Some people are favored by fate which takes them steadily up the ladder of career, personal and family well-being, finally settling in secure old age. Others are blacklisted, doomed to daily toil, oppressive solitude, constantly and bitterly pained at heart...
This story is about a woman who was anything but favored by fate. She died 44 years ago and was buried at the cemetery of a village to which she had dedicated almost 25 years, a village where she is not likely to be forgotten. Her surviving first students are past eighty, yet they still recall her with tender words, telling their grandchildren who will take their grandchildren to pay homage to her modest grave.
Varvara Dovzhenko, yes, Dovzhenko, the first wife of Oleksandr Dovzhenko, his first love who not destined to become his lifelong companion.
She was born in 1900, in Smila, a village in Cherkasy oblast. The family was large: six daughters and a son. The father died early, leaving his wife and small children. Varvara was raised by her mother’s relatives in Zhytomyr. There she studied a high school (gymnasium) for girls and after graduation worked as a teacher of natural history and French at the city’s preparatory high school. Oleksandr Dovzhenko, then 20, got a teaching job there also, after graduating from the Hlukhiv Teachers’ Institute. They met and fell in love.
Oleksandr Dovzhenko and Varvara Krylova started living together in the spring of 1917. That summer he went to Kyiv to find a (better) job and visited with his parents in Sosnytsia, recuperating after an unsuccessful surgery in Zhytomyr. He swam in the Desna, helped his father mow hay, but his heart stayed in Zhytomyr, with Varvara. He sent her tender impassioned letters, “...you are sleeping peacefully, my little girl, maybe seeing me in your dreams. I love you most when you sleep. At such moments you seem not my wife but my charming baby. In my mind I kiss your tender warm hands ever so quietly. 05:30 a.m. Yours Oleksandr.”
The young couple was separated for a long while by stormy revolutionary and war events. Both had to go through a number of ordeals. In 1921, Dovzhenko left Kyiv for Kharkiv to work for the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. He was appointed consular officer at the Soviet Ukrainian trade representation in Berlin. Now he could take Varvara with him. He spent a year in the consulate, attending lectures at the School of Fine Arts of the Berlin Academy; he wanted to be a professional artist. They had their marriage legally sealed by the Soviet Ukrainian representation registrar on July 17, 1923.
They settled in Kharkiv and Oleksandr promptly took up journalism, while Varvara decided to polish her dramatic skills. She had taken ballet lessons at a studio in Berlin and took a drama course in Kharkiv. In 1925, while rowing a boat on a river, she hit her knee with an oar, causing an inflammation, followed by an inaccurate diagnosis and a course of treatment resulting in the development of a grave bone disease. Dovzhenko took her to Yalta and Odesa for treatment. There he painted a great deal and made his first films. One of them, The Diplomatic Pouch, brought the young director recognition and publicity. Zvenyhora won him international acclaim, and was shown in Holland, Belgium, France, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, England, Turkey, US, and Greece. Critics across the world agreed that the motion picture was “a great Soviet cinematic achievement.”
Varvara’s treatment did not overcome the disease. Her legs constantly ached and she had to walk with a cane. When she learned that Oleksandr had an affair with a young actress, Yuliya Solntseva, she decided to leave him becans; she did not want to be an obstacle. She wrote a farewell letter, explaining her decision:
“My Only Love,
“I am saying farewell; I am leaving never to return. I understand everything. First and above all, we can no longer live together. You are stepping into great art; you are dedicating your entire self to it. You need a friend in that new life of yours, you need a woman that will inspire you. You must have someone beside you that will comfort you when you come home tired, totally exhausted. You must not be pained at heart watching your wife limp around with a cane. Oh no, you mustn’t!
“Don’t worry about me, my beloved. I am leaving you fully conscious of what I am doing. I do not want my infirmity to harm your soul. Otherwise you would not be able to remain your creative self and work the way you really want to.
“You will remain in my heart, memories, thoughts, and dreams till my dying day. I will follow your graceful progress. I believe, I am certain that you will create a great many beautiful, virtuous, and lasting works.
“You have fallen in love, Oleksandr — believe me, I hope she becomes your true friend and your inspiration; I do, from the bottom of my aching heart, casting away all jealousy and pain. There is only one little thing I want to ask. I want to live under your surname.
“Farewell. May you live long and happily, blessed by the Earth, Sky, and Water!
“Forever yours,
“Varvara Dovzhenko.”
Indeed, he would create Land, Shchors, Aerograd [a.k.a. Air City and Frontier], Poem of the Sea, Arsenal, Michurin, Chronicle of Flaming Year. Then there would be World War II and his film Ukraine in Flames, followed by work at the Kyiv film studios and the apple orchard planted by him in back in 1929-31. Critics would argue over his productions and his films would conquer the world. Experts would compare his works to masterpieces created by Raphael and Michelangelo. He would become a genius of international acclaim.
Varvara, meanwhile, would bend under blows of fate.
At first she stayed with her sister and her family in the village of Hlibivka, then with her younger sister Lisa in Yevpatoriya. In 1936, she moved to Demydiv (then Dymerske, currently in Vyzhhorod district), with her little son. She taught German and botany at school, living in a small room on the premises.
Oleksandra Vasylieva, a Demydiv schoolteacher who was Varvara’s student in 1936 and her colleague after the war, recalls:
“We saw a dark-haired strikingly beautiful woman enter the classroom. Her eyes were shining and so kind it was some time before we noticed her limp.”
She was so talented! She taught several different subjects. Under her able guidance experimental plantings were made near the school. She and the children grew vegetables and berries. Teachers from all over Kyiv oblast would visit. Varvara played the piano and guitar, she had a beautiful voice, she sang and danced. Her school life received a fresh powerful impetus, both during and after classes. Now there were a choir, a dance and a drama group, with rehearsals often lasting into the evening. She was always where people were and she dedicated all her time to the children.
She had a son, Vadym Petrovych Chazov. His father was a man who loved her but whom she never married.
No one ever saw her cry or give way to despair, just as no one knew how desperately alone she felt. She remained deeply and hopelessly in love with Dovzhenko. Her son would find in her archives evidence of his mother’s profound personal tragedy. She would spend nights writing letters to her only sweetheart, never mailing a single one. Indeed, they met secretly on several occasions. There is note in Dovzhenko’s hand: “How strange life is! You must be immeasurably superior to me. Sashko [dim. of Oleksandr], Kyiv, 1932.”
Vadym’s birth certificate reads that he was born in 1935. After his mother’s sudden death in late September 1959, in faraway Ivano- Frankivsk (she wrote that they had to meet and discuss something very important), Vadym collected documents about his mother’s family and found evidence in Yevpatoriya’s archives that he had been actually born there on August 22, 1933.
A secret jealously kept by that extraordinary woman that no one is likely to ever solve, the more so that her son is no longer among the living. After finishing school in Demydiv, he studied at an art college in Kosiv, later was appointed principal of an art school in Ivano-Frankivsk. He was a gifted painter-like his father? His talent is evidenced by two pictures still displayed at the Demydiv grade school. After many years of strenuous effort by teachers and students, a school museum was opened in 2002.
Everyone who knew Vadym says he looked very much like Oleksandr Dovzhenko and the resemblance is evident in Vadym’s photo portrait. Then why should his mother change his birth date? Answer is found in the letters she never sent Dovzhenko:
“My Love, I shall never ask you to return to me. You are free from me forever, my darling. May your life be easy, free from all worries on my account. May your eyes radiate joy and happiness. There is only one thing you will have to forgive me — my passionate uncontrollable desire to talk to you in my letters.
“Do not leave me! Kill me, trample me to death, but do not leave me, someone savage is howling inside me.
“Oh, Sashko, my only love. My hands reach out for you, my heart is throbbing, aching to beat near yours. Can you hear me, Sashko? Sashko! I treasure your name, I can hear it in the endless sound of the surf. My sweet Sashko.”
Neither desperate loneliness, nor war ordeals or postwar misery could make her forget the name. After the war she settled in an old village home at the end of Demydiv, once owned by a prosperous farmer. She knew what cold and hunger were all about. She had to keep her home in one piece, she kept a piglet and when it grew and time came to slaughter it, she would ask the people next door and run away lest she hear its scream. She would then bring some fresh meat to them, as they would on such occasions to her.
Oleksandr Dovzhenko lived in Moscow at the time. But what kind of life was it? It was a struggle to survive. He desperately wanted to be in Ukraine, but the authorities would not permit him, as evidenced by SBU archives. The magazine Dnipro carried a large collection of such documents, compiled by SBU Colonel Vyacheslav Popyk and titled “In the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-NKGB-KGB Limelight (A Documentary Story based on the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Case in the Archives)” (1995, No. 9-10). Excerpts from files marked top secret and for your eyes only. “Dovzhenko, Oleksandr Petrovych, born 1894 in Sosnytsia, Chernihiv oblast, non-party, post-secondary education, of Ukrainian kulak parentage, citizen of the USSR, director at Kyiv film studios, an active Ukrainian nationalist.”
The classified file was opened 83 years ago. Subject: an individual who simply loved his native land. Eventually, new documents were added in the case, later transferred to the secret archives. Now his every step, every word were closely watched, mentioned in secret reports and put on record in the column “Re: Conduct and Moods of Film Director Dovzhenko, Oleksandr Petrovych.”
One can only try to imagine the tragedy of a man forced from his native land, going through the motions of living in Moscow, capital of the hateful empire, suffocating in “honorary exile,” dying slowly, day by day. The following are entries in his 1945-46 diaries: “Kh. and B. [Khrushchev and Beriya — Author] did not allow me to go to Kyiv, so I am a Ukrainian outcast. The punishment I am meted out by great people acting out of pettiness is even more severe than a sentence being shot.
“I want to write being with my people. Why can’t I live in Ukraine? It is hard for me. Why should I live? Watching them bury me alive over the years.”
“I am already dead. I am forgetting my mother tongue. I write in separation from my people, away from my mother and my father’s grave, away from everything I loved more than anything else.”
“I am a son of Ukraine. Why did they take away my mother?”
His desire to return to Ukraine was such that he began to dream of returning home every night. He wrote in his diary on January 14, 1946: “This morning I flew to Ukraine, but my wings broke, and I fell. There was a severe pain in my chest. I wept as I fell. I tried to take off again, I started singing a Ukrainian ballad and my tremulous voice made me cry again.” February 3, 1946: “I flew to Ukraine last night and tonight. I could not fly far enough. My wings broke on the way and I fell into the water and began to drown. I gathered all my strength to break surface, reaching with my hands to grab something and finding nothing. I shouted, and no one heard me because I had no voice.” 1954: “Little birds, dear birds, lift me on your wings, carry me to the sun. No birds are flying over to pick me up, only sorrow flows down the Desna, settling on the oaks. Quietly, touching the ground with the tips of my fingers, I take off and fly to you, over rivers and lakes.”
There is so much sorrow, grief, and suffering in these highly poetic lines. What a pure and high tragedy of this brilliant son of the Ukrainian people, planned by Father Stalin, implemented by Khrushchev, carried out sadistically to the end.
Oleksandr Dovzhenko died in November 1956, aged 62. Yuliya Solntseva had sent a messenger to Varvara Dovzhenko in Demydiv, asking her formal consent to divorce. She replied, “I will if that’s what Sashko wants.” When she learned about his death she did not go to Moscow to attend the funeral, although some of her colleagues thought she should. Instead, she went to the forest, alone, and stayed there all day. Her closest friends found her exhausted with an injured hand and brought her home, trying to comfort her as best they could. She went to Moscow in the spring of 1957 and visited her one true love’s grave with a bouquet.
She outlived him by less than three years. The residents of Demydiv and neighboring villages where Varvara Dovzhenko had taught their children before settling in Demydiv buried her in late September and mourned her as though she were their closest relative.
Much has been said and is still being said about Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s tragedy. Nothing has been said about the tragedy of this obscure yet extraordinary woman who loved him truly and selflessly since she was 16. Nothing has been said about her over the four decades since her passing. True, she has not left any works or brilliant discoveries. She presented herself the world. But one must agree that such personalities emerge like sunbeams, the light of love that nothing can overcome. Her life, her love, her sacred dedication, even her little white lie are worthy of being immortalized by writers, artists, and filmmakers.
