Yevhen Chykalenko, like many other Ukrainian patriots worthy of his descendants’ respect, remain an obscure figure, at least for the time being, although a closer look shows a figure best described as unique. A patron of the arts, he did his utmost to prevent the Ukrainian character and spirit from fading into the mists of history. He invested in the first Ukrainian newspapers and magazines (e.g., Hromadska dumka [Community Thought], Selianyn [Peasant] , Literaturno-naukovy visnyk [The Literary-Scholarly Herald] , Nova Hromada [New Community]); he financed the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society, founded in Lviv in the late nineteenth century and eventually evolving into a private Ukrainian academy of sciences; he helped writers Borys Hrinchenko, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky with money, and built an Academic Home in Lviv for students from Russian-ruled Dnipro Ukraine. To him belongs the aphorism, “Love for Ukraine must come not only from the bot of your heart and but also the bottom of your pocket.” “The river of our history flowed also under the pseudonym of populism (narodnytsvo). ” Here were Antonovych, Konysky, and Franko, Zhytetsky and Myrny, Karpenko-Kary, the brilliant Zankovetska and ambitious Hrinchenko. Indeed, most were heroes. However, we must not forget that there is a material aspect to history, that it has its material fabric. This fabric was woven by people like Symyrenko, Myloradovych, Leontovych, and first and foremost by Yevhen Chykalenko who was its chief weaver for decades. He was a weaver who seemed to remain backstage as long as he lived, in the shadow, anonymous, never claiming his place in history” (Yevhen Malaniuk).
Mrs. Oksana Lyntvariova-Chykalenko lives on 73rd Street in New York. Her father was Anton Chekhov’s friend. Talking to her, one is strongly reminded of Ranevskaya in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. The woman seems an ideal prototype. She is a surviving witness to the Chekhov epoch. She is 92, yet she does not live in the past, as most people do at this age. She likes to work on her personal computer and is engrossed in memoirs... She is fond of telling about Luka, a village in what is now Sumy oblast in Ukraine, and her father’s estate frequented by Anton Chekhov. Also, she recalls her aunt and her beautiful cherry orchard. Yes, that cherry orchard!
She showed me old photographs and without noticing it we switched from the Chekhov subject to small monologues about Yevhen Chykalenko, a most remarkable Chekhov contemporary. Yes, that “chief weaver” lauded by poet Yevhen Malaniuk in his diary. Mrs. Lyntvarova-Chykalenko was married to Yevhen Chykalenko’s son Levko, a noted Ukrainian archaeologist, one of those that held shouldered the burden of the Ukrainian Free Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US. Their daughter Mariana, a trained physician, sat with us in her mother’s compact New York apartment decorated with Ukrainian souvenirs. We drank tea and then someone mentioned Pereshory, a word I had often come across in Chykalenko’s memoirs and letters to Volodymyr Vynnychenko.
“LOVE FOR UKRAINE MUST COME NOT ONLY FROM THE BOTTOM OF YOUR HEART BUT ALSO OF YOUR POCKET”
Yevhen Chykalenko was born at Pereshory, a small village a couple of miles from the railroad station Mardarivka. At the time it was part of Ananyivsky district, Kherson guberniya. Now it is Odesa oblast. Not so long ago Oksana and Mariana visited Pereshory. Levko Chykalenko willed his ashes to be scattered over that land inhabited by several Chykalenko generations.
An array of photos was on the table. Pereshory residents meeting guests from America; the oak tree by which a member of the celebrated family found his last repose; landscapes, and a chicken shed. It was the exotic Ukrainian countryside as it appeared to the US eye. Mariana admitted that she had of late taken an increasing interest in the family history. I told her about Malaniuk’s chief weaver. She was moved and surprised at the same time, because the metaphor pointed to her grandfather’s acclaim. “I wish I could do something to perpetuate his memory,” she said and asked if I knew how she could go about it. I thought of Vynnychenko, his literary godson. In one of his letters to Yevhen Chykalenko he wrote, “I believe that we will have to select a street to erect your statue.” That was almost a hundred years ago, but there is no statue. There are statues of Mykhailo Zhvanetsky, Mykola Yakovchenko, Holokhvastov and Pronia Prokopivna, Panikovsky, popular actors and literary heroes loved by the people.
Yevhen Chykalenko was a public figure who took an active part in the formation of the Society of Ukrainian Progressives, which created the Central Rada, in March 1917. In April 1918, he was offered the Ukrainian hetman’s mace. He declined because he did not consider himself a politician. He was a landlord keeping up a model business and summed up his agrarian experience in his Conversations on Agriculture . He was the author of priceless Memoirs (1861-1907), Diary (1907-17), currently a bibliographical rarity and diaries still to be published, embracing the last most dramatic period of his life (1918- 1929). In 1904, he published the collection 300 Best Ukrainian Songs, many of which he had recorded in his native Pereshory. Yevhen Chykalenko’s merits before Ukraine are so great and he presents such a fascinating figure that we should be ashamed of our indifference toward his name, because he accomplished a mission impossible as chief weaver of the material fabric of our nation’s history.
In his family tree Yevhen Chykalenko found Zaporozhzhian Cossack names. He was born in 1861, to the family of the secretary of the Ananyivsky (now Odesa oblast) District Court who after retirement turned to agriculture. First, he studied under the local parish priest’s guidance and then at a boarding school in Odesa (later reorganized as a higher vocational school. Among the teaching staff were spectacular individuals like philologist Oleksiy Andriyevsky, geographer Petro Nishchynsky, who was also a composer, author of popular literary-musical soirees, and pedagogue Leonid Smolensky, renowned throughout the city.
It was with Smolensky, influenced as a student by Volodymyr Antonovych and Mykhailo Drahomanov, that Yevhen Chykalenko associated the awakening of his national identity. He recalled the first shocking revelation. They were celebrating Christmas and Smolensky sang to Nishchynsky’s piano accompaniment. The song was about a Cossack who for two hundred years wandered along the Danube as a captive, begging to be free. Yevhen heard his teacher (he looked on him like a god) sing a Ukrainian song, in a language for which he, a village young man from Pereshory, had been so often punished and ridiculed. He burst out crying. Then they read Taras Bulba, Shevchenko, Marko Vovchok, the journal Osnova, and this finally shaped Yevhen’s national outlook.
YELYSAVETHRAD
Somehow, provincial Yelysavethrad (now Kirovohrad) got the better of the Palmyra of the South, Odesa, as Yevhen, then 14, was enrolled in a district modern school [in tsarist Russia, a non-classical secondary school] which at the time ranked with the best institutions of learning in that territory. The school principal, Mykhailo Zavadsky, was “a man of outstanding intellect and a gifted teacher.” Yevhen shared a desk with Panas Tobilevych (future actor Panas Saksahansky). They soon made friends and Yevhen became a frequent and welcome guest at the Tobilevyches’ small house on Znamyanska Street. The head of the family, Ivan Tobilevych, was Secretary of Police (several years later, he would become known as a playwright and actor under the name of Karpenko-Kary). The home was the main venue of cultural life in Yelysaverad. Among its regular guests were prominent Ukrainian actresses and actors Mariya Zankovetska, Marko Kropyvnytsky, Mykhailo Starytsky, and Mykola Sadovsky, the Rusov family (Sofia was a teacher and Oleksandr a statistician known throughout the empire), Oleksandr Tarkovsky, brother of the master of the house’s wife (grandfather of the famous film director Andrei Tarkovsky), writer and deputy prosecutor Dmytro Markovych, and Mykola Levytsky, known as the father of the artel.
Yevhen Chykalenko found himself in the vortex of provincial public activities. Among other guests at the Police Secretary’s were members of a group strongly reminiscent of the Kyiv’s Old Hromada [the center of the nineteenth century Ukrainian cultural revival — Ed.]. Small wonder, as the group’s founding members were Ivan Tobilevych and a local physician named Panas Mykhalevych, who was closely associated with such Hromada denizens as Mykhailo Drahomanov and a friend of historian Volodymyr Antonovych. Yevhen spent six years in those intellectually saturated environs (1875—81), until he left for Kyiv, hopefully to enroll in the university, if only as one entitled to attend lectures without having formal student status.
In his Memoirs written after the UNR’s fall, Yevhen Chykalenko recalled how Oleksandr Tarkovsky and he tried to find Antonovych’s house on Zhylyanska Street and met composer Mykola Lysenko, kobzar Stepan Veresai, linguist Kost Mykhalchuk, and other Kyiv intellectuals forming the nucleus of the Old Hromada. In fact, Tarkovsky preferred Narodna Volia’s ideas (terrorist populism — Ed.). Very soon, after the police arrested the Ukrainian and Narodna Volia circles in Yelysavethrad, he would pay for this with a term in Siberia. Even his desperate letter to Victor Hugo, sent from Odesa prison, would not help, because the police intercepted it. Chykalenko was also taken in and reminded of his participation in meetings at the small house on Znamyanska St. and of his contacts with Mykhalevych and Tobilevych. Fortunately, his punishment was less severe: instead of Siberia, five years of exile in Pereshory under police surveillance.
IF NOT ME, WHO?
In Pereshory, he took up farming and went about it with scientific exactness. He had spent three years sitting in on lectures at Kharkiv University’s Natural Sciences Department. And the results were quick in coming. Now he had a steady and substantial income, so he could buy more land. He even laid down his freshly acquired experience in a brochure, Conversations about Agriculture, and the names of the chapters bespoke of its applied character: “Black Fallow,” “Livestock,” “Sewn Grass,” “Grapes,” “Orchards,” and “How to Work Your Field.”
Chykalenko wrote the manuscript in Ukrainian and it took five years to have it published when the Internal Affairs Minister finally approved the manuscript “as an exception.” Of course, the authorities frowned not at the black fallow or grapes, but at the language, which was banned (under the Ems Ukase, in effect 1876—1905, publishing in Ukrainian was forbidden, but a handful of such exceptions were made — Ed.). One cannot fail to marvel at Chykalenko’s selfless propagation of the Ukrainian language, history, culture, and his efforts to awaken in his compatriots their national identity slumbering under centuries of oppression.
If not me, then who? This was his all-compelling credo. Much to the neighboring landlords’ surprise, he would always speak in the vernacular, record folk songs at Pereshory then publish them as a book, invest in a contest for the best Ukrainian history, write a letter to Ilia Repin, proposing Ukrainian historical themes, and this was just the beginning. Yevhen Chykalenko was drawn into the whirlpool of public activity and the Ukrainian movement. In 1899, he bought an estate at Kononivka, a village not far from Yahotyn. It is also true that Kononivka’s fields were used by Kotsiubynsky as a setting for his Intermezzo.
And so the lord of Kononivka stood out in the aristocratic neighborhood as a thrifty manager and a Ukrainian enlightener of the common folk. Chykalenko dedicated a number of pages his Memoirs to that “pedagogical” period, providing colorful portrayals of villagers in whom he patiently awakened public and national consciousness. And yet neither Kononivka, nor Pereshory was for him the main force point. He resolved to dedicate his agrarian talent to a lofty goal later described by Malaniuk as weaving the material fabric of Ukrainian history.
In the fall of 1900, Yevhen Chykalenko bought a house at 91 Mariyinsko-Blahovishchenska Street in Kyiv (a short walk from the homes of Lysenko, Starytsky, Kosach, and Konysky), whereupon he, in his own words “plunged headlong into Ukrainian public life.” He joined the Kyiv Hromada where the tone was set by Naumenko, Antonovych, Mykhalchuk, Starytsky, Pchilka, Shulhyn, Lysenko, Vasylenko, and Steshenko... “It was the cream of Kyiv’s old Ukrainian intelligentsia,” Yevhen Chykalenko would write later.
His home on Mariyinsko-Blahovishchenska Street turned into a venue of Ukrainian cultural and public-political life of the city. It was also used for conventions of the General Non-Party Ukrainian Organization aiming to unite “all conscious Ukrainian elements.” Here ideas were conceived and then translated into practice (e.g., the Vik Publishing House, library of the magazine Kievskaya Starina [Kyiv Antiquities]). The organization’s council was actually a shadow cabinet with Ukrainian renascence being its ultimate goal. Yevhen Chykalenko’s home also hosted literary Saturdays, and one such gathering was visited by a student named Volodymyr Vynnychenko, so one might say that his literary debut took place with the master of the house’s blessing.
During the civil war, Chykalenko’s home was plundered and ruined, along with a file of periodicals covering thirty years, letters from prominent Ukrainian figures, and a sizable library with autographs by his celebrated contemporaries. The Chykalenkos lived through the stormy year 1905 on Mariyinsko- Blahovishchenska Street as “the frightened tsar was about to take his family and flee from Russia aboard a ship, but his entourage led by Rasputin talked him into staying and making concessions to the citizenry.” (Memoirs, p. 404.)
HOW CAN THERE BE A NATIONAL REVIVAL WITHOUT THE UKRAINIAN PRINTED WORD?
His estates in Pereshory and Kononivka were spared the fire of the agrarian movements, apparently because Yevhen Chykalenko knew how to come to terms with them. But then came the terrible Stolypin reaction with its Black Hundreds and undisguised animosity toward all non-Russians. Under the circumstances, he took advantage of the Constitutional Manifesto (October 17, 1905) and, together with friends, founded a Ukrainian language (!) daily newspaper. And then the first issue of the Hromadska dumka came off the presses, followed by the newspaper Rada (Council), and he would die rather than lose that particular periodical. “If this newspaper dies, so will my soul,” he wrote to Vynnychenko in July 1908. “I will die as a Ukrainian Don Quixote. I will hide away in the countryside, so I won’t see or hear any conscious Ukrainians; in a word, I will run wild, returning to the status of a battle-hardened landlord who knows nothing and cares little beyond his black fallow.”
What was this? Irony? Sorrow? Despair? One can only guess how much diplomatic talent it took to raise the newspaper funds and then “balance” the ambitions, interests, and political differences of all those “conscious Ukrainians” that could so easily quarrel. Yevhen Chykalenko with his pedagogical skill had on more than one occasion to act as an arbiter. He had the right to resort to such sharp national self-criticism so often found in his letters, Memoirs, and Diary. He above all blamed his nation for anarchism and for being “unable to organize itself and build a political system.” At times he envied the Czechs; German bondage did them a good turn, he believed. Thinking of his labor of Sisyphus, one can only hope to find others like him in our own day. There were times when for want of funds he sold some of his land to keep the newspaper alive. He knew that the national revival was unthinkable without the Ukrainian printed word. “The newspaper’s dying of anemia would be another Berestechko,” he wrote in his Diary, “a devastating blow to our national movement.” And Rada survived until World War I broke out, and the Russian government organized a pogrom against all things Ukrainian.
DRAMA OF LIFE AND UKRAINE
From then on Yevhen Chykalenko’s life and that of his family took a dramatic course, largely owing to the revolution and civil war. He had started building his family estate in 1883, after marrying Mariya Sadyk, a noblewoman from Lubny. She bore him three sons and two daughters: Levko, Petro, Ivan, Hanna, and Viktoriya. And then something happened in 1909. In a letter to Vynnychenko he described it as a drama. The family fell apart. “I have been in love with Yuliya Mykolayivna, my wife’s niece, for so many years. At first, I was unaware of it and when I noticed it I was horrified... It transpired that she also loved me secretly, so she said no to all her numerous admirers...” This saga ended in the spring of 1909 when he and Yuliya start to live like husband and wife. The children took this differently. Levko “understanding enough,” Hanna and Viktoriya “like theologians rather than zoologists,” that is, judgmentally.
With time, everything quieted down, but then events took place that literally turned Russia upside down. Yevhen Chykalenko was then in the Crimea. He had a plot and what he called a villa in Alupka. Rada was closed down; Russian troops had entered Galicia and proceeded to evict thousands of Ukrainians, sending them elsewhere in Western Ukraine and to Siberia. Mykhailo Hrushevsky was arrested and sent to Simbirsk. Chykalenko had to go into hiding, because the secret police believed he was one of the leaders of the so-called Mazepa movement. In 1916, however, he managed to resume publishing the newspaper, now titled Nova Rada [New Council] and continued until 1919 when Ukraine was seized by the Bolsheviks for the second time.
During the Civil War, Chykalenko supported Hetman Skoropadsky. “We will adhere to the concept that the Hetmanate best suits Ukraine as a political system,” Dmytro Doroshenko wrote him in an April 1921 letter, a historian who had served in Skoropadsky’s government. Chykalenko and Doroshenko resolutely condemned the anti- Hetmanate uprising organized in the fall of 1918 by Vynnychenko and his associates. This author found Chykalenko’s letter to Levko Hankevych in the US archives. The letter, dated November 1919, was filled with bitter disappointment after the national fiasco just experienced. “Neither you, nor Vynnychenko can carry out my only current desire to bring back the Ukrainian state which he destroyed, expecting a worldwide socialist revolution, organizing a rebellion together with the Socialist Revolutionaries, contrary to the resolution of the Kyiv Central Committee of the Ukrainian Social Democratic, Central Committee of the SR Party, and contrary to the will of the majority in the National Union, precisely where we had half of the portfolios. The ambitious Petliura and inexperienced Konovalets were incited and this forced the weak-willed Skoropadsky to sign the second Treaty of Pereyaslav (the National Union consisting of forces earlier aligned with the Central Rada proclaimed a revolt against Skoropadsky in November 1919 after the hetman had proclaimed the union of the Ukrainian State with non- Bolshevik Russia — Ed. ). As a result, instead of a Ukrainian state in its historical form, we will have a single Bolshevik Russia, and finally a single Black Hundred one, as he warned Vynnychenko.”
IMMIGRATION
Chykalenko wrote this letter while in Przemysl; as thousands of other Ukrainian intellectuals, he had to flee from the Bolshevik regime and become an immigrant. Levko, Hanna, and Viktoriya also settled abroad; part of the family stayed in Kononivka. Petro had been conscripted and fought with Samsonov’s army, witnessing its destruction by the Masurian lakes. In 1928 at the age of 36 he died in a transit prison in Kursk (whence he was to be transferred to Solovki). His youngest son Ivan remained in Ukraine and suffered exile. His son Levko lived in Kyiv (as I have mentioned) and become a professor. Even as a student, he was fond of archaeology and anthropology. Hanna married Sigmund Keller and lived in Sweden. I spotted her interesting article about Prince Repnin’s library at Yahotyn in a collection published in the diaspora. While writing it, Hanna Keller-Chykalenko must have thought of another library, her father’s in Kononivka, very close to Yahotyn. Viktoriya married Oleksandr Skoropys- Yoltukhovsky, who had been quite an influential figure under Skoropadsky. The Skoropyses settled in Germany and had a son, Vasyl. They loved him so and lost him in 1941. The young conscript was killed at the very beginning of the war in Belarus. However, this long and unusual story rates another article.
Yevhen Chykalenko eventually found himself in Czechoslovakia and later in Austria, all his plans devastated. He bequeathed his Pereshory estate to the village community, to be used as a school. The house in Alupka was to become a summer retreat for Ukrainian writers after his death. Neither would ever happen, ever, as events took a different and dramatic course. In 1922, the Chykalenkos lived in Rabenstein, an Austrian village. They were in a desperate and deteriorating situation, and the New York based Ukrainian newspaper, Svoboda, asked the emigration for help, printing a feature borrowed from a Lviv periodical, reading that “our noted figure Yevhen Chykalenko has found himself in a critical, hopeless situation. He has long been ill, his condition has recently worsened, and his life is in jeopardy unless he undergoes an operation. Meanwhile this aging cultural figure, one of the founders of the Academic Home and benefactor of the Shevchenko Society cannot afford it. Chykalenko and his wife live in misery in emigration. The old man collects firewood in a public forest and his wife has to get up at six a.m. to go to the factory. Quite recently, hoisting a heavy tree in the forest, the old man nearly broke his back and is now bedridden, seriously ill, and there is no one to look after him... The old man needs surgery, but he has no money to pay for the hospital and treatment.”
Fortunately, there were people willing to help, and before long Yevhen Chykalenko underwent two complicated operations on his stomach but was not destined to live long afterward. In 1925, the Chykalenkos moved to Czechoslovakia. The former publisher of the Rada was given a low-paid job as chairman of the terminology committee at the Ukrainian Economic Academy in Podebrady. He died in June 1929. Shortly before his passing, he asked that his ashes be scattered at Pereshory. Of course, he realized that this would be possible only after Ukraine regained its freedom. For awhile the urn with a small pile of ash, all that was left of Yevhen Chykalenko, was kept in the Museum of the Ukrainian Liberation Struggle in Prague. The museum closed after World War II and its archives transferred to Kyiv, but a Ukrainian living in Prague managed to get hold of the urn and bury it in the local cemetery.
WE ARE SLOW AND INDIFFERENT
We spoke about this and other things with Yevhen Chykalenko’s daughter-in-law and granddaughter in a home on 73rd Street in New York. Not far from there, on 100th Street, were unique archives at the Ukrainian Free Academy, relating to the fate of this man with a big heart. Original diaries, letters to and from noted figures of the Ukrainian movement of the first quarter of the twentieth century and his children. They say his diaries dating from 1918-20 are being prepared for publication in Kyiv. The newspaper Rada was revived in the early 1990s, but the project proved short-lived, as so many Ukrainian language periodicals have been forced to give way to Russian counterparts. We have independence, but nobody like Chykalenko. We are slow and indifferent as Yevhen Chykalenko knew so well, just as he knew that the national character takes long to be shaped, and it can long remain that way. He could have quit all his voluntary national duties and lived like everybody else. He could but would not. Contrary to common sense, he remained that selflessly dedicated weaver, repeating his pet phrase, “And you, Marko, play!”
