The Fourth Kharkiv by Yurii/George Shevelov (English Translation)
I often feel powerless seeing how little is translated from the vastness of Ukrainian classics. The conditions were never equal. It seems that for the Western academia, we are still a little bit of an imaginary folks. From my imaginary elvish city, I’ve been talking about the Fourth Kharkiv for a long time. Old translations are not easy to find. And so, until a new and shiny official English version of this essay appears I’d like to present my under-the-rug unofficial translation of the famous essay by Yurii Shelevov, The Fourth Kharkiv.
Yurii (or George) Shevelov is one of the key figures in the history of Ukrainian linguistics and literary studies of the 20th century. Born and raised in Kharkiv, he lived through the roaring Ukrainian 1920s, and was lucky enough to escape Stalin’s repressions and move to the United States after WW2. He worked at Harvard and Columbia Universities, and became a valuable link between the missing generations and contemporary Ukrainian literature. Shevelov dissected the Soviet structure of knowledge and analyzed its impact on Ukrainian writers. He conceived deeply philosophical observations of Ukrainian identity.
The Fourth Kharkiv is an essay Shevelov wrote in 1948 as an afterword to Lenolid Lyman’s short novel, Tale of Kharkiv. The essay became seminal in the understanding of Kharkiv by Kharkivians, and opened a discussion on the cycles of historical erasure of local cultures that we witnessed and should not forget. Below is a very rough translation made by me out of sheer desperation and mischief. It doesn’t do justice to the brilliant original. But at least it helps to understand what the Fifth Kharkiv, the dream of the future is all about. (I will delete it when an official translation becomes accessible).
The Fourth Kharkiv by Yurii Shevelov — Translation
“What is this? Save us, Mother of God!” — Ivga [1] all but screamed, seeing from the hill the city that was no longer hers, but a provincial city; she clasped her hands and didn’t know where to look. Her spirit was on fire, and her stomach frozen. “I look, she says to herself, look, and there is no end in sight. And the churches, the churches! .. And chorus, chorus! .. Well, if I don’t lose myself here, I’ll be all right… But that’s that!” ‑ “As if walking in the forest, so miserable it was! One could not get through the crowd at the market, and not a single acquaintance in sight! No one bows to you, no one asks you about anything. Tears, she said, gripped me! I wandered like an orphan. The bells rang in the churches — and those bells! Still buzzing in my ears! — I went to the biggest and the best church. And can you imagine? The soldiers did not let me in; I gave a hryvnia coin, they didn’t let me in, and so it was.”
This is how Kharkiv is perceived by the people of the traditional village, the heroes of Kvitka’s Strong Maiden (“Козир дівка”) [2]. A strange and incomprehensible vision. While not so long ago, Kharkiv was itself a traditional sloboda [free settlement]!
The year of its birth is unknown. Somewhere in the middle of the 17th century, tired of Bohdan Khmelnytskyis’ wars and the dawn of the Great Ruin, those willing to change the burden of Cossack life for the idyll of a peaceful farmer’s state of relatively serene Slobozhanshchyna settled here. But idylls do not last long in history. Slowly, but surely, the shadow of greedy Moscow falls from the north on the gentle villages. Farms are merging into the city. Craft districts are growing. Hrytsko Skovoroda still teaches Ukrainian wisdom, but nearby on the mountain above the Lopan River “Public Offices” grow, and on the other side of the river, behind the peaceful streets of Chobotarska, Kotsarska, next to the tranquil Honcharivka, the second symbol of the regime grows — a prison: an ostrog, as Kvitka calls it. And the patriarchal Ukrainian world gazes with fear and incomprehension at the monster that grows nearby, on their land, with their labor and capital…
Some forty or fifty years go by, and literature delivers a new testimony about Kharkiv. Not surprisingly this time it belongs to the pen of a Russian writer. As Kharkiv is becoming more and more clearly a gateway to Moscow’s attack on Ukraine. Antin Chekhov writes about Kharkiv as a dirty and unpaved city of Russian merchants. The surrounding Ukrainian villages have already been drawn into the orbit of the city: Panasivka; Zhuravlivka, Moskalivka, Zaikivka, Osnova, Kholodna Hora. New branch offices are already being established, and they already bear non-Ukrainian names: factories are grouped in Petinka; Rashkin’s dacha, Tyurin’s dacha… Merchant dynasties set the tone in the city: the Zheverzheevs, the Ponomaryovs and the Ryzhovs, the Utkins, the Serikovs, the Ignatovs, the Sokolovs… They come from the north, lured by the wealth of the Ukrainian land. Old settlements are dying. A new city center is being built. Russian money together with French and Belgian is developing Donbas. Kharkiv becomes the gateway to Donbas. The gate opens to the north. The generation of Ukrainian enlightenement is in retreat and on the defensive succumbing to the onslaught of a foreign force. Kharkiv is an enemy for them.
Then, at the dawn of the Ukrainian National Revolution of 1917–1920, the Ukrainian element again poured into the city. In short squalls, constantly pushed back by forces from the north. But it is already breaking in. A foreign power, forced to nominally recognize Ukraine, deliberately declares Kharkiv the capital of Ukraine: if until now it was a wide-open gate from north to south, why shouldn’t it fulfill this role again? But the Ukrainian element that has emerged from the shores cannot be driven into the calm river of the patriarchal peasantry. It accepts the challenge. Is Kharkiv the capital of Ukraine? Fine. We will make Kharkiv the Ukrainian capital then. More so, let’s make it a center and a symbol of the new Ukraine. There will be no retreat. The time of the Ivgas, who looked at wondrous cities with reverence and awe, is over. Kharkiv will be the Ukrainian capital of Ukrainian Ukraine.
There was Kharkiv of free settlements, farmers, and artisans. There was Kharkiv — a provincial merchant city of the intractable and hopelessly gray Russian empire. Now Khvylovy proclaims the third Kharkiv, a symbol of Ukrainian urbanism. Violent and rebellious Ukraine. Oh, he knows the biography of the city, “wonderful: a stinking industrial city, big, but not great — it forgot its Sloboda birth, forgot the Sloboda regiments, did not form an American fairy tale, the houses did not rise into the clouds — it is wonderful, today its alleys conceal bloody legends hundreds of centuries back”. Together with Tychyna, he might ask, “Kharkiv, Kharkiv, where is your face? Who is your call for? You are plunged into a sticky multiyear, dark as night. Plunged like so, between the hills stomping on one place, stomp, stomp”. But together with Tychyna, he knows where the new capital is breaking into, into the Ukrainian steppe, into Ukrainian elements, “And suddenly you broke through the bridges — and you’re already in the steppe! And you are already chased — speed up, drive, and go! .. Eh! Son of a bitch, you’re restless now.”
Let “there be still wind and snow over your spring. Snow-swamp, March rain-swamp.” Let only “the heights the clock burn above you, above your, above our heads.” It burns still. And it’s already March. Summer will come. The lights will come on. Ukraine will be renewed. And Khvylovy exclaims, “I am madly in love with the city”:
“Night. Spring. Thundering storm. Fire blazes in the distant church, and writes its poem too. I am silent. Maria is silent. It is quiet on the bridge, and only the muddy waters are gurgling and running away into the unknown. Then it dawns on me again how madly I love the city. In the morning in the city, the streets are unfamiliar, and you walk through them somehow unknown and deep in thought: the long-forgotten shadows of ichthyosaurs come and disappear, and a pink window into the future opens. It is nice to come to the city from the village when the silence spreads across the neighborhoods, the drivers are sleeping, and the janitors are sweeping the streets when the morning grows on the city and the phaeton clatters loudly and falls silent.”
“Listen, Nicolas! When I think of the city quarters, I imagine I’m a young girl with blue transparent eyelashes, that I am an Amazon and jig somewhere into the lake lands… Listen, Nicolas!
Night. Spring. Thundering storm. And muddy waters flow into the unknown faraway.
Night.
Spring.
Bridge.
Maria”.
A generation of fiery-eyed romantics, a generation of young women with blue transparent eyelashes set out to conquer Kharkiv. To overcome provincial peace. Did you declare Kharkiv the capital of Ukraine? Fine, we will make it that way. We will fill it with Ukrainian content. Third Kharkiv — the Kharkiv of Khvylovy and VAPLITE, Kurbas’ Berezol, exhibitions of ARAU [Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine] in the former monastery’s halls, irreconcilable and passionate debates in the House of Literature named after Blakytny on Kaplunivska street, Courses of Oriental studies, Ukrainian students, Ukrainian origin, soul, program and aspirations, factories and institutions slowly Ukrainianized, unique, inimitable, full of life and madness. The third Kharkiv, the Kharkiv of our youthful youth.
In its administrative structure, the third Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukrainian SSR of sorts. But its ideologists and its generation spiritually affirmed its capital and in their creative dreams, it was elevated to the level of the world center. Moscow could not come to terms with this. The ideologists of the generation and the entire generation that dared to think had to be destroyed. On May 13, 1933, a shot blasts in Khvylovy’s office. Skrypnyk’s heart stops beating. The GPU [Soviet secret police] is taking over the case. Hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of Kharkiv residents, after interrogations on Sovnarkomivska and Chernyshchevska streets, part with their lives, shot by the chekists or transported to the north and east. At night, the monument to Ellan Blakytny mysteriously disappears from the square. Berezil is turned into a state theater named after T. Shevchenko, and an ethnographic play, Give the Heart Freedom, It Will Lead You Into Captivity is staged. The Theater of Russian Drama is founded nearby. The Russian newspaper Krasnoe Znamya is founded, and the Ukrainian Kharkivskyi Proletar is to be renamed to Socialistychna Kharkivshchyna [Socialist Kharkiv Region], let the peasants read a Ukrainian newspaper, but the city needs a Russian one — like every provincial city of the Russian Empire. No capitals, no Ukraine. The sentence to the rebellious third Kharkiv was executed in two acts, the loud and public transfer of the capital to Kyiv and — quiet, imperceptible, at night — the razing of the graves of Blakytny, Skrypnyk, and Khvylovy. The third Kharkiv, sung so passionately and tenderly, so majestically and so humanely, with such pride and with such lyricism by Khvylovy, was buried. No obituaries, no epitaphs. In grave silence.
And those who remained? Those who are “chained up, walled up”? [3] What was the fourth Kharkiv, a nest of conscious rebels or a cluster of “honest” citizens of the new regime? How did it live, what did it breathe? So far, the literature under the Soviets has not said anything about this (speak of literature — think recycling paper — of course, it blabbered something about the Stakhanovites, about life becoming better, life becoming happier, about the flourishing cities of flourishing Ukraine, — but, praise God, — there were words and whole books and even libraries that seem to have been spelled, written, but at the same time did not exist! A truth that would never be understood by graphomaniacs who hurry to publish their works, and those suppressors of literature who see writers as sergeant majors). Under-Soviet literature would not say anything about this. Because the fourth Kharkiv should according to the party and governmental plans be a solid province. Would it dare say it is a province? When a province realizes and spells out that it is a province, it takes the first step toward ceasing to be a province. And Moscow, the legislator and judge of the under-Soviet literature, will never allow this. The entire policy of Moscow in the end is aimed at keeping the whole of Ukraine in a condition and at the level of gray provincialism.
And the state of the fourth Kharkiv is the state of Chernihiv, Kamianets and … Kyiv — and all the cities of the conquered Ukraine. Only in the Third Kharkiv did the dream of capital blossom so magnificently and majestically, and therefore the contrast with the decline and decay of the Fourth Kharkiv is particularly striking here. So let’s not be mistaken when we say, the Fourth Kharkiv is all of Ukraine today, perhaps, with the exception of the regions that were “reunified” post 1939.
Is it necessary to say that the consciousness of the fourth Kharkiv is a conditio sine qua non for the development of the Ukrainian liberation movement and the movement of a new Ukrainian state? It is very easy to dream for yourself an emigration ivory tower, I have nothing in common with the Soviets, I did not enter into any compromises with them, I am clean and pure! But the Ukrainian people live in the Fourth Kharkiv, i.e they fight and adapt, die and survive, exist and think, build and endure.
Therefore, from the point of view of the state, from the point of view of the need to eventually move to the Fifth Kharkiv, which will think and behave majestically and sovereignty, next to Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa and the whole countless mass of Ukrainian cities and villages will feel the center of the Ukrainian idea and therefore the spiritual capital, — from this point of view, there is no more important, responsible and urgent task for our science, our art, than knowledge and awareness of the identity and the entire spiritual face of the human of the Fourth Kharkiv.
Leonid Lyman is the first to speak here with his Tale of Kharkiv [4]. And no matter how much we treat this work as a thing of art (this is not the place to talk about this, this should be discussed in critical articles), we must affirm that in our emigration literature, this is perhaps the first non-emigration work. The work that turns not to the past, but to the present and thus to the future. The work is bold, written on lived experience, warmed, perhaps, by years of thinking, rationalizing, and aching about what was seen, felt, and experienced. The first link — let’s hope — to a true rendering of the Fourth Kharkiv. Truthful from the outside— because the facts and images are quite real and vital. And truthful in depth — because no party or personal programs forced the author to reshape or distort the reality. Therefore, among numerous useless and dead or falsified and distorted discussions in our country, a discussion about the Kharkiv novel by Leonid Lyman could be particularly appropriate and useful.
In these remarks, we do not undertake to debate with or about the novel, nor even to open a discussion of the sort. The tasks are smaller and narrower, to emphasize those features of Kharkiv’s identity the author defined as typical, to take a look at the reasons these features appeared and how they can develop in the future.
We are in June 1941. Before us is a generation of twenty-two-year-olds. A little arithmetic will help understand a lot. These people were born somewhere in 1919. Soviet newspaper jargon knows among many other stamps the following, “peers of October”. This is an even younger batch. Khvylovy’s shot rang out when they were 13–14 years old. So, the Third Kharkiv passed them by— they did not know him while he was alive, and after his liquidation, the authorities made sure that they did not learn anything about him. This generation knew virtually nothing of the customs of the old Ukrainian village — collectivization, having undermined the traditions of rural life, happened when they were ten or eleven years old. This generation did not know the roaring renaissance of Ukrainian spirituality in the twenties. The elders, of course, never talked about it with them. It did not know the history of Ukraine anymore and even “the history of Rus” — it grew up on the “history of the USSR”. It knew Ukrainian literature within the anthologies of Novitsky, Pilhuk, and Shakhovsky. At the age of eighteen, a terrible storm of Yezhovism [5] swept over them — but the reasons and roots of it remained incomprehensible to the generation — and the identity trauma was all the more dreadful because the mind could not see the reasons. This generation grew up on political lessons, Komsomol meetings, in learning a defensive way of speaking and behaving, it grew up without discussions, its philosophy was limited to party slogans, and its authorities could only be Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, because they did not have access to anything else.
Oh, it was a terrifying school. And its first consequence was that this youth was not completely young. The hero has gray hair at the age of 22. It is, if you like, a symbol. At one time, Khvylovy addressed the young youth with the passionate desperation of romantic delight. It wasn’t a wordplay. Even then, his keen eye saw the aging of youth. Even then, he saw that young people were losing their ability to change the world. And what is the value of young people who do not want to turn the world upside down? Khvylovy called for the youth to be young. But this is what the regime was most afraid of. And it made every effort to make the youth old. It had success.
The young youth are storming the world with an unstoppable onslaught. To the barricades — is their motto. The old youth of the Fourth Kharkiv try to walk through the world without touching anything, without breaking anything, without stumbling through anything. They are afraid of questions about themselves and therefore do not ask others. They prefer to know less about others. It’s safer. They do not like people and are afraid of them. Deep down, they are loners, although they pretend to be social people and activists. They grew up in limitations: food, clothes, electricity and — most importantly — sincerity. They save themselves into a standard: to not stand out, to be like everyone else, to speak other people’s words, to wear standard clothes. It’s safer that way. Way calmer. It is better to crave less from life. Asceticism was not officially proclaimed by anyone, but in effect, it prevailed. A snail became the ideal of a person: you could hide every minute.
And it is not easy. At the age of 20 and 22 to aspire to be a slug. Give up feelings. And it hurts so much, you want to be honest sometimes to the point of shamelessness. But you can’t. Sincerity is perceived as a provocation. In this country, even love is “tucked” under politics and discussed at [communist] party meetings. Feelings are still needed. A person cannot live without them. And here the system comes to “help”. It creates an ersatz [fake double] mood. Just as there are special distributors of goods for the privileged, this artificial happiness is formed and systematically distributed. In a small and state-regulated proportion, young people release bites of artificial happiness, bites of simulated feelings. You can learn to dance. You can watch the Viennese film The Great Waltz (pardon me, “Bolshoy Waltz”, of course). There is a play on sentimentality, Roma romances, sweet street songs. There are touching stories about how a Red Army man gives way to a freed Galician poor woman. There are officially introduced verbal stamps that no one knows how to love like a Soviet person, that nowhere is there such a harmonious family, such a happy life. When a slug no longer has the strength to sit in its hut, when a dusty young man no longer has the strength to give public speeches, he can immerse himself for a short time in this world of ersatz feelings, the romances of Isabella Yuryeva and the tearful songs of Vadym Kozin are at his service in original performance and on gramophone records.
The sluggishness of spiritual life and the mechanization of public life gave birth to ersatz feelings. Ersatz feelings give rise to a sense of falsity. Beautiful and thoroughly compromised words of purity, love, and friendship hide nothingness, hide brutality, misogyny, and abomination. This is how the nihilism of Soviet youth appears. Thinking one thing, and saying another. Saying one thing and doing another. Even in emigration, we are sometimes amazed at how inclined people of Soviet upbringing are to lie. Often even without need or purpose. It’s not their fault, and under the circumstances, it’s not even a fault. This is a common and natural feature, and it is one of the main means of self-defense, which later becomes flesh and blood. In a country, where laws only prohibit and never allow anything, one can only act insincerely. The strong and sly win there, but they have to pretend to be cowards, they have to pretend to be average and ordinary. The substance value of words there is exhausted and equals zero due to the eternal repetition of clichés, due to the general dullness. Everything is monotonous and unified, like a menu in a workers’ canteen (The author of these lines once went to a restaurant in Kherson. Everyone ate the same thing. He asked if there was anything else there for a higher price. The diner’s manager answered him not without a sense of pride, ‘we have one for everyone menu’). Depreciation of words and bankruptcy of words causes the depreciation and bankruptcy of contents. Everyone cares only for themselves. Bones crack, people eating people. But it is not mentioned. Never! Human to human here is a thousand times worse than a wolf. But it is not mentioned. And to an elderly young man, who from childhood (a sad childhood in the yard of a state-run housing cooperative and in the drill of a paramilitary school) steps up to old age, such concepts as love, nobility, patriotism seem useless clichés, mere material for cheap demagoguery. Perhaps, they don’t admit it, but that’s how they really feel.
Caution, neglect, cynicism, nihilism… And deep in their soul, a person feels, there is no happiness, there is no People, there is no homeland. What is there? There are only lies, lies, lies. And the only thing that is real is Me. And the only thing that can and must be done is to preserve this Me in a terrible and uncomfortable thoroughly false world. Nihilism manifests itself as careerism. The system is willing to meet. Orders and medals, a personal car and special distributors, villas in Sochi and Stalin’s awards await the nimble adjuster. So let’s direct our energy not on fighting the system, but on crushing competitors, on making a career for ourselves, on better adaptation. Put a foot on others (but hide), fight cunningly and insidiously (but quietly), climb up at all costs, knocking others down (but without shouting). This is how the careerism and unbridled egoism of this generation grows. Cruelty and ambition. “We are all careerists now,” Leonid says.
And so the most unexpected emerges, their absolute apoliticalness. It might seem paradoxical. How can people whose lives are permeated with politics, people who even in their most private lives speak in party slogans and newspaper stamps, how can these people be apolitical? However, it is so. Public life with all its “burdens” is deeply repulsive to these people. Where possible, they save themselves by lying. Where there is no such luck, they bear the burden with disgust.
And beyond that — nothing, emptiness. The setting is June 1941. A terrible war continues outside the USSR. Every thinking person cannot but understand that the fire is about to spread to the east of Europe. But the press does not write about it, having received the relevant instructions back in September 1939. And the heroes of the story worry about staying in graduate school so as to not end up in the province, to avoid being mobilized to aviation schools, in a word, to somehow get out of the way, somehow arrange their personal, private lives. Therefore the outbreak of war comes as a surprise, and that is why it does not arouse any enthusiasm and heroism. This generation is apolitical because politics has become a lie because it [this generation] is atomized to an extreme. Everyone for themselves, about themselves, in themselves. Outside of this self there is nothing but a lie.
The circle of our analysis has closed. We started with a slug, and we ended up with a slug. The world is locked in a pearl shell. There is nothing bright, decent, clean outside the shell.
And if the author had put a full stop here, his book would have been a book of despair and death. It would mean “Finis Ucrainae”. Fortunately, this is not the case in Leonid Lyman’s story, and it is not the case in reality.
A generation — even the most standardized and mechanized — is never a whole. It consists of layers. School kids of the village are not the same as school kids of the city. Workers aren’t equal to a new party-bureaucratic top. Even first-year students differ from graduates. And even more importantly, it consists of humans. Humans of a generation have common features, but they are still individuals. No system can ever level humans on a deep, spiritual, mental plane. The fourth generation of Kharkiv is no protoplasm either. These are humans. And that is why the phrase dropped in the story (how scary to think about it!) that Kharkiv is a living, not yet buried Pompeii (and we already know that Kharkiv means all of Kharkivs, all of Ukraine), this phrase applies only to the Bolshevik Kharkiv, but does not apply to Ukrainian Kharkiv.
There are people who feel like fish in the sea in the mud of the Sovietness. These are scoundrels and careerists — and that’s all. Such is Dniprovyi. They are few. All the others, to a larger or smaller extent, acutely or bluntly, with exaltation or moroseness— at least sometimes, at least sometimes, feel the falsity of life, the falsity of the system. Then thoughts about the randomness and inappropriateness of life come. Then Maria sobs hysterically. Then Sofia childishly thinks about suicide. Then Leonid blindly, naively rushes all-in — on the path to “beautiful catastrophes”, — putting some part of his intimate, sincere thoughts and ideas into a report for… party members and Komsomol members of his institute.
His intimate, sincere thoughts and considerations… Yes, with few exceptions, the youth of the fourth Kharkiv still kept their intimate, sincere thoughts and considerations. The regime did not eradicate them and will not eradicate them. And here lies a moment of extreme importance. Seed of the future. But we shouldn’t exaggerate the degree of maturity, completeness, systemic nature of these hidden thoughts. Indeed, everyone, with the exception of a few soulless individuals, realizes that something is wrong. But, first of all, everyone realizes this in themselves and for themselves, because everyone in the Fourth Kharkiv is atomized and surrounded by a soundproof glass wall of mutual distrust; secondly, they cannot get to the roots of evil, because they have no access to sources of criticism, no outlet other than the official plane of thinking. It seems to some that the whole matter is a conflict of generations. Maria sees her truth, but it seems to her that her mother, an old communist, also has a truth, her own truth. Others are so used to thinking in the class dimension that they cannot think otherwise at all. Even Sirovyi, an opportunist and a brat, even he talks about “parasites” in Soviet society and is willing to speak out against them, even if within the Soviet system. (This is, in fact, the program of the Vlasov movement!) Even he says something about his peasant class. And the most intelligent, most decent of all, Leonid who goes as far as to realize that the regime trampled and crushed a human, that the idea of human, as the regime formulates it, is “in the theoretical stage”, even Leonid with his great and inexhaustible idealism and sacrifice (because what is his report, what is his fight against Dniprovyi, if not a manifestation of idealism and self-sacrifice?), even he, putting forward for himself the ideal of society, where everyone has equal opportunities, but unequal achievements, putting forward the ideal of “beautiful catastrophes”, does not understand that implementation of this ideal means, first of all, overthrowing the Soviet regime and liberating Ukraine.
Thus, under all these dreams about the leadership of the “peasant class”, about justice, about an ideal society, the essence of the matter lies in the ideal of an independent Ukrainian (in the sense of the conformity of the social order to the national-psychological type and its ideals) Ukraine. But no one, not one of the heroes of the Fourth Kharkiv, thinks in terms of national categories. They are taught to think in class categories. Life has taught them to think in materialistic and often even selfish categories. Nothing, nowhere, ever taught them to think in national categories. And only from these positions could they fight the regime, the occupational regime of Moscow. National in them, of course, exists, but it is driven into the subconscious.
Leonid talks about “the trains of my country”. This is not a mistake. This is a very subtle touch. Despite everything, he sees the USSR as his country. And when he talks about his love for his Kharkiv, he does not understand that this Kharkiv is both his and not his (“Our land, but not as ours known”) [6]. He unconsciously feels it. Maria, having returned from Galicia, states with surprise that “we” are not loved anywhere in the world, because “we” have an unintelligent government. Here, a step is already taken to separate oneself from the authorities, but this “we” and “us” — this is again a tribute to the concept of a single Soviet people, traditional for this generation.
And here, in fact, lies the main reason why before the war this generation could not fight the occupational regime. You can’t fight without a battlefield. The battlefield with the Soviet regime can only be thought in terms of national categories. The Third Kharkiv reached this mindset with hard work and pain. This thinking was lacking in the Fourth generation of Kharkiv.
Yes, the regime taught this youth to be deceitful and cruel, instilled in it slobbering, skin-snapping selfishness, and nihilism. But this generation preserved and carried with it a feeling of the falsity of everything in which it was brought up. And that’s a lot. A sense of falsity means a lack of faith. The lack of faith in the under-Soviet system and the lack of faith in anything else (due to ignorance of that anything else) means that the mental strength of this generation was not wasted. And if the adaptation of a generation to the regime is the key to one side of the generation’s spiritual life, then the key to the other side of its spiritual life is not to waste mental energy. The first key opens to negatives, the second to positives. The positives that fill us with faith in the future revival of the best traditions of the Third Kharkiv.
If it is impossible to reveal oneself in action and word, then might the reserves of accumulated, unspent energy go to the inner enrichment of a person? You can deprive a person of their property and break their ties with other people. But you can’t dispossess [7] your brain, professor in Fear by Afinogenov says. True, not everything here is simple, easy, and straightforward. A person can be placed in such conditions of spiritual isolation that their thinking process, although it will not stop, will slow down, be systematically distorted, and, most importantly, will not be able to crystallize into a clear and independent system. We have already seen the success of the regime in this direction.
Still, you can’t dispossess your brain. The colossal lust for life, tremendous resources of unspent mental energy the youth of the fourth Kharkiv carry within themselves as a legacy of the primal Ukrainian world and which they cannot find a reasonable and appropriate application in a distorted life, the youth allows themselves to be enriched with knowledge. Here, too, their paths are blocked, and everywhere they only find medicines and ersatz established by the party and the government. But, perhaps, Ukrainian youth have never before shown such a passionate, insatiable desire to learn about the world, their own and other people’s, have never been so eager to enrich their mind.
Restricted in their development, directed into the narrow stream of practical life, fenced off from abstract thinking, this youth out of thirst for life and knowledge creates a generation of people with technical skill, practical orientation, the ability to get out of the most difficult situations, great concreteness of thinking and concentration of will. This generation is not entirely materialistic, but it is entirely of this world. They are clingy to life, the foggy otherworldliness is unknown to them, but they— even if often unconsciously — feel the ideal in the concrete; their poetry is the poetry of felt details of lived existence, not extraterrestrials and undefined speculations. They have the features of creators, builders, and conquerors, although these features do not yet have a point of implementation.
The unexhausted mental forces, the boundless desire to know the world and master it, create a generation that hates limitations and frameworks. This generation in its essence is not of a provincial, but of an imperial character and way of thinking. Therefore, it will never agree to racial restrictions, to national isolation, to military discipline and complacent limitations. They are alien to the measured monotony and boredom, tight regulations of a German Burgers’ life, as Leonid Poltava revealed with extreme profundity in his Ms. Herty — one of the best self-characteristics of this generation. This generation is not on paper, but with its heart and bare chest open to the winds of the four sides of the world, it accepts and understands them, even more so, it greedily devours them.
This generation hates military discipline and limitations. It grew up in the conditions of complete elimination of remnants of feudalism, which still weighs on the youth of Europe. It knows no ranks and titles; it does not kiss the hand, it approaches each person as self and equal. It seeks sincerity and faith, poetry and humanity, friendship and pure love. It yearns for real human life. It instinctively gravitates towards such life, which is open to all good strangers. It is capable to accept everything, except for narrowness, slovenliness, ritualism. Its eyes are greedily open and shine. But they are turned forward, not back, and this generation will not return to the fence of old provincialism, no matter how many good features this old provincialism has and no matter what modern nicknames it uses today. Before us is a generation of externally dislodged, but internally healthy people, thirsty for life and humanity. It just doesn’t know that real life and humanity for it is called Ukraine. It only lacks a transitory connection with the Third Kharkiv. It is in the blinds of a terrible alien system.
And here once again the field of our observations and considerations closes. At the beginning, we indicated the premature aging of the youth of the Fourth Kharkiv — now we are talking about how it preserves its youth in an unspent way. We established that it lives in ersatz feelings— now we see behind these feelings concealed strength and depth. We observed its nihilism — now we see its love for life and the foundations of faith. We have noted the lies and cynicism, but now we see that this is a shell behind which hides the desire for sincerity, sociability, and humanity.
Contradictions? Yes. Well, such is life. A person is never flat, never a scheme. A person is always in contrasts and coexistence of mutually exclusive opposites. This increases even more in circumstances that do not allow a person to open up and show themselves. Unconnected? No, connected in theory and connected in practice. A generation that is alive and strong, albeit with a cataract on its eyes. The Ukrainian generation, although it does not know about it. Heirs of the Third Kharkiv, although they barely know about its existence. And this means that when the eyes of the generation will be opened, when they will be able to see, when their thinking will move into the field of other categories that have not yet arose, a new faith will flare up in their souls. The power of the outbreak of this new faith will be directly proportional to the power of the oppression under which that faith has been crushed until now.
And then an open battlefield will be presented, then nihilism and egoism, self-love, and premature senile pessimism will fly away like dry shells. Then this generation will fight, and it will have a chance to win.
The Tale of Kharkiv only touches upon this, showing sparingly and in hints how the eyes of the heroes begin to open first under the influence of impressions from the “liberated” lands, then from the sudden breakdown of Soviet power and general demoralization during the German offensive, and then — and most importantly — in the brutal truth of the destruction of nation by nation in war. The Tale of Kharkiv only barely raises the edge of the curtain over these processes. And it does it right. Because these processes have only just begun, and it would be naive and overly optimistic to overestimate them now. Because this would have to be already an essay about the Fifth Kharkiv .
And we are still dealing with the Fourth Kharkiv, and the story of Leonid Lyman is sober and documentary, unrelenting in its truthfulness (although, of course, only partial) and that is why at first glance it is so terribly pessimistic, but upon closer inspection it is so optimistic — the testimony of a man of a generation about his generation, the generation of the Fourth Kharkiv. Words of harsh criticism and deep faith. And now this generation needs nothing more than the harshest, most relentless criticism and the deepest, holiest faith. Faith in yourself, faith in Ukraine. Because today’s Ukraine is not the living corpses of the second Kharkiv, not the living corpses of the emigration, not the knights of idiotic pseudo-elitism copied from other people’s models, but it is the generation of the Fourth Kharkiv.
Written in Munich in 1948
[1] Ivga, or more precisely Ïvha (Ївга)- a traditional Ukrainian name, a version of Eugenia.
[2] “Козир Дівка” (which I crudely translate as Strong Maiden) by Hrihorii Kvitka Osnovianenko is a classical novella that describes the adventures of a young peasant woman who goes to Kharkiv to beg the city bureaucrats for her fiancé to be released from prison, as he is falsely accused in theft.
[3] A line from Taras Shevchenko’s poem “Світе ясний, світе тихий” (Oh Shining World), trasnl. by Herbert Marshall.
[4] Leonid Lyman (1922- 2003) — Ukrainian poet and writer. Lived in the USA after the Second World War.
[5] Nikolai Yezhov, a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin, head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the height of the Great Purge.
[6] Line from Taras Shevchenko’s I Care Not.
[7] The word in the original is “розкуркулити” — rozkurkulyty. Kurkul is the term used by the Soviet state to described rich farmers in a derogatory tone. The politics of rozkurkulennya — the dispossession of the farmers of their estates — was implemented in 1920s towards Ukrainians.
