In the deadly cage of thought

The life of a talented and earnest artist in a time of despotic (and at this hypocritical) government domination is an eternal subject for writers, historians and philosophers. There are really a lot of didactic “twin” figures to comprehend the problem – Ovid and emperor Augustus, Seneca and Nero, Moliere and Louis XIV, Shevchenko and Nicholas I, etc. The terrible history of the last 20th century is especially abundant in such stories. Disobedient and free thought was destroyed together with its creator – that’s the tragic model of relations of a totalitarian government and a gifted man of art. The most dramatic evidence proving that one who crosses a despot had either to surrender or to die is, looking at Ukrainian history of the 1920s-1930s, the fate of Mykola Khvylovy, a prominent writer and public activist, one of ideologists of the “Executed Renaissance.” Khvylovy, not willing to be completely “ideologically disarmed” (a wolf term of those years), chose another, fatal way out – a bullet through his temple. This happened on May 13, 1933.

Consequences of creative highs and lows in Mykola Khvylovy’s last years of life and reasons which led to his tragic death are still a mysterious subject, which is not studied enough – there is still a lack of trustworthy documents. This makes the publishing of the new, thoroughly elaborated research Poliuvannia na Valdshnepa. Rozsekrechenyi Mykola Kvylovy (Hunting for Woodcock. Declassified Mykola Khvylovy) (Compiled by doctor of historical sciences Yurii Shapoval. Foreword by Yurii Shapoval and doctor of philological sciences Volodymyr Panchenko. Kyiv, Tempora Publishers, 2009), all the more important. This research-documentary collection convincingly states that security officers constantly shadowed Khvylovy, gave him the nickname “Valdshnep,” and diligently prepared his physical elimination. The published sources revealed in the book, which were still secret not so long ago, shed light on the suicide of the writer, the motives and circumstances of which became not only a form of protest against the regime, but also an act of self-affirmation. The work Hunting for Woodcock proves this statement based on abundant documentation (the publication contains 63 secret documents, among them – secret service reports and informers’ messages to the State Political Directorate of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic about even the most trivial events, anonymous feedback of “literary critics” which proved the “nationalistic” and “hostile” character of the writer’s works, evidence by people who knew the writer closely, messages to the governing bodies of the State Political Directorate about the death of the author, etc.). The book is based on documents declassified in 2009 from the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine. The dossier reveals the character of shadowing Mykola Khvylovy by the Soviet security bodies. From the pages of the files Mykola Khvylovy arises, as well as those who (due to different circumstances) feared, hated, despised or envied him. In addition, the book contains an interview of the doctor of philological sciences Volodymyr Panchenko with Iraida Kryvych – the writer’s daughter (see The Day’s issue for February 5, 2010).

“For Khvylovy will and choice, responsibility and moral dimension were important,” notes professor Yurii Shapoval in the foreword, “he wouldn’t allow people to make an obedient victim of him. Split into two halves between communism and Ukraine, Khvylovy will put an end to his biography with a shot through his temple.” The key reason for the tragedy, in the opinion of Yurii Shapoval, was peculiar to Khvylovy “permanent internal ambivalence, psychological breakdowns, a game that the writer tried to play with the system and (after all) with himself. This game turned out to be fatal. He considered himself to be a romantic. However, his romanticism conflicted with a non-romantic time. The new economic policy caused revolutionary illusions (those who had them) to vanish. The crystallization of Stalin’s dictatorship required a transformation of yesterday’s ‘fighter’s for the people’s cause’ into obedient bureaucrats. The formation of ideological and political monism, establishing the ‘one and indivisible’ Bolshevik, devalued declarations about national renaissance even within the limited frameworks of the official ‘indigenization’ policy,” stresses professor Yurii Shapoval.

The two halves of Mykola Khvylovy’s soul – the devotion to the big cause of national renaissance of Ukraine and at the same time a belief in the ideals of social justice, in the future zahorna komuna – couldn’t be combined in the years when the perfidious “red dictator” persistently gathered the lands of the old imperial state, creating a new, unprecedented superpower. Therefore one can only fully understand the tragic death of Khvylovy after analyzing the details the devilish demagogy of Bolshevik ideologists (as well as bloody deeds of Stalin’s “practitioners”) in the sphere of interethnic relations. As doctor of philological sciences Volodymyr Panchenko neatly remarks, “Bolsheviks understood the right of nations for self-determination as the right for a voluntary junction, and not a separation! Splitting Russia by creating independent national states, would be a terrible blow to the Russian Carthage – the monarchy of the Romanovs. However, in reality Bolsheviks remained centralizers, whose strategy lied in building a red-Bolshevik empire over the Romanovs’ empire.”

Mykola Khvylovy – a Ukrainian by spirit and a communist (to be more precise – a communitarian) by convictions, clearly realized this. He couldn’t compromise with such events. This was one of the reasons for his tragedy, the scope and sense of which is deeply and persuasively elucidated by Hunting for Woodcock. Declassified Mykola Khvylovy.