Volodymyr Svidzinsky ended up returning to Kamianets-Podilsky. It was as though he had stepped out of a classroom onto the university quad and stopped at the end of a quiet alley, in the shade of the trees. His portrait is cast in a block of red granite. His eyes are filled with sorrow, and he is wearing a Ukrainian embroidered shirt. Fallen leaves, ripe fruit, and birds are carved in the stone, with the legend: “1885-1941. ‘I am carrying the grapes of renewal into the night...” he seems says to himself.
It was there that I met Prof. Anatolii Svidzinsky, the poet’s nephew on his father’s side, who is a noted scholar from Lutsk and the author of a book about his uncle, entitled I Am Carrying the Grapes of Renewal into the Night. The scholar arrived in Kamianets-Podilsky on Oct. 18 with a group of researchers and devotees of this world-class poet, ethnographer, and translator to take part in the ceremony of consecrating a monument to Svidzinsky and the International Scientific-Theoretical Conference “Volodymyr Svidzinsky: Era and Context.”
Actually, this is not a monument but a cenotaph, which means “empty grave” in ancient Greek. In other words, this is a symbolic burial site, because Volodymyr Svidzinsky has no grave. He died a violent death, burned alive in a barn together with other victims of the Stalinist purges, when they were being transferred eastward from the Kharkiv prison, before the Nazi onslaught. “Now his sorrowful soul has found its final repose,” says Eleonora Solovei, chief research fellow of the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Dr. Solovei is the author of a monograph dedicated to this unique nonconformist poet, entitled The Unknown Guest: The Destiny and Heritage of Volodymyr Svidzinsky. She was among the first Ukrainian scholars to investigate his creative legacy at length and in depth. She says that “returning Svidzinsky to Ukraine was a long, drawn-out process because some high-ranking bureaucrats were opposed to it. Knowing how brutally he had been destroyed, they wanted everything connected to the poet to sink into oblivion, including his name.”
Earlier, the poet’s creative legacy was investigated by scholars from the Ukrainian Diaspora. “For them he was an alternative, an example of secret literature that opposed Soviet literature,” explains the Svidzinsky scholar. Ukrainian diaspora scholars believe that if his works had been easily accessible, then 20th-century Ukrainian literature would have been “entirely different.” It would not have poems along the lines of “The party leads us.” Instead we would have Svidzinsky’s poem “September” and its lines: “Where are we sailing? Why are these waters/Splashing so mournfully in the fog?/And in the heavens a silvery river,/We know nothing.” As Dr. Solovei argues, “All of Svidzinsky’s poetry is rooted in subtle mythological allusions connected to archaic cultural strata.”
In Soviet times, taking a public stand as a writer was a very dramatic undertaking. That “Svidzinsky defined his position” was the unanimous opinion of the participants of the conference hosted by Kamianets- Podilsky State University, and Ukrainians must help him return to Kamianets, Ukraine, and the world.
“The first conference dedicated to the creative heritage of this unique artist took place in Lutsk. A proposal made by his nephew, Prof. Anatolii Svidzinsky, was wholeheartedly supported by the philologists present and the first collection of Svidzinsky’s works was published. They must have realized that people are interested in his creative legacy. Although more than three years have elapsed, this interest is increasing. It is a very gratifying phenomenon,” Viktoria Sokolova, associate professor at Lesia Ukrainka State University, told her colleagues in Kamianets-Podilsky.
The conference participants discussed the fact that Vasyl Stus preferred Goethe, Svidzinsky, and Rilke above all. Svidzinsky “looks natural in this list, without any exaggeration. However, it takes time to make this an accepted fact. Such things take place over a considerable period of time.”
Prof. Mykola Vaskiv, head of the chair of theory and history of journalism and Ukrainian literature at Kamianets-Podilsky State University, said: “Students walk past-not those from the philology faculty-and they ask about the Svidzinsky statue on the boulevard. They want to know who this man was.”
The admirable idea to erect a monument to Svidzinsky was conceived two years ago, when Prof. Solovei visited this ancient city by the Smotrych River to launch a two-volume collection of “almost all of Svidzinsky’s works” (publishing his complete works will have to be a future project). “At the time we wanted a memorial plaque on the university wall. The structure is old, historic, and associated with countless celebrated names. It turned out that a chain reaction was triggered off, with plaques covering the entire facade. This would be an act of justice. Everything turned out just right: a cenotaph, a symbolic grave in the university boulevard, instead of a memorial plaque. The sculptors, Borys Nehoda and Volodymyr Lashko, were truly inspired by Svidzinsky’s destiny and creative legacy. They ‘felt’ it, although they were promised to be paid ‘one of these days’ for their inspired creation,” says Prof. Solovei.
Svidzinsky lived and worked in Kamianets-Podilsky in 1918-1925. In those days he was a student, then a graduate student at the Faculty of History and Economics, while working as an archivist. The atmosphere of the city inspired him to create the collection Lyric Poetry (1922). “It was a decisive period in his life. Kamianets was, in fact, the capital of the liberation struggles. This determined his position and conduct. Svidzinsky would always remember this city — at least during the Kharkiv period in the life of that ‘unknown guest.’ He wrote that ‘Kamianets is wonderful and incomparable...What a shame that I am not with you in Kamianets... I spent time in Kamianets that was truly happy.’ This city was very much alive in him as an antithesis to industrialized Kharkiv,” Prof. Solovei told The Day.
Svidzinsky’s prescience of his death by fire shocks devotees of his poetry. During the conference the scholars also spoke about the mystical motifs of his lyrics in the philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic contexts of the 20 th century (O. Sinchenko’s “Psychophysiological Landscape of Volodymyr Svidzinsky’s Poetry”; H. Nasminchuk’s “The Archetype of Fire in V. Svidzinsky’s Verse”; M. Moklytsia’s “The Elements in V. Svidzinsky’s Mythomodel”). Dr. Vaskiv drew the discussants’ attention to the fact that certain serendipitous events are taking place even now: “We spent a long time looking for a stone for the statue. Then we found out that we had two granite slabs on the university grounds. We took a closer look and saw that they were precisely what we needed.”
In searching for an answer to the question “What does all this mean?” the conference participants reached the conclusion that the poet was nature itself in his works. The following lines convey his characteristic mood: A cold silence. Broken moon,
Stay with me and bless my grief.
It is like snow resting on branches
Like snow on branches, and then drifts down.
There are three joys no one can take away from me:
Solitude, work, and silence.
There is no more malicious yearning.
The poet of sorrow returned to Kamianets earlier than the statue was erected, the conference held, and the street named after him. “There used to be a Gorky Street, but now it is Volodymyr Svidzinsky Street. No, he did not push the proletarian writer to the literary sidelines. It so happened that there were two Gorky streets in the city. Svidzinsky spent the Kamianets period living in a house located on Kruhly provulok (Round Lane). The local authorities racked their brains. That lane was known as Kruhly for 300 years. Svidzinsky Street is in the historical part of the city. The poet walked up and down that street,” says Valerii Klymenko, head of the city council’s organizational and control department.
In their papers presented at the scientific-theoretical conference in Kamianets- Podilsky the scholars did not neglect the issue of how Svidzinsky “advanced” through the world and Ukraine during an era when every such effort encountered terrible bureaucratic resistance (I. Onokiienko’s “The Image of the Lone Traveler in V. Svidzinsky and V. Stus’s Poetry”; O. Rarytsky’s “The Road to Self-Replenishment: V. Svidzinsky in V. Stus’s Perception,” and works by other scholars).
Vasyl Stus, Ivan Dziuba, and other dissidents were thrilled by Svidzinsky’s works in the 1960s. Prof. Solovei, the author of the foreword to the biobibliographical sourcebook Volodymyr Svidzinsky, believes that “in the existing system and its rules this turned out for the worst because it highlighted the existence of a poet who remained true to himself in a literature ‘cleansed’ of all ‘hostile elements’ and totally under government control, when he refused to kiss the pope’s shoe. Now it seems he is becoming a significant figure.”
Volodymyr Svidzinsky, who had prophetic vision, “took steps” to be returned to Ukraine. As though aware that he was taking his last steps on this sinful earth, he settled his affairs: he prepared his unpublished works in the form of two large volumes of poetry, one entitled Medobir and the other, untitled. “He gave a copy of the other book to M. Ohloblyn at the start of the war, shortly before his arrest. The latter, who already knew what had happened to the poet, gave the manuscript to O. Veretenchenko in Nazi-occupied Kharkiv, in the presence of the interpreter M. Ivanov, and he [Veretenchenko] took it with him when he was emigrating. This manuscript was the source for the publications of Svidzinsky’s verse in 1947-1948 in the MUR journal Arka, the Ukrainian newspaper Chas, published in the German city of Fuerth; in Buenos Aires’s periodical Porohy, in 1954-1956. Later, on the basis of these publications collections of Svidzinsky’s selected poetry appeared in several anthologies published in North America and Western Europe: Broken Strings, Modern Ukrainian Poetry: 1900-1950, The Executed Muse: Silhouettes,” writes Prof. Solovei.
Dr. Eleonora Solovei’s monograph The Unknown Guest: The Destiny and Heritage of Volodymyr Svidzinsky, which was launched at the conference in Kamianets-Podilsky, was a significant event. Clearly, her work is an event in literary history that cannot be ignored. Dr. Solovei, holding the two volumes of works by Svidzinsky, emphasized the fact that her foreword to these volumes is more of an afterword. This was a deliberate decision: the poet’s word comes first, then hers.
