I am like a stork that slowly walks in a vast field, bending to peck, picking whimsical word patterns embellished with the flowers of songs, proverbs, folk sayings, puns, anecdotes, and miniature short stories. I raise my beak and marvel at the clear blue skies; I am mesmerized by the rich harvest grown by this woman, who is deeply in love with folk imagery.
The Ukrainian world is captivated by Nina Matvienko’s vocal talent and, for the most part, does not even suspect that there is also the treasure of her letters, poems, diaries, dialogs, memoirs, and notes on concerts tours across the world. It takes special talent to unfold before the people the large black-and-white scroll of one’s soul, revealing with such striking clarity and sincerity the joys of childhood, subsequent worries and misfortunes, including a family tragedy caused by her father’s drunken rage, eventually obliterated by the joy of spiritual unity of one’s own family. Beautiful scenery, the magic of communication with fellow humans, dramatically eloquent description of one’s life experiences, the echo of national history, love of folk music reflecting the people’s tragic and heroic, downtrodden and happy destiny, her experience of folk songs as the destiny of her own child — all of this and much more is found in Nina Matvienko’s book Oi, vyoriu nyvku shyrokuiu (I’ll Plow a Broad Furrow).
Preparing the manuscript for publication, the Ivan Honchar Museum, a center of Ukrainian folk culture, sought to use the “golden key” of Nina Matvienko’s voice and creativity to open the treasure trove of Ukrainian culture. The charms of her gift of eloquence are harmoniously combined with the magic of her songs, with the keen awareness of the destiny of every song as a reflection of the historical and cultural destiny of her native people, her sons and daughters.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian folk songs form an inexhaustible source for understanding national and local history. They help perceive the dreamworld of folk oral art and imagery-rich thinking, where all this comes alive through melodies. Such harmony of text and melody as one finds in Ukrainian folk songs is an aesthetic rarity on the global scale. The fact that the people’s memory preserves such organically united lyrics and melodies and such masterpieces of folk creativity is proof of the Ukrainian people’s unique talent.
Matvienko has succeeded in sharing with people her natural gift, her keen perception of lyrics and music, and her incredible dedication, so much so that her renditions now live a life of their own; they are inseparable from the singer and many a listener will simply refuse to accept them if performed by anyone else.
She vowed to herself: “Nina must be a song, she must…” She visualized this transformation into a song, the transmigration of her soul to a song as a divine act of spiritual incarnation. Matvienko was very anxious about such moments of identification with songs, wondering if her heart and that of the song would beat as one.
She was saddened by the inattentive audience during a concert on the Soviet Army Day at the Ukoopspilka (Ukrainian Association of Co-operative Societies) — not by the lack of attention to herself but to her songs, fearing they might take it as an insult: “My song innocently huddled up to me, giving me a loving embrace, consoling me, and suddenly I felt ashamed of myself. How could I ever distrust it or doubt it? We held each other tight and our hearts started beating in unison, becoming one.”
This self-dedication to the Ukrainian song reaches the level of lofty sacrifice, that sweet spiritual self-crucifixion for the sake of the song that is for Nina Matvienko her cri de coeur, a confession to her beloved people, and a sea of love in which her soul luxuriates. In many of her letters, especially those addressed to Roman Didula, in her diary, in all these short stories, sketches, and observations born of pure heart, one finds breath-taking emotional saturation, sparkling eloquence, and refined style. The reason is that Matvienko is so fond of marveling at things, words, overheard dialogs, humorous situations, singling out interesting characters from the drab routine of daily life and presenting them for public judgment.
Matvienko masterfully portrayed Anatolii Avdievsky in black and white, via rehearsals. “There is no other person in the world with such incredible patience when explaining a song and its melody and revealing its emotional charge. There is none other like him!” Matvienko wrote on April 11, 1995. Somehow she managed to produce a verbatim account of Avdievsky’s peevish exchanges with the members of the choir, the threats, entreaties, words of praise, and moans of despair of this truly brilliant creator of vocal masterpieces performed by a choir, a body that is so big and hard to organize to produce a harmonious performance!
Her notes let the reader peek behind the stage and glimpse at the tempestuous world of rehearsals that last for hours on end — and all this standing, until the capillaries in your legs are ready to burst! — and marvel at the backbreaking labor of giving life to a harmonious song; it is like letting a bird fly into the sky, as every song is born of sweet suffering followed by tears of joy as you watch it soar high above.
Matvienko views her mission of reviving the spirit of folk songs with a nearly religious belief in the miracle-working ability of words and tunes to charge people emotionally. She is convinced that songs can fill social sentiments with the spiritual strength of confidence in the nation, mobilize the people’s spirit for tremendous achievements, and consolidate the nation with their “volcanic force.”
In fact, Ukrainian folk songs are not the only ones to possess such an ideological and spiritual potential. Matvienko is effectively mastering both classical and modern works by professional composers. She rejoices and marvels at the remarkable capacities of her own voice. She regards the talented Oleh Kiva’s Symphony No.3 to Shevchenko’s lyrics as “a great repentance before the great Shevchenko’s poetry” and adds: “Today I am the happiest woman on the face of my music planet, which is my State, and its name is Beauty and Faith — this is my Ukraine. I am basking in the melodies collected by the father of national poetry, Taras Shevchenko. It was not he but his soul, the tears of triumph, the sparks of the Divine rainbow that moved the earth and heavens, when the dead, the living, and those yet unborn raised their eyes to the Lord. It was Kiva’s Symphony of Love.”
In her diary entries hastily scribbled on board a jet or train, in a line to the doctor’s reception room, or after putting the children to bed — in her poems, stories, and letters there is a burning desire to share her emotions, feelings of disappointment, wrath, and mourning — the multitude of creative passions and daily worries of a woman who wants to “touch the iconic Song.” Matvienko’s perception of songs is in many respects rooted in the oral and musical heritage of Polissia that has not lost its special meaning for Ukrainian ethnic genesis and national culture, even though it suffered heavily from the Chornobyl disaster.
Not coincidentally, the Polish Academician, ethnologist, and linguist Kazimierz Moszy ski wrote to Filaret Kolessa, a celebrated folklorist, philologist, and expert on folk music, on Feb. 28, 1932: “You won’t believe how much I am worried that the central part of Polissia remains terra incognita for musicologists. Regrettably, I am not versed enough in musicology to assess what I heard in Polissia, but I love music and I know lots of Polish folk songs, Ukrainian and Russian ethnic ones, etc., yet the Polish songs I’ve just mentioned, in particular some vesnianky (spring songs) and Christmas carols, left me with unforgettable impressions; somehow they sounded as if they were especially unusual and very ancient.”
The Polish scholar invited his Ukrainian colleague to go to Polissia for several weeks and record the texts and melodies performed by individual singers and duets. The two scholars recorded songs not in Matvienko’s native Zhytomyr oblast, but in what is today Minsk oblast in Belarus, bordering on Brest oblast. It was thanks to the energetic quest of the noted folklorist and ethnologist S.Y. Hrytsia that a collection of folk songs and instrumental pieces, recorded by Kolessa and Moszy ski in September 1932, was found, reconstructed in a scholarly manner, and published in 1995.
This collection of folk songs recorded in the part of Polissia along the left bank of the Prypiat and its estuaries has been mentioned here for a reason. The songs it contains are convincing proof that the Ukrainian ethnos dominated in that Ukrainian-Belarusian borderland. Kolessa compared Polish and related Ukrainian and Belarusian tunes, and used several thousand such songs to demonstrate the overwhelming domination of Ukrainian elements in Polissia’s folk music.
In her book Matvienko offers songs and music from her own repertoire: over 250 folk songs and works by Ukrainian composers, including various traditional ritual songs, wedding songs and funeral lamentations, lullabies, humorous and dancing songs, psalms, historical, social, romantic, and family songs. If one compares the songs from Matvienko’s repertoire to those recorded by Kolessa and Moszy ski, a remarkable similarity of the texts and melodies will become instantly obvious. This evidences the unique ethnic cultural environment of Polissia with its tradition of vocal improvisation.
For Matvienko, creative improvisation in terms of text and melody is an intrinsic need when it comes to identification with the song and mastering it, as well as building an affinity with the text and conveying the message with her voice. This feature of Matvienko’s singing has a deeply rooted tradition. Kolessa was perhaps the first researcher to trace the connection between the song and the performer and explain the transformation of Polissia’s language of songs, which is caused by the old tradition of individualizing the creative material, an ability to live rather than perform a song.
What makes Matvienko such an original, inimitable singer is the way she uses her voice to master the creative matter of the text and the melody as a single, inseparable whole, reproducing it in both the words and the melody, individualizing every song by her masterful vocal improvisations.
She wrote in her diary at 1 a.m. on Jan. 16, 1986: “I want to be a song. I realized that there is nothing you can tell about it and no sentimental words will reveal it. The golden key to its inner world is in the sage words and melodies — depending on who sings and with what skill. Oh yes, the song is a very sensitive mother and her old age and death depend on her children. Sometimes, as I listened for the umpteenth time to Maryna, Oi, haiu, haiu, zelen rozmaiu, or Leontovych’s Baida, I felt that no words are needed — the young fellows’ mustaches would start growing, the maidens’ breasts would swell, mothers’ bosom would be dripping with milk, and fathers would grab their swords. Oh, that honey-bearing wheat! No, better still, the song is the tiller’s grain, oil for a painter, love for the tear-wetted lips, glory and recognition for me, and for my people — a decoration in its victory over age-long humiliation.”
For several centuries servitude kept the Ukrainian nation in the shadows of civilization, but the soul of the people was not eclipsed by the shadow. The historical existence of this nation was constantly illuminated by its inexhaustible cultural and spiritual sources, among which folk songs provided perhaps the most powerful boost to the national spirit. Matvienko perceives Ukrainian songs by color, smell, and touch — as though it were a living being. She lives by songs and relishes in the song-making process, in her affinity with the song, opening for it her own soul and for the soul of the Ukrainian people after the shadows of servitude.
Mykola Zhulynsky is an academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NANU) and director of the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature.
