 1983. Chernihiv, as I have argued previously, is a virtual laboratory of constructivist poetics, both in its thematic properties—utter contemporaneity, as reflected in the language of newspapers, recent party pronouncements, and so on; social and ideological engagement; coordination with the popular idiom, including broad popular humor and the like—and in its formal-technical features: heavy reliance on everyday living speech (formally conveyed by the absence of punctuation), slang, newspaper jargon, quotations from ideological cant (for example, Stalin’s recent “dizziness from success” speech); shifting accentual meters; oblique rhymes; and a general “loading down of the word” (gruzifikatsiia slova) that was precisely the centerpiece of constructivist theory at the time.18 A major difference, however, is that for all his reliance on these devices and the general systematics of this poetry, Tychyna does not allow it to be the exclusive defining mode for him. In fact, as central as it is here, it still is made to coexist with other moments: broad folklike humor echoing the Ukrainian intermedia tradition, the vertep, and aspects of neo-kotliarev­shchyna, and so on. Cumulatively, all of these moments create a new polyphony.19

16. Barka, Khliborobs´kyi Orfei, 65. 17. See my “Tyčyna’s Černihiv,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1, no. 1 (March 1977): 89–113. 18. See, e.g., Kornelii Zelinskii, Poeziia kak smysl (Moscow, 1929); cf. Grabowicz, “Tyčyna’s Černihiv,” 108–13. 19. Grabowicz, “Tyčyna’s Černihiv,” 113. Creating and Concealing Modernism 457

The last point may provide a gloss to the entire poetic trajectory: Tychyna seems to resist being typecast or defined by any one mode or style—even if it is as successful, that is, as enthusiastically received, as his “clarnetist” symbolism. He seems uncomfortable in the procrustean bed of klarnetyzm that Barka and then Lavrinenko were to prepare for him some forty years later.20 As shown in Chernihiv, he also subverts the conventions of socialist realism as he juxtaposes self-important official pronouncements (including Stalin’s “dizziness from success” speech) with buffo humor and carnivalesque scenes (as in “‘Pislia ts´oho zrozumilo’ robitnyk kazhe ‘choho ukr-varshavs´komu smittiu tak zaraz veselo’” [“After This It’s Clear,” Says the Worker, “Why the Ukr-Warsaw Trash is Feeling So Cheerful Now”] and the next poem, “Dulys´ pany i dvadtsiat´ p’iat´ lit tomu robitnyk zhaduie 1905 rik na Chernihivshchyni” [The Gentry’s Nose Was Out of Joint Twenty Five Years Ago as Well, the Worker Reminisces about 1905 in the Chernihiv Area]). Six years earlier, when Tychyna had prepared for publication his multifaceted collection Viter z Ukraïny (with modes/styles ranging from the constructivist “Nadkhodyt´ lito” [Summer is coming] or the constructivist-cum-buffo “Kozhum’iaka” [The Hide Pounder] to the sonorous and elegant dactylic hexameter of “Khmary kruhom obliahly” [The clouds laid siege to the fields]), he notes ironically in a letter to his future wife, Lida Paparuk, that his Kyivan readers would prefer him to keep on republishing his Soniachni klarnety for the fifth time, while he clearly is going in another direction.21 In effect, a subtle tension is realized here—one which will define an essential dynamic throughout Tychyna’s work. His energy will consis- tently lead him to stake out new territory, to set for himself new tasks of poetic invention and formal experimentation. With Chernihiv, this experimentation is located most often between the emerging demands of socialist realism and the modernist repertoire he is still actively

20. See note 14 above. 21. This is said mainly in passing and with reference to some or other gossip, i.e.: “ясно тільки те, що т. Рильський напевно більш правильно і щиро прийняв мою оцінку ніж оті всі старокияне. Вони ж мені ніяк забути Харкова не можуть!” But the actual point he goes on to make is altogether clear: “Бачте, по-їхньому, я повинен сидіти в Києві і перевидавати п’ятим виданням мою першу книгу” (Pavlo Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv u dvanadtsiaty tomakh [Kyiv, 1983–1990]; here, vol. 12 [1990], pt. 1, 28). Indeed, after the first three collections there was V kosmichnomu orkestri (1921), and now, as he is writing, his fifth collection, Viter z Ukraïny, is about to appear in 1924. Some would argue that this should have been the fifth edition of Soniachni klarnety. Tychyna’s letter to Mykola Zerov, in which he provides a detailed account of the contents of Viter z Ukraïny, appears to have been written just earlier, sometime in March 1924. See Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 12, pt. 2, 26–28. 458 Grabowicz developing. At the same time, in various subtle ways his poetry estab- lishes multiform and ramified continuities: tone and voice and various techniques remain distinctly and unmistakably Tychynian even while some shifts may seem radical, almost suggesting a kind of self-parody.22 The task this presents to the critic is to identify the various formal and technical moments that construct continuity even while allowing fun- damental shifts of tone, voice, and style. Not least of all it obliges him to rethink the evidence and particularly the relative importance of various tropes, devices, and so on, and the ways in which the poet is handling the emerging demands and strictures of the new socialist realist poetics, and with time the ever more fraught question of censorship. In general, the transition between collections, say, between Soniachni klarnety and Pluh, or between Zamist´ sonetiv i oktav and Viter z Ukraïny, is always significant for Tychyna by virtue of the selection and care he puts into constructing any particular collection as an aesthetic and dramatic unit23 and his breathtakingly rapid introduction of stylistic innovation as well as formal experimentation. In effect, each new collection projects a new poetics, and this applies both to the early period—that is, from 1918 to the end of the 1920s—and his middle period, the 1930s and the war years. In contrast, the late poetry follows different patterns. As suggested by the sheer length of Tychyna’s poetic trajectory span- ning some six extremely turbulent and traumatic decades of Ukrainian history, and as signaled by Chernihiv, the tension between shifts and continuities looms particularly large at the juncture between his “early” and “middle” periods.24

The Role of Intertexts

The modernist poetics which propels Tychyna onto the literary scene where he will remain for well over a decade as a dominant presence

22. This is also Malaniuk’s take: first he elaborates Zerov’s maxim, noted above, that “в ‘Соняшні кларнети’ увійшов майже весь основний ‘капітал’ Тичини, а решта книжок — то були лише ‘відсотки’ з того ‘капіталу,’ відсотки, що блискавично маліли,” and then adds his own scurrilous point: “Вже в ‘Чернігові’ (р. 1929?) вони досягнули нуля, бо, коли б брати цю книгу поважно, треба було б її вважати за психопатологічний збірник автопародій”; Ievhen Malaniuk, Knyha sposterezhen´, vol. 1 (Toronto, 1962), 302. 23. Thus it is most revealing that his first collection, Soniachni klarnety, includes only a small fraction of the poetry he wrote prior to its publication in 1918. 24. See here my earlier “Continuity and Discontinuity in the Poetry of Pavlo Tychyna,” in East European Literature: Selected Papers from the Second World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, September 30–October 4, 1980, ed. Evelyn Bristol (Berkeley, 1982), 13–22. Creating and Concealing Modernism 459 can arguably be best examined, as noted earlier, through techniques and strategies, as well as experiments, that constitute Tychyna’s unique voice and style and quickly contribute to his stature as the all-but-­ official national poet. It goes without saying, of course, that the “idea content,” the “ideology” (as nuanced or attenuated as it may be) of his poetry is equally in play; as is his projection of the Ukrainian collec- tive experience, of war and revolution, of the euphoria of approaching independence and horror at the rigor mortis of the old order and at the brutalization that accompanies the revolution—and with that as well his masterful interweaving of individual, personal hopes, feelings, and experiences into that collective mainstream. All of this obviously con- tributes to the totality of his narrative. But the sense of the poet as figure and spokesman, and especially as iconic medium, is carried above all by his voice—in effect, his style. This, of course, also underlies the earlier essentializing attempts at identifying that voice-and-style through the notion of his klarnetyzm, which was touched upon above, and which still remains the all-but-official default mode for reading Tychyna in Ukraine today—and indeed all of Tychyna, not just the earliest hypos- tasis. Although mistaken as to its tenor and content, the search through the Barkian notion of klarnetyzm for an “essential Tychyna” was right insofar as it sought to find a coherent artistic vision and within that its various constituent artistic tropes. At its simplest it probably reflects the universal fact that national poets rise to that status by the workings of the heart, not the mind of the collective. In the argument that follows, that style is examined through various perspectival and compositional recourses—beginning with the use of intertexts and of intertextuality—which build on the one hand to greater narrative complexity, going on specifically to the use of collage, montage, pastiche, and so on, but which also reveal various essential modernist facets of his poetry, most particularly moments of self-re- flection and self-thematization that mark out a characteristic modernist concern with artistic self-fashioning and general artistic self-themati- zation. Since the trajectory of Tychyna’s poetry of this period, and of Ukrainian literature as a whole, coincides with the collective experience of a society rapidly subjected to totalitarianism and then its higher essence—that is, its more brutal distillate, Stalinism—the modernist cast he was developing from the time of his entry on the scene in 1918 and throughout the entire subsequent decade was soon confronted by the massed, state-mobili­ zed forces of regimentation and militant antimodernism (fanned, to complete the picture, by a bristling, general and again state-directed populism and anti-intellectualism). The mortal threat this implied was utterly real: writers and intellectuals were falling victim to state terror already in the late 1920s, and by the early 1930s, 460 Grabowicz with the implementation of the genocidal Holodomor, hundreds and perhaps thousands were liquidated, and the number of peasant victims rose to the millions. The ways in which Tychyna handled or “negoti- ated” (as today’s fashionable term has it) this context or predicament is coterminous with his creating-and-concealing (or creating/concealing) of his poetry and, beyond that, simply his survival as a poet and as a person. The topic of the intertextual or of intertextuality as such is, of course, extremely broad; it has animated the discourses of poststructuralism and deconstruction and continues to draw concerted theoretical atten- tion. The key notion and very term “intertextuality,” first used by Julia Kristeva in a 1966 essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” postulates that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorp- tion and transformation of another.”25 Renate Lachmann distinguishes between intertextuality taken as a “category for describing a general dimension of texts”; a narrower “purely descriptive category applicable only to those texts whose struc- ture happens to be organized by the interfacing of texts or textual ele- ments”; and, finally, a concept useful “primarily in its critical potential for literary theory, in the sense that it questions the previously accepted concepts of literature (uniqueness, closure, structural totality, and sys- tematic structure).”26 For our purposes, clearly, the second meaning and focus is most productive; the theoretical has its own uses and agenda. At the same time, as anticipated by the notion of intertextuality, especially its virtually open-ended theoretical potential, the focus on the interrelation of two texts necessarily also becomes a focus on the ontology of the text itself, on how it exists and what new dimensions it reveals; intertextuality becomes or indeed determines textuality as such.27 For Tychyna and the new inner space of the text that he was making and exploring—beginning already with his first collection—this dynamization of the text, a multifarious empowerment of the poem to resonate with a range of new rhetorical and compositional/narrative devices, is an immediate sign staking out an unmistakably modernist stance. Arguably, these are features or clues as important as the sym- bolist features (the “correspondences,” the gamut of musical devices and

25. See Frank J. D’Angelo, “The Rhetoric of Intertextuality,” Rhetoric Review 29, no. 1 (2010): 31–47; here 33. 26. Renate Lachmann, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism (Minneapolis, Minn., 1997), 28–29. 27. See also Mohammed N. Niazi, “Encountering the Other in General Text: An Approach to Intertext through Poetry of the German Sensibility,” Comparative Litera- ture 52, no. 2 (Spring 2000), 101 and passim for his discussion of the Kristeva/Bakhtin/ Derrida nexus here. Creating and Concealing Modernism 461 rhythmic forms, the poetics of association, and so on) that were noted by his astute early critics such as Zerov and Nikovs´kyi (see above). Although a full examination of the variety of intertextual juxtapo- sitions, problematizations, or thematizations is a task for a separate occasion, one can begin by noting the telling fact that these intertextual features, whose presence will grow steeply as Tychyna’s poetry matures, begin with his first collection, but they are either largely muted or absent from the considerable body of early poetry that Tychyna wrote in the decade or so before he published Soniachni klarnety but omitted from this collection. The principle of selection is strictly applied: to put it metaphorically (and somewhat tautologously), what is included is what is like the Tychyna we will know; what is excluded is what sounds like Oles´ or other minor poets of the period—often quite lyrical, full of feeling and pathos and striking images, but still not first order, not unmistakably, palpably, challenging…and modernist. A specific variant of a broad range of intertextual devices or moments that will mark out Tychyna’s early poetry is his subtle and programmatic use of paratextual thematization or reference, here specifically the way in which the lead poem of the collection introduces, plays with, elaborates, and thematizes (all these functions are occurring simultaneously) the very title and theme of the whole collection. In short, the opening poem becomes a dramatization of the emergence of a new kind of poetry, an epiphany, a fundamental transformation. In Soniachni klarnety this is the task of “Ne Zevs, ne Pan, ne Holub-Dukh” (Not Zeus, or Pan, or Spirit-Dove), which encapsulates the transformative power of the poetry being introduced, a poetry with which the poet making it—that is, his voice—will merge. The poem presents this concisely and forcefully:

Не Зевс, не Пан, не Голуб-Дух,— Лиш Сонячні Кларнети. У танці я, ритмічний рух, В безсмертнім — всі планети.

Я був — не Я. Лиш мрія, сон. Навколо — дзвонні згуки, І пітьми творчої хітон, І благовісні руки.

Прокинувсь я — і я вже Ти: Над мною, підо мною Горять світи, біжать світи Музичною рікою. 462 Grabowicz

І стежив я, і я веснів: Акордились планети. Навік я взнав, що Ти не Гнів,— Лиш Сонячні Кларнети. (1, 37)28

That it is a poem of creation, of movement from unformed or frag- mentary chaos to a new entity, seems clear. It also stresses, in the first lines of stanza 2 and then stanza 3, that it is a fundamental transfor- mation, first from being Self to becoming Not-self (“Я був—не Я”) and then the awakening from being “Me” to being “You” (“Прокинувсь я—і я вже Ти”)—and finally, in the last stanza, of realizing or internalizing (by way of the lapidary, but momentous “навік я взнав” and the contrast drawn to “Гнів”—that is, Divine Wrath—which clearly places this in a biblical, archetypically religious setting) that a new sacrum has been realized, in effect created before our eyes. This sense of transcendent and cosmic forces (the setting of Genesis and God’s spirit hovering over the void and then of planets arranging themselves into new chords) also conveys a new revelation, the birth as it were of a new religion, which is the new poetry now being introduced. Because this collection of poetry that you are holding in your hand are the Soniachni klarnety, the Clarinets of the Sun that the poet has revealed to you and to us— with himself as the celebrant/carrier/archpriest within it. But while the allusions and the movement of the poem are precisely toward this, and one can imagine as the implied visual intertexts two iconic paintings of Sandro Botticelli, his Cestello Annunciation and also his Primavera (to which the first line of the fourth stanza would seem to refer, especially in light of the neologism “веснів” [to become like Spring]), to be Spring in the process of becoming—which is exactly how Flora is depicted in Botticelli’s iconic painting—all of this is effected without any overt reli- gious rhetoric or pathos; it occurs as transformation and revelation as such, pure and unadulterated, without aid or crutches of established religious symbols (specifically not Zeus, or Pan, or Spirit-Dove) and sans worn-out, traditional rhetoric—but with the sheer power of reanimated, archetypical poetry. Even if the reader cannot or does not follow all the steps and does not visualize the iconic visual intertexts (although the references to “Annunciation’s hands” and “becoming Spring” are clear cues), the power of the suggested transformation is palpable— precisely because it is largely subliminal—and the allusions to such

28. All in-text references are to Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv (see note 21 above), volume and page; if the given volume has two parts, part 2 is specified as, e.g., “12/2.” Creating and Concealing Modernism 463 modern instruments as the clarinet and to interplanetary space provide, paradoxically, seemingly stable handholds or platforms for this out-of- body experience that has just been revealed to us. The introductory lines of the lead poem to the collection Pluh, “Вітер. / Не вітер—буря!” (Wind. / Not wind—a storm!), and the unnamed lead poem of Zamist´ sonetiv i oktav, “Uzhe svitaie, a shche imla…” (It’s dawning, but the mist’s still high…), follow a similar pattern. The paratext of the opening poem becomes a synecdoche for the whole collection: in Pluh as the plow of a revolution whose blade overturns everything—people, animals, orchards, gods, and temples—with no one able to know its path and purpose, and in Zamist´ sonetiv i oktav as the poet’s anguished cry that all he can now offer is curses at those who have become beasts and worse—instead of sonnets and verse:

Прокляття всім, прокляття всім, хто звіром став! (Замість сонетів і октав). (1, 127)

Most of the texts in Soniachni klarnety that serve as intertexts and in various ways actualize the narrative and give the text its driving urgency, complexity, and spontaneity are not themselves citations or allusions, texts referring to other authors or contexts (this will appear prominently in later collections), but appear mainly as devices for dramatizing other voices or perspectives and to provide counterpoint. Thus in “Podyvylas´ iasno” (She looked brightly), it is a series of images that correlate feel- ings, experience, aspects of nature and music—without suggesting plot or even narrative, but only a higher correspondence between things, an inkling of a cosmic harmony in which all these moments play their roles as instruments in an orchestra:

Подивилась ясно,— заспівали скрипки! — Обняла востаннє,— у мої душі.— Ліс мовчав у смутку, в чорному акорді. Заспівали скрипки у мої душі! (1, 44)

In “Z kokhannia plakav ia” (I cried from love), the whole poem is presented as two juxtaposed perspectives, as a kind of dialogue between them, with the odd lines presenting the feelings of the lyrical subject, his hyper-sketchy account of a love affair, and in each case the follow- ing (even) parenthetically given lines are like minimalist comments on surrounding reality but from some other perspective, the nature 464 Grabowicz of which is quite unclear: another uninvolved observer? The objective side of the inner poet? A kind of echo or some unstated and undefined chorus? It is not clear at all, other than the fact that the counterpoint is unexpectedly telling:

З кохання плакав я, ридав. (Над бором хмари муром!) Тои плач між нею, мною став — (Мармуровим муром…)

Пливуть молитви угорі. (Вернися з сміхом-дзвоном!) Спадає лист на вівтарі — (Кучерявим дзвоном…)

Уже десь випали сніги. (Над бором хмари муром!) Розбиті ніжні вороги — (Мармуровим муром…)

Самотна ти, самотнии я. (Весна! — світанок! — вишня!) Обсипалась душа твоя — (Вранішняя вишня…) (1, 45)

In general, there is a sense of a kind of “inner” and “outer” narrative, of echoes and syncopation, which suggest that the voice may come from different sources, whose provenance is palpable but not clear. Further into the collection, the poem “Odchyniaite dveri” presents the counter- point with fierce intensity: the difference between the expectations at presumably a wedding, a joyous waiting for a radiant bride and then a totally opposite, antipodal reality revealed when the doors open: storm, all the roads in blood, weeping, darkness and death:

Одчиняйте двері — Наречена йде! Одчиняйте двері — Голуба блакить! Очі, серце і хорали Стали Ждуть… Creating and Concealing Modernism 465

Одчинились двері ­— Горобина ніч! Одчинились двері — Всі шляхи в крові! Незриданними сльозами Тьмами Дощ… (1, 69)

One can, of course, provide a reasoned, historical reading: the expec- tations for a national rebirth, the joy of liberation—and then the actual reality of it all: revolution, destruction, anarchy and mass bloodshed… But the poem draws its power precisely from the archetypal juxtapo- sition, not the reasoned or historical elucidation that supplants the feelings themselves. In the four-poem cycle “Skorbna maty” (Mater Dolorosa), the inter- text comes from the apocryphal stories of the Virgin Mary wandering the land, bearing witness to its suffering, and unable to help. The very vagueness of the temporal setting—these are, of course, scenes of the Ukrainian countryside and the ravages of war and revolution, but they can be from any period—the universal sense of human misery, and the simple directness of the Biblia pauperum suggest a use of counterpoint and intertext that is raised, so to speak, to a metaphysical level; no longer a nuance of style but rather an intimation of a deep underlying collective trauma—of society in extremis, where even heavenly forces cannot come to the rescue. The sense of speaking for the collective and drawing on its chthonic memory is particularly evident in the final poem of the collection, “Zolotyi homin,” which resonates with topoi and scenes suggesting (as a decade later in Dovzhenko’s 1928 film Zvenyhora) a mythic Ukraine of both past and present, the people now and their ancestors with them, stirring and coming to life in a massive collective rebirth, with the young nation drawing its power from the earth and its youth and shrugging off the mountain of stone and rubble heaped upon its grave as if it were fluff. The rebirth—as in Buddhist bardo—is not without its encounter with demonic, dark forces: the cripples that beg and threaten and reject the hand extended in brotherhood, and the black bird with talons for eyes emerging from the recesses of the soul, the depth of the uncon- scious and cawing in response to the general jubilation. The intertext here is again an encounter with the Shadow—the enemy within—which a few poems earlier Tychyna had depicted in “Viina,” where in answer 466 Grabowicz to the mother’s blessing as he goes off to war (“благословляю, синку, на ворога”) the son replies (as she tells it),

А він: матусю моя! Немає, каже, ворога Та й не було. Тільки й єсть у нас ворог — Наше серце. Благословіть, мамо, шукати зілля, Шукати зілля на людське божевілля. (1, 78)

In “Zolotyi homin,” as with the paratext of the early collections just discussed, the title is also a synecdoche revealing both the action and the meaning of the poem: with inspired circularity it emerges from collec- tive archetypal images, a kind of collective urtext, of newly remembered scenes from a collective, mythical past that transcend time, providing a way of simultaneously seeing one’s past (the incarnate ancestors, and St. Andrew the apostle blessing the land and its destiny), one’s present (the ingathering of all, literally all,29 in Kyiv on Sophia Square to greet the liberation that was awaited for centuries), and the prospect of the collective path ahead, with all seen as merging in a common fate—now assured of a new common identity. The final coda of the poem is an incantation invoking and affirming nothing less than a new, collec- tive national consciousness. It is the kind of thing one expects from a national poet.

* * *

29. Thus: То десь із сел і хуторців ідуть до Києва — Шляхами, стежками, обніжками. І б’ються в їх серця у такт — ідуть! ідуть! — Дзвенять немов сонця у такт — ідуть! ідуть! — Там над шляхами, стежками, обніжками. Ідуть! І всі сміються, як вино: І всі співають, як вино: Я ­— дужий народ, Я молодий! (Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 1 [1983], 85) Creating and Concealing Modernism 467

The intertexts of Pluh are more pronounced and more identifiably inter- textual. Already the third poem “I Bielyi, i Blok,” invokes not just two but four contemporary Russian poets and highlights an overarching fact or factor that defines the scene whether in 1919 when the poem was written or in 1920 when it was published, and basically depicts the Ukrainian predicament—whether in the present or in the past— through the looming presence of Russia. Characteristically, it is missing from the Soniachni klarnety where elemental, primordial, and indeed archetypal and mythical moments hold sway and where political, real- and-concrete considerations are simply not invoked—they would be out-of-frame there. In Pluh they are at center stage as this collection focuses on the concrete, political, and ideological here-and-now and formally expands its modal repertoire to include a range of rhetorical elocutions: commands, injunctions, imprecations, critique, and so on. The whole resounds with a new, engaged voice of the poet-as-tribune, in effect a newly canonized national poet. It is still quintessentially Tychyna’s voice, and any number of these works have become iconic texts—and precisely as early Tychyna—and yet they are palpably differ- ent from the so-called klarnetyzm of Soniachni klarnety. In contrast to the pastel and enharmonious world of the latter (as depicted in the two luminous cycles so named) the plow of revolution in the eponymous poem of Pluh introduces a world that is starkly apocalyptic, where man, like the tiny insects in the sod, is able only to cower and flee the plow’s inexorable force:

Вітер. Не вітер — буря! Трощить, ламає, з землі вириває… За чорними хмарами (з блиском! ударами!) за чорними хмарами мільйон мільйонів мускулястих рук… Котить. У землю врізає (чи то місто, дорога, чи луг), у землю плуг. А на землі люди, звірі й сади, a на землі боги і храми: o пройди, пройди над нами, розсуди!

Characteristically, too, he is no more equipped to grasp its meaning and purpose than the inhabitants of the sod: 468 Grabowicz

Й були такі, що тікали. В печери, озера, ліси. — Що ти за сило єси? — питали. І ніхто з них не радів, не співав. (Огняного коня вітер гнав — oгняного коня — в ночі —) І тільки їх мертві, розплющені очі відбили всю красу нового дня! Очі. (1, 89)

But the poet can; in fact that is his task. This is perhaps the central, structural moment in his evolution from Soniachni klarnety to Pluh: no longer just observer and witness (silent in “Viina,” on the brink of becoming an active force, an objective correlative, or agent of the col- lective in “Zolotyi homin”) he emerges as an empowered force, as is repeatedly and forcefully expressed in the rhetorical modulations of Pluh noted above. The very next poem, “Siite” (Sow), exemplifies this as on the one hand it continues the natural cycle from plowing to sowing, but also in the extraordinary amplification of the rhetorical mode as such—as the whole poem, in each stanza, in practically every verb, is cast in the imperative mode:

Сійте в рахманний чорнозем з піснею, грою… Над долиною, низом — сонце горою!

Робіте — прокинувся вулик. Тверезить земля: од вас я, од вас тільки волі — жодних кривлянь!

Будьте безумні — не зимні. Нові, по нові марсельєзи! Направо, наліво мечі — ставте дієзи в ключі!

Ударте у мідь, обезхмарте! Вірте (не лірте!), ідіть, Creating and Concealing Modernism 469

фанфарами крикніть вночі: дієзи, дієзи в ключі! (1, 90)

In his realm the poet is implicitly all-powerful, like the orchestra conductor at a symphony, as director for a film. The role of his power and agency is further stressed and amplified in the collection through such “tribunicial,” or simply imperative, enunciations that come one after the other at the end of the collection: “Ia znaiu” (I know), “Hna- tovi Mykhailychenku” (To Hnat Mykhaily­chenko), “Odyn v liubov,” “Pliusklym prorokam,” or “Palit´ universaly.” The next to last, “Pliusklym prorokam,” is perhaps most concentrated and direct in its expression of the poet’s, Tychyna’s, mandate to address his contemporary fellow poets as first among equals and implicitly to lead by example:

До вас, казенні поети, офіціантики, до вас моє слово, мій гнів. Не робіть, не робіть ви романтики з червоної крові братів!

Упивайтеся славою, винами, взивайтесь жерцями краси, — та не плачте, не вийте над домовинами, як пси.

Фальшива естетика, грація для вас навіть там, де гроби. Що вам всесвітня федерація, продажні натхненці, раби?

Що те братерство, коли вам еротика? — Змовкніть, од могил одійдіть! Революції від вас, як од нерівного ґнотика, тільки чадить… (1, 123)

This arrogated power, however, is not mere voluntarism or ego infla- tion. As projected in Pluh and in later collections, it is earned by intense feeling and commiseration, through a filtering of one’s sense of the collective and one’s duty towards it through a kind of ordeal, by standing watch as at a sacred ritual; as he will later say in Viter z Ukraïny, the right to speak for all is earned by the pain that he can suffer: “За всіх 470 Grabowicz

скажу, за всіх переболію.” It is a status that necessarily accrues to the poet who speaks for his nation—which also allows us now to rejoin our discussion of “I Bielyi, i Blok.” In various ways the poem is key; it not only projects the real-world setting, the political context which simply cannot be formulated without a consideration of Russia, it also brings to bear the essential quality of the poet himself, who in Pluh, as already intimated, is systematically constructing his profile as national poet. This poem palpably, dramatically conjoins these moments:

І Бєлий, і Блок, і Єсенін, і Клюєв: Росіє, Росіє, Росіє моя!.. …Стоїть сторозтерзаний Київ, і двістірозіп’ятий я.

Там скрізь уже: сонце! — співають: Месія! — Тумани, долини, болотяна путь… Воздвигне Вкраїна свойого Мойсея,— не може ж так буть!

Не може ж так буть, о, я чую, я знаю. Під регіт і бурю, під грім од повстань, од всіх своїх нервів у степ посилаю — поете, устань!

Чорнозем підвівся і дивиться в вічі, і кривить обличчя в кривавий свій сміх. Поете, любити свій край не є злочин, коли це для всіх! (1, 91)

The juxtaposition of Ukraine and Russia allows a comparison of what exists or is possible there (in Russia) and here (in Ukraine), which then moves to touch upon issues that are fraught in the extreme and skirt the accusation of chauvinism (or separatism). While four Russian poets are mentioned in the first line, the second line, while seemingly com- ing from all four, is in fact a recasting of a repeated line from Andrei Belyi’s “Rodine,” which suggests the general exaltation in the original, but dispenses with the self-immolatory and messianic components.30

30. I.e., in the first stanza: Рыдай, буревая стихия, В столбах громового огня! Россия, Россия, Россия, — Creating and Concealing Modernism 471

* * *

The point, however, as developed in the following stanzas, is to show that while Russia has its day in the sun and its Messiah, Ukraine, crushed by the revolution (the “hundredfold” destruction of Kyiv) and the Russian-Ukrainian war (the “civil war” as it still is called in many quarters), Ukraine is still awaiting its Moses—implicitly, therefore, its liberation—which in the course of stanzas 3 and 4 turns in Tychyna’s rendering into an appeal, an invocation to Ukraine itself, implicitly the land, the steppe and the chernozem, to bring forth this poet—“поете устань!” As the steppe/chernozem is grimacing in bloody laughter, a voice proclaims the poem’s concluding lines, “Поете, любити свій край не є злочин, коли це для всіх!” The source of this voice is presumably the poet’s persona, and given the poem’s rhetoric, is purposefully close to Tychyna himself. Alternatively, it somehow comes from the cher- nozem itself (semantically it is plausible, although the colon or dash to indicate speech is missing); at the same time it plausibly suggests its peculiar radically populist, anarchist, political frame. If it comes from the poet, its qualification is a source of puzzlement, even outrage, to this day: “To love your country is no crime—if it is for everyone.” Is he thus instructing that anticipated, liberating (?) poet of the future? Did we hear him right? When is loving your country a crime?31 And what does it mean to “love it for everyone” (in order to avoid it becoming a crime)? To pose these questions is to answer them—particularly because the answer is also implied by the political, and underlying colonial, context: it is, after all, a poem dealing with what can be said in Russian and what in Ukrainian. In the setting in question (and later generally in the Soviet context), in a Russian-­Ukrainian encounter the charge of chauvinism is always in the wings. What is remarkable is to hear it expressed so directly and literally that while it is entirely normal to express passionate patriotism in Russian (Belyi’s quote), the equivalent Ukrainian may always be tainted. Characteristically, Tychyna addresses this directly in a later poem in Pluh (the second part of “26. II [11. III],”

Безумствуй, сжигая меня! And in the seventh (last) stanza: И ты, огневая стихия, Безумствуй, сжигая меня Россия, Россия, Россия — Мессия грядущего дня! (Andrei Belyi, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, ed. A. V. Lavrova and Dzhon [John] Malmstad, vol. 1, Novaiia biblioteka poeta (St. Petersburg, 2006), 409–10) 31. Malaniuk focuses on this in a contemporary lecture with special outrage. See Malaniuk, Povernennia, 279–80 and passim. 472 Grabowicz which is the date of Shevchenko’s death in 1861) in which he, his lyrical persona, which again for all practical/rhetorical purposes is the poet himself, advises the bard: “Дивись. Мовчи. Хоча б схотів і їсти — / нічого не кажи Первопрестольній.— / Бо ще й Тебе пошиють в шовіністи.”32 He also returns to it in Zamist´ sonetiv i oktav; see, for example, “Shovinistychne” (Chauvinistic). While “I Bielyi, i Blok” demonstrates how close to the surface of daily political reality is the making of poetry, similar concrete issues, like the poet’s reception, the way he is perceived by his readers, are also near the surface, and are deftly projected by intertextual tropes. Particularly telling here is the Pluh triptych “Lysty do poeta” (Letters to the Poet), which consists of three poems, each stylized as fanmail from a woman admirer. The intertexts here, the supposed letters are fictive, but the issues they raise are real and also potentially fraught. This first letter is most innocuous, and most revealing of the undercurrent of the erotic in poetry. While the writer positions herself as a person of culture (her modest furnishings include the works of Kotsiubyns´kyi, a map of Greece, a statue of a swan) she is attracted to the poet through emotions and an undercurrent of passion:

Мені все сниться: сонце, співи, і Ви, і день весняний, — i от я з Вами вже знайома, поете мій коханий.

Прийдіть сьогоднi: в мене вдома лиш я сама та квіти. Я цілий вечір буду ждати, боятись і радіти… (1, 105)

The second letter is much less sanguine; in fact it questions (fictive though the letter is) whether there is anything “real” or “realistic” in Tychyna’s poetry. And the charge that it is not like Shevchenko can hardly be refuted (Tychyna’s irony is surely intended):

32. This poem was censored under the Soviets and not included in vol. 1 of the twelve- (actually fourteen-) volume complete edition; it was reinstated in 1990 in vol. 12, pt. 2, 111, but without any commentary on the fact that it was actually censored; the evasive locution given is that “this part of the diptych was not reprinted during the poet’s lifetime.” Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 12, pt. 2, 360. Creating and Concealing Modernism 473

Ви десь, мабуть, не з наших сел, абож… о ні, не смію. Читала Вас я і не все, не все я розумію.

Чи я у полі, чи в лісу — усе мені здається: у Вас у книжці неживе, а тут живе сміється…

Про Вас недавно хтось писав: “Поезії окраса”. А все ж таки у Вас не так, не так, як у Тараса.

Про все в Вас єсть: і за народ, і за недолю краю. А як до серця те узять — даруйте, я не знаю. (1, 106)

And finally the last fan, the least enamored and most curt: his poetry, she claims, are rachitic sonnets and songs—and who needs them: the workers? The ones who are hungry? Even more so this claim is irre- futable—and of course highly prescient of the instrumentalization of poetry in socialist realism, still a decade in the future—but its roots in ambient reductionism and anti-intellectualism are all around, and who better than the poet to see his native grain:

Я комуністка, хожу в “чужому”, Обрізала косу. — І Вам не соромно співати в цей час про сонце, про красу?

Пишу до Вас, бо так схотіла. Скажіть мені: кому потрібні рахітичні оті сонети та пісні?

Народу, скажете? голодним? — Нещасна, жалка ж та рука, що тріолeтами годує робітника. 474 Grabowicz

Поки прощайте, не здивуйте — це ж не любовний лист. А втім, скажу: Ви — сила, і з Вас ще буде комуніст. (1, 107)

What saves the poet is that somehow his poetry still speaks to her (“Ви—сила”)—and with the ultimate power of the voice of the narod she allows that he may still become a Communist (which was also fated to happen). Even before the revealing prediction at the end of Zamist´ sonetiv i oktav that the poet will indeed be obliged to kiss the Pope’s slipper (see below), already in Pluh he is anticipating the same outcome. The rich intertextual fabric of Pluh is somehow particularly enabled by Tychyna’s reliance on cycles: the aforementioned “Lysty do poeta,” as well as the cycles “Sotvorinnia svitu” (Creation of the World), the four poems of “Madonno moia” (O My Madonna), and the four “Psalom zalizu” poems, the two “Rondeli” (Rondels) poems, and so on. They call attention to recurring themes or concerns, and they particularly allow the poet to demonstrate continuity, nuance, and change. Particularly telling are the poems of “Madonno moia,” which present yet another variant or intertext of the apocrypha about the Wandering Virgin first presented in Soniachni klarnety as “Skorbna maty.” Here, however, the iconic image of the Virgin blurs as the Madonna must also coexist (see “Madonno moia,” pt. 1) with the bold, sinful, and naked, unadorned woman who, echoing perhaps the Apocalypse, presages a new released sexuality. Which in turn is directly repeated in the poem’s parts 2 and 4. As noted, too, the final poems of the collection introduce the repeatedly stressed note that the poetry here, implicitly the poetic statement as such, has at its core a direct relationship with justice and with social action. This is particularly stressed in “Palit´ universaly,” which in the lead and last stanza proclaims a kind of anarchist maximalism:

Паліть універсали, топчіть декрети: знов порють животи прокляті баґнети! Проклинайте закони й канцелярський сказ — Воля! — єдиний хай буде наказ. (1, 124)

The poet seems to accept and project a voluntaristic and anarchic rev- olutionism, seemingly embracing its violence and rage, and somehow merging them with his persona. That is not where he goes, however, and Creating and Concealing Modernism 475 from his actual trajectory the poem seems more a venting or a trying out of a radical stance than a path to be taken.

Collage…

Tychyna’s next major work, Zamist´ sonetiv i oktav (hereafter referred to as Zamist´), also published in 1920, is a watershed in his creativity and provides perhaps the most concerted example of a range of familiar themes and intertextual echoes, but with a radically new organizing principle: collage. The term is taken from visual art from the period; as argued by the art critic Budd Hopkins, the first known collage was also a quintessential statement on the ontology of modernist art and the aporia at hand in a modernist representation of reality:

Picasso, sometime near the end of 1911, created a small oval work, a cubist still life, that is generally regarded as art history’s first collage. Across more than one third of its surface Picasso glued a piece of commercial oilcloth bearing the photographically reproduced image of chair caning. On the remainder of the canvas he painted a cubist still life—an image which is itself highly ambiguous—and allowed some brushstrokes to glide across the “perforated” oilcloth. Thus the painted areas appear to do the impossible: to exist flat and intact on a surface that is seemingly full of holes. The “real” and the “artifi- cial” are thus locked into an open-ended equation which contains no fixed terms. Is the mechanically printed chair caning more—or less—artificial than Picasso’s hand painted imagery? In this small seminal work the war between photography and painting as repre- sentational modes is both stated baldly and, through a series of sub- tle formal decisions, tentatively resolved.33

For A. M. Clearfield, writing on early Pound and Eliot and the formation of the modernist movement in England, the issue is not so much the aporia of the effect as it is a stress on the artifice as such and a fix on the objec- tivity of the text:

Collage is the quintessential cubist technique, pioneered by Picasso, of inserting extraneous objects and images into an artistic work to call attention to the artifice of creation, and to deny the viewer’s ten-

33. Budd Hopkins, “Modernism and the Collage Aesthetic,” New England Review (Middlebury series) 18, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 5–12; here 5. 476 Grabowicz

dency to see the work as other than an object. A collage painting can never be a window, can never be other than what it says it is: an arrangement of colors and lines upon a flat surface, with famil- iar objects pasted upon it for their aesthetic qualities, and perhaps for the intellectual comment they make upon other icons displayed across the flat surface.34

To provide another conceptual nexus Hopkins describes René Mag- ritte’s surrealist painting Personal Values, where the various depicted objects—bed, comb, wineglass, and so on—are all wildly out of pro- portion and notes that

an unnerving mystery exists solely because we are deprived of a con- sistent system of scale in a painting centrally about objects. Is every- thing miniature? If so, some things are more miniature than others. Magritte’s diabolical method is to offer a number of disjunctive scale suggestions without ever giving us any one controlling system. Even the room itself may be any size; in fact, it dematerializes itself as we study it, because of its illusionistic sky wallpaper. As this surrealist work eloquently shows, the collage aesthetic can be defined as the presence of several contradictory systems in a work of art, and the absence of a single controlling system.35

A profound sense of parallel and contradictory systems, of the seeming absence of a single controlling system, is precisely what we encounter in Tychyna’s subsequent evolutionary stage. Unlike Pluh, which quickly assumed iconic proportion (and with all its inconsis- tencies was often interpreted as an embrace of the new Soviet order), Zamist´ soon became the most censored and spectral of all of Tychyna’s collections. After its first appearance in 1920, and then its inclusion in Zolotyi homin, a collection of the first three poetry volumes published in Lviv and Kyiv in 1922, Zamist´ was never republished and for the bulk of the Soviet period was entirely absent from Tychyna’s canon. It was reinstated in 1983 in the first volume of the twelve- (actually fourteen-) volume edition of his collected works, but with a glaring omission: the last antistrophe of the cycle was censored.36 In fact to this day Zamist´

34. Andrew M. Clearfield, These Fragments I Have Shored: Collage and Montage in Early Modernist Poetry (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984), 10. 35. Hopkins, “Modernism and the Collage Aesthetic,” 7. 36. It was finally reintroduced in 1990, along with some other blatant excisions, in vol. 12, pt. 2, but the censorship was not acknowledged or discussed and no bibliographic, Creating and Concealing Modernism 477 has still not received due attention from the critics, even as it remains a key work and a fundamental stage in Tychyna’s poetic trajectory. What follows here is a preliminary discussion; a fuller treatment is the subject of a separate, ongoing study. Even upon rereading it, Zamist´ cannot but appear as a remarkably complex and difficult work, almost hermetic in its structure. In a first encounter it must appear altogether daunting and a further proof that Tychyna is uncommonly ready to intellectually and imaginatively test his reader. No convention to lead him by the hand is in place, no Bae- deker guide for arcane allusions is provided, and yet the work is full of such allusions. And without some form of deciphering, the work remains opaque and hermetic—one reason why the critical attention to it has been so meager. It is a remarkably concise text: it contains eleven pairs of short poems, the strophes with titles and antistrophes without, and is introduced by a short ten-line poem dedicated to Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722–1794), a major Ukrainian philosopher and an important early modern poet. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Tychyna was working intensely on his Skovoroda: Symfoniia, as he referred to it, although the work was never finished; it now exists in two different redactions.37 All the strophes in Zamist´ are short: the longest (“Liu”) is about sixteen lines, but most are much shorter; the antistrophes, given without title, are still shorter: most are five or six lines. A general impression, which comes not just from their length but their internal form, and the fact that they mostly begin and end abruptly, is that these are fragments. The whole, in short, has the appearance of a work in fragments, as if preserved from dis- tant antiquity, and extant now only in incomplete form. As Clearfield notes, whether as collage or as montage (about the latter see below), the import of the technique was that it stressed radical discontinuity and fragmentation:

For example, it was not clear in 1922 that Eliot’s Waste Land and Pound’s “Mauberley” or first three, fragmentary Cantos, were really headed in different directions; both were simply perceived as being radically discontinuous, and as employing fragments of “found”

let alone methodological, commentary was provided. See Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 12, pt. 2, 110 and 360. 37. See Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 4 (1985), and the Tel´niuk edition: Pavlo Tychyna, Skovoroda: Symfoniia (Kyiv, 1971). 478 Grabowicz

material—quotations from other authors and from different genres, in other languages, and so forth.38

One may also add that the radicalness of the search or indeed experi- ment with form, as, for example, Pound’s short (three-line or four-word) 1916 poem “Papyrus” (“Spring……/ Too long……/ Gongula……”), was enough to drive Robert Graves and Laura Riding, the authors of the 1927 A Survey of Modernist Poetry, to distraction, and thus they firmly decided to keep the charlatans—that is, Pound—out of the “Temple of Fame” as they saw it.39 Apart from the fragmentary and discontinuous cast of the whole, what particularly characterizes this collection is the fluid, generically ambivalent nature of the text. It seems to be a synchronic text, a text-col- lage, vibrating between diary notes or jottings; overheard speech; authorial musings, even meditations, on more profound matters; and thoughts on the notions of prominent critics (most interestingly perhaps on Viacheslav Ivanov, a principal participant, indeed guru, of Russian symbolism, and specifically his writings on Richard Wagner and on ancient Greek drama). Zamist´ is thus a particularly charged “open” or even “found” text (as defined by Clearfield, see above) marked by a particularly opalescent, indeterminate, or elusive quality. Most directly, it blurs the boundary of poetry and prose. The present critical wisdom in Ukrainian criticism, and in the “academic” edition of Tychyna, is that it is, obviously, “rhythmical prose”;40 it should seem equally obvi- ous that it is inspired poetry —a poetry particularly geared to “found material,” to the common idiom, and so on. For its part, the introductory poem is perfectly “normal” poetry, and excellent at that. Not least of all it reminds us that in various national traditions a core task of the modernist agenda is precisely to rethink that boundary, empowering poetry with the leeway and nuance already found in prose.41 The collage-like nature of Zamist´ is evident, and indeed it evinces

38. Clearfield,The se Fragments I Have Shored, 16. The question of “found material” is telling: from 1910 Tychyna kept two notebooks, one of them entitled “Zoloto i musor,” in which he recorded various folk sayings, witticisms, etc.; in other words, a repository of “found material.” Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 12, pt. 2, 93–100 and 357. 39. Janine Utell, “Virtue in Scraps, Mysterium in Fragments: Robert Graves, Hugh Kenner, and Ezra Pound,” in “Modern Poets,” special issue, Journal of Modern Literature 27, no. 1/2, (Autumn 2003): 99–104; here 99–100. 40. Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 1, 602. 41. See Clearfield for a particularly incisive discussion of this, focusing on poets such as Wordsworth, Browning, Hardy, Hopkins, Dickinson, and Frost. Clearfield, These Fragments I Have Shored, 40–56 and passim. Creating and Concealing Modernism 479 some aspects of montage, on which more below. In essence it presents and describes, or alludes to, scenes of urban life during the revolution and war. Each such vignette or meditation or insight is powerful in and of itself and as such deserves separate commentary; their total impact is even more compelling, and the whole is not just a sum of its parts. The large political or national issues are many, including the issue (already noted above) posed by “Shovinistychne” (strophe 8):

Беруть хліб, угіль, цукор і так, немов до чарки, приказують: — Ну, хай же вам Бог посилає… та щоб ми ще не раз на вашій землі пироги їли. А ми, позиваючи сусіда за межу, одказуємо: — Дай Боже, дай…

Іноді так: небо ясне, а з стріх вода капле. (1, 143)

Here the misdirection and lie fostered by the colonial, exploitative situation applies not only to the victimizer (here it could be either the Russian Empire, or the German allies of Pavlo Skoropads´kyi, or the forces of Anton Denikin, who say “та щоб ми ще не раз на вашій землі пироги їли”) but also the Ukrainian side, the narod, obsequious before the foreigners while engaged in the usual backstabbing of one’s own. Or of the perennial problem, as posed by the next strophe (strophe 9), “Ispyt” (Test), of proving to some outsiders that, yes, we do have culture:

Тільки що почали ми землю любить, взяли заступа в руки, холоші закачали... — — ради Бога, манжети надіньте, що-небудь їм скажіть: вони питають, чи єсть у нас культура!

Якісь цибаті чужоземці покурювали крізь пенсне.

А навколо злидні — як гудина, як гич! А навколо земля, столочена, руда…

Тут ходив Сковорода. (1, 145)

This manifests perhaps most strikingly in the final antistrophe to “Kukil´” (Weeds), where so many strands are woven into one: 480 Grabowicz

Грати Скрябіна тюремним наглядачам — це ще не є революція.

Орел, Тризубець, Серп і Молот… І кожне виступає як своє.

Своє ж рушниця в нас убила. Своє на дні душі лежить.

Хіба й собі поцілувать пантофлю Папи? (12/2, 110)

The question of Ukrainian identity and its inordinately drawn-out process of nation-formation (the striking statement “Орел, Тризубець, Серп і Молот… І кожне виступає як своє” was true in 1919, and is still true today in 2019); the fact that in human terms revolution and its cost is virtually impossible to assess and justify, or, not least of all, that precisely in these human terms this all folds back on the poet himself, and he must contemplate whether his own submission to total control, to kissing the Pope’s slipper, is what awaits him.42 And where then is the courage of his convictions? Or better: What form will it have to take? The issue of the poet in society is put starkly and with utter candor and above all brought home to the poet, narrator, and the author himself. It is not an “abstract humanism” that is argued here (pace Novychenko) but a personal, existential crisis, which arguably stayed with Tychyna throughout his life, and given the present state of the Tychyna reception, is still not resolved.

…and Montage

In critical practice the notion of montage is often paired with collage and qualified by the fact that it is also an intrinsic component in the production of film. In Clearfield’s perspective on the origins of English

42. As noted, this key antistrophe was censored from the first volume of Tychyna’s complete works—obviously for the sin of mentioning the various sides who each claim to be the “native one” (І кожне виступає як своє). When including the antistrophe though, the editors still managed to save face by glossing the meaning of “to kiss the Pope’s slipper.” In their version it is: “ідіоматичний вираз, що означає—утвердитись, проголосити своє кредо”—which is the exact opposite of what the poet meant. Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 12, pt. 2, 360. Intertextuality is important, but editorial control even more so. Creating and Concealing Modernism 481 modernism, the difference between collage and montage, as we have seen it, is secondary to their shared use of discontinuous composition. In light of this, the difference between Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s Waste Land may seem secondary.43 At the same time, essential differences between montage and collage when put into literary form are not min- imized or wished away, although Clearfield’s argument remains quite general, and theoretical.44 But this is a perspective inferred from its cultural time and place and not necessarily adequate to Tychyna, for whose context the broadly elaborated, disseminated, and influential montage techniques discussed by various early Soviet filmmakers like Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, and especially Sergei Eisenstein appear to be especially relevant.45 As David Bordwell argues,

the theory of montage, viewed most abstractly, can be applied out- side film. The fundamental principles—assemblage of heterogeneous parts, juxtaposition of fragments, the demand for the audience to make conceptual connections, in all a radically new relation among parts of a whole—seem transferable to drama, music, literature, painting, and sculpture. Vsevolod Meyerhold put it well: “Given man’s power of memory, the existence of two facts in juxtaposition prompts their correlation; no sooner do we begin to recognize this correla- tion than a composition is born and its ideas begin to assert them- selves.” Without looking for precise historical influences, we can see principles of montage at work in cubism, the poetry of Apollinaire, the graphic designs of the Dadaists Grosz and Heartfield, and the “musique concrete” of the Italian Futurists.46

It clearly can also be found in Tychyna, whose experimentation with, and utilization of all the key (italicized) moments enumerated above (and especially the last two traits, particularly the “demand for the audience to make conceptual connections”), has been repeatedly stressed here. One should also note that the writing of his breakthrough

43. Clearfield,The se Fragments I Have Shored, 9–11 and passim. 44. Thus: “When adapted for literary use these two types reveal some interesting qualities. The montage form is capable of infinite extension, either in time or in the imagined space of the action. Collage form, despite its often random and arbitrary feel- ing, is complete, entire and self-sufficient: we have no curiosity about what happens to its personae, or what lies just beyond the edges of the text.” Clearfield, These Fragments I Have Shored, 10. 45. David Bordwell, “The Idea of Montage in Soviet Art and Film,” Cinema Journal 11, no. 2 (Spring 1972): 9–17. 46. Ibid., 10. The italics are mine. 482 Grabowicz

Zamist´ occurred in 1918–1919 (to be published in March 1920), antic- ipating the key LEF-based essays of Eisenstein and Vertov, such as the former’s “Montage of Attractions,” by some three years. Tychyna’s later application of montage technique in his “unfinished” poetry of the mid- 1920s—that is, the “Ukraïna v ohni” (Ukraine in Flames) cycle as I am calling it here (see below)—and then its reiteration and reformulation in his “Shablia Kotovs´koho” (Kotovs´kyi’s Sword) in the 1938 collection Chuttia iedynoï rodyny, may have possibly drawn on these theoreti- cal essays. By that time, of course, montage theory, the constructivist poetics that it drew on, and other such modernist practices had all been labeled “formalist” and banned, and their promoters sidelined (if not “repressed”—that is, murdered).47 Interestingly enough, Tychyna, the complete conformist as some would have it, continued to examine montage—that is, its poetic, not theoretical, possibilities—into the late 1930s, when he included his “Shablia Kotovs´koho” in Chuttia iedynoï rodyny and thus, formalist or not, it still managed to appear in 1938.

* * *

Zamist´ does not seem to directly engage montage. In the most “natural” locus for its dramatic application, on the interface of the strophes and antistrophes, the situation is ambivalent: Some antistrophes develop or add nuance to the preceding paired strophes and some do not; their interaction at times is more in the spirit of ambivalent collage than a dramatically orchestrated montage. But an attenuated montage does appear by way of some clues and a kind of concealed or encrypted, but nevertheless implied, narrative. Because without it, if the operant poetics is simply that of collage, and the meaning generated somehow intrinsically indeterminate, with no controlling system to give it shape and force, then the main import of the work, its powerful defense of culture and poetry, its rejection of violence and brutality, can easily dissipate. That key, I would submit, is conveyed by the mythic figure of Orpheus, who is a central presence in classical antiquity, appropriated as a precursor of Christ by early Christianity, broadly reborn in the Renais- sance, and an animating force in modern literature, particularly for such sublime poets as Novalis, Gérard de Nerval, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and most recently in the early formulations of postmodernism.48 Orpheus is not named in the text, but his presence

47. Ibid., 15–17. 48. The bibliography is particularly broad here; one could begin with Charles Segal’s Creating and Concealing Modernism 483 is made palpable by various clues, allusions, and intertexts. A rather unambiguous clue occurs (most likely not by chance; its placement is probably itself a signal) in the very middle of the text in “Evoe” (strophe 6), which does not mention Orpheus, but does address the role of poets as makers of revolution and alludes by the cry “Evoe!” to his killing:

Творці революції здебільшого лірики. Революція єсть трагічна лірика, а не драма, як то подейкують. Ευοε!

За плугом ходити наші нащадки готуватимуться не менш, як зараз готуються в балетній студії. І на людину, що не вмітиме пісні, дивитимуться як на справжнього контрреволюціонера.

Все на світі від примружених очей. Ευοε!49 (1, 139)

That Tychyna knew of the myth of Orpheus goes without saying. Given his close attention to Viacheslav Ivanov’s works he may well have been aware of the latter’s various writings on Orpheus and his poem “Orfei razterzannyi” (Orpheus Dismembered), where the Maenads that tear him apart repeatedly shout “evoe” and boast that “Мы… / …Бога с богом разлучили, растерзали вечный лик”—that is, that by dis- membering Orpheus they also broke the bond between the Apollonian and the Dionysian that was incarnate in him, and in a sense defined mankind’s golden age.50 A few other clues also appear in the cycle. At the beginning of the cycle, in “Osin´” (Autumn; strophe 1), there is this

Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore and London, 1989), where both the classical sources such as Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, as well as Euripides and Plato, and in the mod- ern period Rilke are examined. See also Walter A. Strauss, Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) and Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (Madison, Wisc., 1982). 49. In this edition (Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv) the editors asterisk “Еvое!” and define it as “Вигук радості на святах древніх греків.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines evoe as a “Bacchanalian exclamation” and notes its appearance in English in, among other texts, Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” (1819) and in Carlyle. In the larger tradi- tion it is the Bacchic cry of frenzy or rage. 50. From Ivanov’s “Prozrachnost´” (Transparency, 1904); see Viacheslav Ivanov, Sobra- nie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Brussels, 1971), 814. 484 Grabowicz oblique reference to the already dismembered Orpheus, whose head, according to the mythical stories, still utters mellifluous sounds even while floating on the waves, and, as the hope has it, may still speak (or prophesy) to us:

Вони казали: можна ж купити старого кармазину, сяк-так заслати смітник і посадовити культуру (тільки голову піддержувати треба!) — ачей вона ізнов до нас промовить. (1, 129)

But, of course, in this benighted, war-torn land (echoing again “Skorbna maty” from Soniachni klarnety) this is a vain hope. The voice of the poet who brought harmony, music, and civilization to man will not be heard, especially not if those who seek to resurrect his voice think that simply mixing equal amounts of music and bricks will evoke orphic enlightenment:

А листя падало. І голова на в’язах не держалась. Тоді — вкинулись в еклектику. Взяли трохи цегли і стільки ж музики. Думали — перемежениться… А листя падало. І голова на в’язах не держалась. (1, 129)

As if to drive the point home, the next strophe, “Teror,” reveals the human context of Orpheus’ absence with utter directness: Orpheus is now seen as the early Christian antecedent of Christ himself, but with his body on the trash heap being torn apart anew:

Ізнову беремо євангеліє, філософів, поетів. Людина, що казала: убивати гріх! — на ранок з простреленою головою. Й собаки за тіло на смітнику гризуться.

Лежи, не прокидайся, моя мати!

Велика ідея потребує жертв. Але хіба то є жертва, коли звір звіра їсть?

— не прокидайся, мати…

Жорстокий естетизме! — й коли ти перестанеш любувати з перерізаного горла? — Creating and Concealing Modernism 485

Звір звіра їсть. (1, 131)

The whole collection thus serves as a synecdoche for the void that faces society with the loss of Orpheus and the orphic voice: all that is left are the membra disiecta, mere fragments, a detritus of civilization— much as in Eliot’s Waste Land, which would soon be published. For most readers they remain mute and obscure. They barely provide sustenance for the poet himself, who now contemplates kissing the Pope’s slipper and a return to Hades.

* * *

As far as montage is concerned, Tychyna returned to it with vigor in the mid-1920s in some of his later works, which also reveal the stress of writing and publishing poetry in the face of ever more stringent censorship. The first part to appear in print, in the 1924 collection Viter z Ukraïny was a fragment entitled “Khmary kruhom obliahly” (the opening words of the poem) subtitled “Heksametr,” dated simply 1921. It appeared again, without any changes, as a segment in part 1, entitled “Hniv nash khiba ne iz stali” (Is Our Wrath Not of Steel), of the poem “Shablia Kotovs´koho” in the 1938 collection Chuttia iedynoï rodyny.51 Between these two dates—that is, from just a year after Zamist’ sonetiv i oktav to the depth of the Stalinist terror—Tychyna, Ukrainian liter- ature, and Ukraine itself had undergone phenomenal changes, above all the genocidal Holodomor of 1932–1933 and the massive, arguably also genocidal, destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in Stalin’s war against Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalism.” And yet already in the run-up to the repressions, still in the mid-1920s, Tychyna had made significant progress toward a large epic poem in hexameter that could with good reason be called “Ukraïna v ohni,” as we will see in a moment. It consists of three parts: “Chystyla maty kartopliu” (Mother was peeling potatoes), which was published in the short-lived journal Vaplite,52 and two other unpublished parts (each about 200 lines, thus some 600 or 650 lines in all), each segment known by its opening lines: “Tam, de vyhin odhorodzhenyi” (There where the pasture’s fenced off) and “Ne popadaiuchy nohoiu v zemliu” (With his feet not touching the

51. Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 2 (1984), 62. Earlier publications of this part were in the newspapers Visti, 5 October 1937; and Literaturna hazeta, 6 October 1937; see Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 2, 578. 52. Vaplite, 1926, no. 1, 7–11. 486 Grabowicz ground).53 All three are noted as being written between 1920 and 1925. No title for the poem is given—it is simply noted as “Uryvky z poemy” (Fragments of a Poem); the latter two parts remained in manuscript to be published only in 1983. As we see from Tychyna’s August 1925 letter to Lida Paparuk, his future wife, written from Alushta in the Crimea, he complains that the money that was due him as an honorarium for a reprint of his first and second collections of poetry (some 500 rubles) and which he had wanted to give to the peasants (seliany) of his home village, Pisky, was being held up by the State Publishing House (DVU), and then launches into how he misses the villagers while on vacation in Crimea:

Ось зараз я згадав. Селян не достає мені тут—ось чого. Море є, а селян, як коло Дніпра колись у Межигір’ї, нема. Татари десь у горах, а ця публіка всяка—це те, від чого я тікаю. Написав ще трохи далі з тієї речі, що задумав. Про селян. Та ось простудіювати ще трохи про село статті Маркса, Енгельсa і Леніна. Це я почну вже як приїду… (12/2, 51)

The chatty and offhand tenor of the letter does not do justice to the searing quality of the work in progress. It is not just any poem, but a broadly conceived epic poem couched mostly in elegant dactylic hex- ameter but also continually varying in mode and reaching for expressive nuances not yet attempted in Ukrainian poetry, moreover by a poet at the height of his power, having successfully experimented in his ear- lier collections with various forms and limits of poetic expression and still without having had to retreat or dissimulate before the despots in power. It deals directly with what is endlessly important for him: revo- lution and the life of the common people in it, precisely the peasantry, who were fated to be the principal victims of the Bolshevik experiment. (Tychyna’s earlier reference to the “theorists,” the “classics” that he feels he has to “study up” on, is profoundly ironic in that for all of them the peasantry were basically a hostile class to be “neutralized,” if not totally eliminated, from the path of the revolution.54 Tychyna’s stated intent, of course, may have been pro forma, or for the censor.) In the world of the

53. Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 1, 527–35; “Chystyla maty kartopliu” (the censored version) is given there on 524–26; the uncensored version is included in vol. 12, pt. 2, 115–17. 54. See Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917–1933, Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). Creating and Concealing Modernism 487 poem, any theory or ought-to-be-reality cannot but be absurd; the issue here is life at its most real, crude, and brutal. We hear this at the end of the third part, when a Ukrainian military leader (otaman) who has been trying to stitch together a coalition with the “Whites” and other “irregulars” to somehow move in tandem against the Bolsheviks finally realizes the hopelessness of his task and explodes in rage:

Доволі! — схопився він. За ним в ту ж мить ще виструнчилось двоє: — Доволі! — кричав він, ні, не кричав — хрипів. Гнів стискав у кулаки, боявся, що от прорветься, от-от не витримає и крикне на ввесь цеи краи.— Доволі, я кажу! Гадюки! Наволоч! Мізеріє нещасна! Так з вами ще контакти тримать? Украіна в огні, а вони тут про геєнну! Украіна в муках, а вони тут «преімучества пополам»! Росію згадали! А як же: соплі украінського народу! Та вас перестріляти мало! Покидьки! Падлюки! Я боротись вас примушу! — ви чуєте? — примушу! (1, 534–35)

Before turning to the remarkable gamut of montage devices that animate this poem, one should note a special contextualizing feature: in this period, roughly the first half of the 1920s, Tychyna was experiment- ing with various forms of dramatization or staging (instsenuvannia). In large measure this includes his own works. Sometime around 1921–1922, he proceeded to do an instsenuvannia for his short and limpid “A ia u hai khodyla” (And I went to the woods) from Soniachni klarnety as well as “Osin´ taka myla” from his Viter z Ukraïny, which he also rewrote for the stage in 1921–1922. But the strangest of such re- or over-writings—by dint of their bizarre mix of pop art and surrealism—are his two attempts at “staging” (with requisite “explanations” for the uninitiated) of his lead poem to Pluh (“Вітер. / Не вітер—буря!”). This is how this “augmented” or “dramatized” text now looks (its first variant):

Стара Земля протрухла, поцвіла. Гангреною взялись краіни світу. Бо Людство, цеи наикращии бог, наисправедливішии,— новому богові капіталісти і банкіри підкорили. Капшук запанував. Визискування стало правом. Насильство — за закон. Гниє Земля. Людство задихається. І от — на визволення покривджених іде соціальна революція. Немовби вітром дихнуло! Але ні, соціальна революція не вітер,— буря! Це вона трощить, ламає, з землі вириває. 488 Grabowicz

Іде соціальна революція, а за нею мільион мільионів мускулястих рук. Котить, у землю врізає (чи то місто, дорога, чи луг), у землю плуг. Іде соц[іальна] революція. От коли Земля нарешті освіжиться! От коли почнеться життя! Нове! Прекрасне! — Але панічнии жах обняв гнилизну світу і воно аж до планет здіимає: О проиди, проиди над нами, розсуди! Соціальна революція иде. (“Pershyi budynok novoho svitu”; 1, 441)

Even if not entirely successful, or even if entirely unsuccessful, it does show that it is not ideology that is driving Tychyna here, but experi- mental curiosity asserting itself long before party directives were the order of the day. Other than tinkering with his own works, Tychyna was also par- ticularly drawn to the works of his early supporter and esteemed role model Mykhailo Kotsiubyns´kyi, whose short story “Smikh” (Laugh- ter) Tychyna also dramatized (in 1923),55 and indeed inserted an echo of a telling detail from that story into his subtly intertextual “Plach Iaroslavny I” (Iaroslavna’s Lament I); see the lines “Прислухається княгиня—тільки сміх, / тільки труситься сміх” (1, 172). The key inter- textual connection that clearly models the long epic poem in question— specifically, its second part, “Tam, de vyhin odhorodzhenyi”—is to Kotsiu­byns´kyi’s novel Fata morgana (1902–1903; 1910), which depicts the 1905 Revolution in Ukraine, and particularly the novel’s poignant ending in which one of the key players in the peasant insurrection in the countryside becomes a victim of that peasant community’s preventative and anticipatory self-policing—to fend off even harsher penalties from the authorities—as meted out by the Cossack troops sent to quell the rebellion. Only here, in Tychyna’s epic poem, the outcome is different, as we shall see. More striking than that, however, is the way Tychyna’s story is told—largely through a yoking of cinematic montage, of implicit editing of shots and angles and sequence connections along with a range of literary—that is, poetic—rhythmic, and narrative devices that set up a powerful sui generis narrative stream that makes as striking and mesmerizing a text as one can encounter in Tychyna or in other

55. See Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 1, 512–20. Creating and Concealing Modernism 489

Ukrainian poetry—or for that matter, only rarely encountered in any poetry. Thus, the beginning of part 2:

Там, де вигін одгороджений од церкви штахетом, зібрався народ. Ларивон-штундист убив свою меншу дочку. Що це робиться? До чо’ це приведе? Всі хвилювались (жінки трохи далі), усі хвилювались; брали у доказ минулії роки — і спокій, і сталість, брали закон тут і совість і владу.— Гаду не жити! — всі хвилювались.— Це треба прикончить! — «Не жити, не жити!» — всі хвилювались. Виступив дід Омелько: — Православні! Я вам скажу: був цар — до цього не було. Убить його й край. (С т е п а н: — Да понятно!) Всі хвилювались (жінки трохи ближче), усі хвилювались; рвали повітря, словами рубали: щоб довго не думать — зараз же яму копать та отам в ровчаку і задушим, зараз же яму! Це треба прикончить! — «Задушим, задушим!» — всі хвилювались. (1, 527)

One of the key features of this text is the way dialogue and descrip- tion, refrains, and the rhythm of movement and collective thought or awareness somehow fuse—precisely through the workings of montage, the way things swim into focus—making a kind of hypertext where everything seems to blend into one whole (and where, one may note, the Nebentext, the “stage directions,” are also part of the flow of the hexam- eter). At the same time a kind of choral principle is at work here, where the general narrating voice is also charged with, and endowed with the ability, to speak for the whole collective. Thus a series of expressions, especially at the outset (“Всі хвилювались”), the repetition of questions or fears (“Що це робиться? До чо’ це приведе?”) or of phrases, then of words themselves (“Гаду не жити!, «Не жити, не жити!»,” or “отам в ровчаку і задушим, «Задушим, задушим!»”) or even the refrain of Stepan’s “Да понятно!” all become one unifying, amalgamating text that like the voices here seems to come from everywhere at once. This is the collective speaking. Its voice permeates the action and is hypnotically real. It makes reality. For its part the action, the story line, is continually developing, progressing in real time, again through the montage, the long, medium, and close-up shots, but we are also—like the participants in the events—hypnotized by the drama, losing sight of what is objective and what is collective. 490 Grabowicz

The confrontation with the Cossack becomes more and more heated, and as the crowd surrounds him he puts his hand in his pocket and manages to come up with his revolver, and as he’s being surrounded and jostled he shoots Stepan, the village simpleton:

К о з а к . Та що ви мені — не вірите, чи що? (А сам руку в кишеню.) — Руку вийми з кишені! — А руку їй-бо можна вийнять із кишені. Чого ж?— раптом з кишені руку.— Ха! — натовп жахнувся. Парубійка кинувсь. Хлопці ззаду за плечі козака. Козак, червоний, з озвірілими очима, борюкався, вивертав руку з револьвером, та раптом не в парубійку, а якось убік криво: — н-на! н-на! Степан заскавучав, закрутився, засміявся й ліг, хватаючи руками повітря. (1, 529)

What follows is a frenzy of violence as the mob attacks the Cossack, but even while the mass is a roiling chaos the montage, the “camera eye,” follows and records the action:

А! Дак ти так? Бий його! Агітатор! — Жінки заверещали. Натовп кинувсь в одну кашу. Руки піднімались і з гуркотом падали, кидали, хватали. На хвилинку розскакувались усі — і тоді мертва тиша! — а потім зрaзу гул. І знову руки і гупіт мов по снопу з криком. Кийки, ціпки й паліччя.— Бий його!.. Гул. І високо в цьому гулі верещали жінки та кінь іржав.

Аж ось по мертвому задзвонило. Ху! Притихло трохи, розійшлось, на всі боки розсторонилось. (1, 529–30)

And then the frenzy is over, and the collective—and we too—wonder what happened. From a mob they slowly resume individual shapes and the whole event begins to revert to normality, although the bloody bodies remain and the setting sun casts a bloody red glow over every- thing, and the poet’s impressions, purposefully echoing those of Fata morgana, are seemingly all that remains as a record of what happened:

Що це сталось? Кожен сам себе за пітне холодне чоло — немов очутитись хотів. Creating and Concealing Modernism 491

Натовп рідшав. Заходило сонце, і захід був увесь червоний, на вітер. І на землі, поруч з Степаном, щось таке було — з землею змішане, до землі прибите, невиразне. Але й його вечірнє сонце освітило: зубами засміялося i воно. Натовп рідшав, а дехто стояв ще на місці — і тіні від них падали аж через увесь вигін, згинались на гнідому коні, що іржав, добігали через цвинтар на церкву: там поруч з тополями стояли на облитих кров’ю стінах церкви, п’яно ворушились. А з дзвіниці плакало...... Заходило сонце. Кінь іржав… (1, 530)

Modernism Folded into Socialist Realism

Tychyna’s poetry of the late middle and then later periods can, of course, be seen as a retreat—under evident duress, one always needs to add56— from the practice of modernism. The charge from a party functionary, Vlas Chubar, that he was “peddling a national opiate” (natsional´nyi durman) in the “Chystyla maty kartopliu” fragment published in Vaplite was a clear warning, although Tychyna was allowed to publish a rebuttal in reply.57 (The fact that friends and colleagues no more nationalist or anti-Soviet than Tychyna were disappearing and getting shot and exiled a few years later was a clearer warning. Even a dullard could see it was night outside.) What Tychyna did do, however, was nothing short of heroic: he left a legacy of interesting and at times brilliant poetry written after night had fallen. For the history of Ukrainian lit- erature and culture, that is no mean achievement. The examination of that period of Tychyna’s creativity is a separate and highly instructive chapter, and the mechanisms it reveals deserve serious attention, not crypto-journalist trash talk about spinelessness. What can be appended here are only one or two sketchy comments about the tenacity and boldness with which he defended his own modernist positions long after it seemed that the battle had been definitively won by the forces

56. There are those, to be sure, who aver that it was out of sheer spinelessness—which does not deserve any comment. 57. See his 1927 letter to the editor of the newspaper Komunist in Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 12, pt. 1, 71. 492 Grabowicz of darkness and modernism or “formalism” (let alone experimentation) had been definitively deposited in the trash can of history. The case or rather text in point is that same epic “Ukraïna v ohni” poem presented above that never emerged under that name (the name ended up being used by Oleksander Dovzhenko for his well-known war film, and there was under that same name a collection of Ukrainian writers’ writing in 1942 when the picture looked dark for the Soviet side—and Tychyna never apparently laid claim to that title, although he contributes to that collection), but a version of the poem does indeed emerge again, only now as “Shablia Kotovs´koho,” and in the collection Chuttia iedynoï rodyny in 1938.58 It is now given a requisite ideological cast:

Робітники та селяни Украіни під керівництвом партіі за допомогою росіиських робітників, напруживши своі сили, звільнилися від польськоі окупаціі. Особливо нищівного удару завдала білополякам Перша Кінна армія на чолі з червоними полководцями К. Є. Ворошиловим та С. М. Будьонним…, etc. (2, 54)

More importantly, Stepan, who was killed in “Tam, de vyhin odhorodzhenyi,” is now resurrected as a seredniak and is singing away (with his trademark “да понятно” where needed or not) and, most importantly, it’s all in the same dactylic hexameter. And that is a seri- ous matter. Not only does it allow Tychyna to reinsert bodily—with- out changing a comma—the hexameter fragment “Khmary kruhom obliahly” that first appeared in Viter z Ukraïny, it allows him to filter through that canonic form (i.e., the hexameter) the socialist realist beliberda (guff, nonsense) that is now an officially required ingredient in Soviet poetic cookery. And in Tychyna’s kitchen it works—it ends up tasting like poetry. To be sure, to do so he must also significantly desemanticize the text (which is also a separate subject—but it can be done); initially in moderate fashion, as when the hero, Kuz´ (originally the son in “Chystyla maty kartopliu”) chastises the villain, Ruden´kyi, who also happens to be a beekeeper (and a lapsed communist and an antiempiricist, and a follower of Bishop Berkeley to boot), but then somehow Kuz´ gets carried away and his berating becomes trans-sense

58. In fact only the final (sixth) part, titled “Poiedynok Kotovs´koho z bilopoliakom” (Kotovs´kyi’s Duel with a White Pole) was included in the collection; see Chuttia iedynoï rodyny (Kyiv, 1938), 87–106. The other parts were either published in 1937 or later, or remained unwritten. Tychyna, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 2, 54–92 and 577–85. Creating and Concealing Modernism 493

(a kind of zaum, which resonates with задумa; see the penultimate line in the quotation below). This is shown by the fact that it is picked up by the birds who are flying about and they start chirping about it among themselves—which, of course, reveals its true dialectical power—and, of course, the whole demonstrates the same montage devices that were used by Tychyna so effectively in the “Ukraïna v ohni” variant of the poem. It is not conjecture, it is all in the text:

К у з ь : Ану пригадаите, як ви, будучи вже незалежниками, пов­ ставання проти Радянськоі влади піднімали. Куцо ви мислили, чорно надіялись, мріяли синьо. Що в вас міцніше, чи синь, чи куцінь — я негоден сказати. …Синь чи куцінь! — пролетіла синичка, а друга з берези жовтоі-жовтоі стишено: Синь чи куцінь! — обізвалась. Синь чи куцінь! — повторили синички і дальні над яром. Дальні над яром, а там іще и інші, в червоному шумі — чути: куцінь! — потім жовтоі шелест берези од вітру. Вітру в осики сипнуло — куцінь! — розлетілося листя. Цінь! ледве чути крізь трепет… А сонце от-от як не блисне! Блисне, потьміє та и знову. Кузю ніяк не сиділось: він, одвернувшись, бровами продовжував думати грізно. Сильне ж напруження думки пішло на хвилинку в задуму. «Шуму якого! — подумав.— А буде ще и більше?» (2, 57)

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The question of parody and self-parody (which seem to be clearly pro- jected here) raises further interesting issues. For the moment, though, the basic issue is what happens when matter and antimatter are mixed, when modernist devices and stances confront socialist realist strictures. Presumably, the weaker, more fragile system will implode. Ultimately, though, it is a question of where the poetry is. That is what counts.