In 2003 the Vinnytsia Oblast Ethnographic Museum obtained a set of personal papers from the archive of Hnat Yastrubetsky, a little known Ukrainian cultural and musical figure of the 1920s. Among the documents was a diary of the famous Ukrainian writer Stepan Vasylchenko. In the summer of 1920 fate brought these two men together in the Dniprosoyuz First Traveling Choir, which later became the world-famous Dumka Chorus (Ukrainian State Traveling Choir). The 85th anniversary of the choir’s first large-scale tour of Left-Bank Ukraine was celebrated in July 2005. The Ukrainian press was remiss in not mentioning a single word about this important anniversary.
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST “ROWDY AND SYCOPHANTIC” SONGS
The period of the national-liberation struggles in Ukraine saw the untrammeled growth of cultural and educational establishments. Choral singing was especially popular. During this period a host of musical education societies, orchestras, and amateur choirs arose in various institutions. In March 1919 the talented organizer Polikarp Bihdash-Bohdashev helped the Dnipro League of Consumer Unions (Dniprosoyuz), Ukraine’s largest cooperative at the time, to found a choir that turned professional in less than two years.
In the summer of 1920 the performing group, now called the Dniprosoyuz First Traveling Choir, was entrusted to a well-known and experienced conductor and choirmaster named Nestor Horodovenko. During his brief sojourn in Kyiv, the conductor headed St. Volodymyr University’s student choir, a combined choir of Kyiv teachers, and the choir of the 5th Red Army Infantry School.
The Dniprosoyuz choir comprised the best vocalists in Kyiv, some members of Bihdash-Bohdashev’s choir, as well as singers from the Kyiv Opera, the Kyiv Theater of Musical Drama, the Mykola Lysenko Choir, Kyiv University’s student choir, and other Kyiv vocal ensembles— altogether 44 singers and 6 administrators. The choir’s chief administrator was Hnat Yastrubetsky, an activist in the cooperative movement and a Dniprosoyuz executive, who had a beautiful voice and sang bass parts.
The choir’s main goal was to revive and popularize Ukrainian folk songs and to combat “rowdy and sycophantic songs widespread in Ukraine.” The troupe was originally conceived as a showpiece traveling choir that would serve as a model for various local cooperatives and other organizations to set up their own choirs.
The choir was finally able to leave on tour in July 1920. The tour was carefully prepared. Dniprosoyuz received 2,950,000 rubles, a sizable amount at the time, and placed an order with a publishing house for advertisements, billboards, tickets, and passes. No one was expecting to make a profit from the tour: the artists were united by their love of Ukrainian songs and inspired by a desire to enlighten their listeners. Since this was a time of war and starvation, the choristers had to take basic necessities with them, such as food supplies, cooking pots, and other household utensils (cauldrons, buckets, frying pans, axes, samovars, teapots, knives, and irons). Special clothing was made for the singers from sackcloth and calico — navy blue for the men, white for the women, and black for the choirmaster.
“OFFICIALS WATCHED WITH JEALOUSY”
On July 12, the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, the choristers packed all their belongings in five trunks, loaded them on horse-drawn carts, and set out from 46 Volodymyrska Street to the Darnytsia railway station. Originally, the tour was supposed to last until Aug. 24, but owing to their successful performances and the insistent demands of the Left-Bank public, it was extended until Sept. 1.
The tour organizers invited the well-known Ukrainian writer Stepan Vasylchenko (S. V. Panasenko, 1877-1935) to accompany the choir as a correspondent, who would keep a diary “to record everything that was of importance to the choir.”
During the tour Vasylchenko kept two diaries: one of them, entitled “With a Song through Fire and Water,” is now part of the writer’s personal collection at the Ukrainian Institute of Literature, while the other one belonged to the Yastrubetsky family until 2004, when it was transferred to the Vinnytsia Oblast Ethnographic Museum.
In the summer of 1920 the choir drew full houses in Lubni, Romodan, Myrhorod, Poltava, Kharkiv, Kobeliaky, Kremenchuk, Lokhvytsia, Romen, and villages in Poltava, Kharkiv, and Luhansk oblasts. At the request of local priests, the choir performed in Orthodox churches and also gave a number of benefit performances. Altogether, the artists gave 31 concerts.
Audiences consisted of hundreds and even thousands of people from various walks of life: factory workers, peasants, the local intelligentsia, and the military. The concerts were held in clubs, community centers, theaters, and even in gardens and open-air grounds.
It was more difficult for the choristers to travel across Ukraine, then ravaged by civil war, than they had expected: they had to live in unbearable and unsanitary conditions. “At home, the choristers have to be content with a scanty meal almost without fatback and salt. They swallow a spoonful or two — they can’t afford more — and then go to sleep in the same gloomy and depressing mood indoors or in a courtyard on some hay” (July 14 entry in Vasylchenko’s diary). They traveled by train only to big cities but made their way to villages and small towns on horse— and bullock-drawn carts or even on foot.
At first, the local authorities were suspicious and cavalier toward the choir: “The government maintained a reserved and prim profile. We noticed no warm sentiments: on the contrary, the officials watched this success of the folk song with understandable jealousy and envy” (July 14). The Soviet administrators’ indifference had little impact on the way the peasants responded to the choir’s performance. “The populace did not in fact know how to treat these unwelcome guests who came with the choir, and, as always in such cases, it adopted a wait-and-see attitude marked by suspicion and caution. But when the first Ukrainian folk song rang out, the peasants seemed to change. After this, the choir always sang to thunderous applause.”
GLORY AND MEALS
When word about the concerts spread throughout Left Bank Ukraine, local administrators changed their attitude to the choir and began inviting it to various cities and villages. There were so many invitations by the end of the tour that the choir was unable to accept some of them. The Ukrainian population would always give the choir an enthusiastic, warm, and hospitable reception: for example, they would treat the choristers to free or nominally-priced meals.
Local Prosvita branches that were found in almost every populated area helped organize concerts. Its member located premises, sold tickets, carried out promotional campaigns, and attracted large audiences. Prosvita activists greatly appreciated the Kyiv choristers’ discipline and professionalism, which local choirs clearly lacked.
What united the choir and its audiences was a passionate love for authentic Ukrainian songs, a folk art treasury that not only warmed the heart but also lifted the spirit. “Various songs in a beautiful and unusual (for the countryside) interpretation literally enchanted the peasants,” says Vasylchenko. “Deep sighs and charming smiles made it clear that a strong impression was created. When a gray-haired old man, the village’s former celebrated singer, heard his favorite song (‘Oh, I saw him’), he became so carried away that he began to dance on the street like a playful boy, while everyone laughed heartily. It was clear from the comments to every song that the peasants knew and loved these songs” (July 22).
The overall impression from the concerts of the Dniprosoyuz First Traveling Choir was aptly expressed by “a teacher from Romen, who delivered a simple but extremely sincere and moving speech: he compared the choir’s concert with a radiant sun that had unexpectedly risen over a dark and gloomy horizon, with a magic dream that made the frozen hearts of people throb, reminding them of never-ending beauty, the joy and happiness of life, and the struggle for exalted ideals. Like the fabulous water of life, the excellently performed native song washed and freshened their souls and aroused a longing for beauty” (Aug. 28).
However, in such places as industrial Kharkiv, audiences accustomed to “rowdy and sycophantic songs” would often reject the spiritual idea that a Ukrainian song in the choir’s interpretation carried and would shout remarks, like “A slick job indeed!” or “What the heck is he doing, singing the Matins?”
The repertoire of the Dniprosoyuz First Traveling Choir consisted of more than 30 revolutionary and folk songs, as well as arrangements of works by Ukrainian composers. Some songs were learned during the tour. All the concerts featured folk song gems in arrangements by Mykola Lysenko, Kyrylo Stetsenko, and Mykola Leontovych.
“The audience would present the choristers with flowers after the very first song. They would ask for encores for almost every number. The choir sang enthusiastically and smoothly. The songs ‘Monday, Monday,’ ‘In a Grove,’ and ‘Snow on the Hill’ seem to have made the most lasting impression on the audience” (July 14).
Vasylchenko considered folks songs to be the greatest treasury and spiritual source of the Ukrainian people. “They gave speeches about our folk song and its meaning and power as a pure and exalted instrument in the struggle for national liberation” (July 15). On July 18 the choristers arrived in Myrhorod, where Vasylchenko’s wife Kylyna and son were living at the time. She later recalled:
“The days when the choristers toured Myrhorod were a feast for me and my son: the husband and father whom we had not seen for many months came to see us. The choir performed in the garden of a high school, next to our parent’s house. I attended every concert. Peasants, workers, and Red Army men gave a rapturous welcome to the songs — their national Ukrainian songs that just a few years earlier nobody would have dared to sing so openly in front of a large audience. Stepan Vasylchenko, too, was excited. He would look into people’s faces, listen to them discussing things, and when the artists relaxed after a concert, he would sit down somewhere in a corner, take out his notebook with its dark oilcloth cover and put it on his lap, and write down his impressions of what he had seen and heard in small economical handwriting.”
When you read Vasylchenko’s notes, you feel the warmth of the songs and derive indescribable pleasure from the beauty of his language and lyrically poetic style. The writer’s diary reveals his true artistic maturity and mastery. “The time of day was extremely quiet and serene,” the manuscript reads, “the red sun was setting over the golden fields. The look in people’s eyes was quiet and bright. Good-natured and friendly words formed the finest background for our song, creating a clear, light, and pensive mood that equally suited both humorous and sad songs.”
The tour was a commercial failure. The constant lack of food and sleep, sleeping on floors, the lack of hot food, having to sell one’s last belongings at a market, and even thefts “added sad tints to this supposedly merry and attractive artistic tour.” The singers earned a mere pittance: “What the choristers earned during the tour was barely enough for a string or two of onions that were comparatively cheap everywhere, so the choristers rushed to buy them so as not to come home completely empty-handed” (Sept. 2).
THE FINAL CONCERT
The choir gave its final performance in Romen on Aug. 28. Vasylchenko made the following entry in his diary: “This was the last concert of the First Traveling Choir, and it may be justly called the crowning point of this artistically brilliant tour” (Aug. 28). In spite of all the conflicts and troubles that emerged among the choristers and between the choirmaster and the administration, it was a brilliant tour.
The last entry in Vasylchenko’s diary is dated Sept. 2.
Although the writer gave a detailed account of every day of this long tour, he once blurted out to his wife, “You could write a book about each concert, but instead, you have to drop just a few lines in a notebook. You’ll never see or hear this anywhere else. There are ruins and enemy gangs everywhere, but here you have a folk song that shines its way like a sunbeam into people’s hearts.”
The tour helped to form Vasylchenko as a writer. Later, he based a number of fiction pieces, including the short story “Famine,” on his two diaries. Ukrainian folk songs formed the basis of the plot of many novellas and legends.
On Sept. 3 the board of Dniprosoyuz’s noncommercial branches resolved “to consider the First Traveling Choir disbanded as of Sept. 1 this year.” “The First Traveling Choir thus ended its short but colorful life, when it streaked like a meteor across Ukraine’s sky, only to be smashed by the barbaric measures of the cooperative institution’s cultural and educational department,” Vasylchenko wrote.
The Dniprosoyuz Second Traveling Choir, headed by Kyrylo Stetsenko and Oleksandr Chapkovsky, was founded, and the new ensemble incorporated a considerable number of the original choir’s singers.
On Sept. 8 the Second Traveling Choir went on a tour of Right-Bank Ukraine, which lasted until Nov. 10. In late October the choristers arrived in Tulchyn, where they met Yastrubetsky’s old friend Mykola Leontovych, who attended the concert featuring some of his works. After the tour the Second Traveling Choir also ceased to exist, and Dniprosoyuz’s cultural and educational department was disbanded.
At the same time, a new choir was formed at Dniprosoyuz on the basis of the first two ensembles. The new choir became part of the system of state-run artistic institutions under the jurisdiction of the Kyiv Gubernia Department of Political Education. In the spring of 1921 the choir was reorganized into a traveling company called the Ukrainian State Traveling Chorus “Dumka.”
Eighty-five years later, the homeland of Lysenko and Leontovych is again rife with “rowdy and sycophantic songs,” while Stepan Vasylchenko, the most readable writer after Taras Shevchenko in 1920s Ukraine, is known only to a narrow circle of specialists. His works, as well as those of the majority of Ukrainian classics, are a pro forma subject in school, although their plots are still important today: ruined villages, impoverished peasants, and a culture in decline.
Meanwhile, the world-famous Dumka Chorus, which gave hundreds of concerts all over Ukraine in the 1920s, now travels on tour, mainly abroad.
