September 25 marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Artistic Ukrainian Movement (known by its Ukrainian acronym MUR, which in the Ukrainian language conjures up associations with a castle wall — Ed.). This organization united Ukrainian writers in exile who ended up in displaced persons’ (DP) camps in the West after World War II.
On that day 60 years ago a group of Ukrainian intellectuals met in Furth, a suburb northwest of Nuremberg. Despite their different fields of creative endeavor and lifestyles, they were united in being forever cut off from their homeland. A so-called “initiative group” comprised of Ivan Bahriany, Leonid Poltava, Yurii Sherekh (Yurii Shevelov), Viktor Domontovych (Viktor Petrov), Ivan Maistrenko, Yurii Kosach, and Ihor Kostetsky decided to create a writers’ organization. Other creative professionals — actors, musicians, journalists, and artists in Germany, France, Austria, and other countries outside the USSR’s control — were also expected to join MUR.
Although MUR existed only for three years, this brief period may be rightfully considered an epoch in Ukrainian literature. It was an extraordinary phenomenon, which has not been duly appreciated to this day. Its exceptional nature was not entirely due to the fact that MUR united all kinds of creative personalities, guaranteeing them intellectual liberty, which writers in Soviet Ukraine did not have. It was not due to the MUR writers’ anticommunist position or their rejection of socialist realist methods. MUR set itself the lofty goal of reaching the heights of world-class literature by using various methods and styles and avoiding the principle of ars gratia artis (art for art’s sake). The great Ukrainian nation had to assert itself primarily through great literature.
MUR’s initiative group proclaimed that the purpose of Ukrainian art is “to serve its people in a highly artistic and accomplished manner, and thereby earn a voice and reputation in the world of art.” These lofty goals were seemingly utopian. While writers in Ukraine were busy “developing” Soviet literature, the emigres on this small island of Ukrainism called MUR not only preserved their faith, but also found a source of creative inspiration to assist the cause of Ukraine’s revival and self-assertion. The search for national identity provided the groundwork for a new, genuine Ukrainian literature at a time when Ukrainian writers in the Soviet literary domain were relegated to the role of colonial provincials.
MUR members were called upon to create literature that would be national in character and reflect the nation’s essence. They also considered the theory of “art for art’s sake” to be tantamount to “defection from the nation.”
Yurii Sherekh was the ideologist and deputy chairman of the Artistic Ukrainian Movement, which was headed by the prominent prose writer Ulas Samchuk whose friends called him the “General.” Samchuk’s efforts to rally the forces of the banished Ukrainian creative intellectuals scattered in the West were unmatched. The emigre writers’ choice of leader was supported by the First Congress of Ukrainian Writers held in Aschaffenburg on Dec. 21-22, 1945. In addition to the members of the initiative group, the founders of MUR included the famous writers of the time: Vasyl Barka, Oleksa Varava, Katria Hrynevycheva, Yury Klen, Yevhen Malaniuk, Todos Osmachka, Yar Slavutych, and others. A basement room in a DP camp was the venue for important meetings, during which Domontovych, Samchuk, and Bahriany delivered lengthy speeches.
Many years later various prominent writers offered differing assessments of the “island of MUR.” Although there were disagreements and dissatisfaction among the MUR members, there is no denying that the creative environment and the writers’ powerful organized force encouraged the creation and publication of many works that entered the treasury of Ukrainian literature, the many years of suppression notwithstanding. Samchuk’s Ost and Yunist Vasylia Sheremety [The Youth of Vasyl Sheremet], Domontovych’s Bez Hruntu [Without Land] and Doctor Serafikus, Bahriany’s Tyhrolovy [Tiger Catchers], Osmachka’s Starshyi Boyaryn [The Chief Boyar], Kosach’s Enei i Zhyttia Inshykh [Aeneas and the Lives of Others], Barka’s Bilyi Svit [White World] are among the major ones. According to George Grabowicz, who is researching MUR and its activities, this organization’s efforts resulted in the publication of “over 1,200 books and pamphlets in various fields, 250 of which are original works of poetry, prose, or drama.” MUR even had its own publication series: Mala Biblioteka MURu and Zolota Brama.
Sherekh and Samchuk’s speeches at the first MUR congress should become required reading. At that time Ukrainian writers were facing the question of their future undertakings. A recipe of sorts was provided in an article by MUR’s ideologist, which was entitled “Styles of Ukrainian Literature in Exile.” According to Sherekh, the value of a literary work depended on its proximity to the ideal of national literature, which “is national not in the ethnographic sense but in the sense of a sovereign European nation, which has the right to a place in Europe because it has something of its own to tell it.” Instead of following Europe or Moscow’s lead, Ukrainian creative intellectuals were encouraged to build on the national foundation. All this was to be done “not to move away from values common to all mankind, but instead to proclaim and underscore them with greater force, albeit in our own, Ukrainian, way.”
The first MUR congress was followed by the publication of the first issue of the MUR almanac, which included speeches from this gathering. The participants clashed over their differing views, and the congress failed to agree on a single recipe for creating a great Ukrainian literature. Of course, it could not be otherwise.
Despite hardships (the writers lived in different DP camps) 38 members joined this new and unprecedented creative organization. MUR was proclaimed a national union of writers, who tasked Ukrainian art with defending the nation’s interests.
The resolutions of the first MUR congress are remarkable for the confidence and prophetic insight voiced by these Ukrainian intellectuals, who considered their exile and the plight of their fatherland to be temporary. They believed, therefore, that the 200,000 Ukrainians living in the West had no right to become scattered and lose their national identity. Of course, implementing this declaration was no simple task. Besides the misunderstandings and differences among the various writers, MUR became the target of criticism of Dmytro Dontsov’s Literaturno-naukovyi visnyk [Literary Scientific Herald] and nationalist groups. All of this further complicated the creative atmosphere.
Samchuk went to great lengths to keep the organization going and preserve its status of authority and respect in the Ukrainian community. Samchuk’s efforts to keep Kosach from leaving MUR were characteristic of the former’s devotion to the organization. Kosach was notorious for his “dissatisfaction” stemming from the fact that he was “not duly appreciated.” The new organization’s oath reads as follows: “The creators of literature must never let their attention falter when they are discharging their honorable duty to the fatherland and the people. [They] may not disgrace their calling by replacing it with other occupations, no matter how much more attractive they might occasionally seem compared to the hard and responsible work of creating our art.” Many famous MUR members had to perform hard physical labor; Kosach was one of them. Already a classic in his lifetime, Samchuk was forced to earn a living as a janitor in Canada. Yet none of them stopped writing. Decades later Sherekh would recall this exceptional period of MUR’s existence in Germany: “Scholarly work, university lectures, earning a living, and meals became insignificant and were relegated to the background. I lived with the idea of surrounding the writers with a creative atmosphere by rescuing talent from the drabness of life among philistines and building a spiritual palace.”
Unfortunately, this topic — the small island of Ukrainian spirit on German soil — has not received adequate scholarly attention. Solomea Pavlychko made a significant contribution to research on MUR in her second edition of Discourse on Modernism in Ukrainian Literature. However, a comprehensive study of this extraordinary creative center is still ahead.
Although MUR existed for only three years, even this brief period showed the tremendous creative energy of Ukrainian intellectuals faced with the challenge of surviving and writing in exile. Most of them did not trust the nationalist political leaders, who called for continuing the struggle for an independent Ukraine. The writers believed in using other means to accomplish this, one of them being the development of literature as one of Ukraine’s most potent means of creative expression. By that time only Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka had won international recognition for Ukraine. Samchuk was convinced that the creators of a great literature had to be inspired by great ideas, and there was no need for them to follow Europe’s lead. MUR was conceived as an elite organization. Writers were expected to master numerous foreign languages in order to familiarize themselves with the best works of world literature. They simply had to “step over Europe in order to go further.” In his speeches at conferences and various MUR congresses, Samchuk declared: “Ukraine and a number of eastern nations have the mission of becoming a source of Europe’s spiritual rebirth in the future.”
Of course, the writers were immediately confronted with the question of how they should write. As we know, MUR was nothing like the Soviet writers’ union, which followed orders from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. MUR members resisted and condemned any and all interference from the Communist Party or even from nationalists. However, this unprecedented freedom occasionally served to hinder the writers. Bahriany considered the orientation toward Western European literature a disorder, while Kosach could not imagine Ukrainian art without Europe. MUR’s leaders interpreted the very meaning of the word “literature” differently. For Samchuk “great literature” was a world of ideas and philosophy, which transcended simple literature. Bahriany considered works not written in the nation’s interests to be a crime. MUR’s ideologist, Sherekh, was convinced that one should not be a derivative European writer because it was time to say “our own word” in an organically national style. Regardless of their differing opinions, the writers produced a number of distinguished works. In 1947-1948 many of them were published in the literary and art magazine Arka. This monthly publication, a supplement of the nationalist newspaper Ukrainska Trybuna, did not have a sound financial footing. This forced MUR’s board to become the magazine’s cofounder by forming a joint publishing committee with the newspaper. Viktor Domontovych became the magazine’s chief editor, publishing 11 issues of this respectable illustrated publication. However, Arka did not belong exclusively to MUR, which complicated the authors’ task. Interference from the political leaders who had founded Ukrainska Trybuna had a detrimental effect on the publication. Germany’s financial reform in June 1948 dealt a final blow to Arka. Other magazines that were published in DP camps — Orlyk [Eaglet] and Ridne Slovo [Native Word] — reflected the conflict of aesthetics that had broke out within MUR. Mykola Orest, Yuriy Klen, and Volodymyr Derzhavin formed a group called Svitannia [Dawn] after becoming advocates of neoclassicism, which Sherekh resented. MUR was undermined from within and was heading into a decline. The most outstanding writers of MUR began leaving, while its enemies ridiculed the organization by saying that MUR stood for Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, widely known by its Russian acronym MUR.
The board’s didactic instructions, announced at conferences and the third MUR congress, did nothing to resolve the complex situation. The gap between writers of different generations widened. The second MUR collection included an unsigned article accusing young writers of cynicism and careerism. Nevertheless, the leaders of MUR — mainly Samchuk and Sherekh — made tremendous efforts to convince the membership of the dual need to serve art and the people. One of MUR’s slogans read: “[We seek] not the self-assertion of literature but the self-assertion of a nation of 45 million, in which literature must play an auxiliary role as a tool of this self-assertion if it wants to become a great Ukrainian literature.” Inspiration fed by lofty ideas did not evaporate with time, no matter in which country the Ukrainian intellectuals found themselves after the DP camps were disbanded in 1948. Never before or since has Ukrainian literature experienced such passions and literary disputes as those that took place in MUR. Even though thousands of kilometers separated the island of MUR from mainland Ukraine, Uk-rainian intellectuals on this island and around it not only breathed its freedom, but were also imbued with great inspiration for creativity and life.
