Natalka and Yevhen were tied up with invisible spiritual threads. They left an indelible trace in the life of each other: he was tormented with her refusal and she with having caused him such an acute pain.
THE POET REJECTED LYRICISM AS UNNECESSARY AND SAW GENUINE BEAUTY IN FORCE
Natalka, an 18-year-old girl, left her native land in the fall of 1920, a fatal year for Yevhen Malaniuk. Concerned about the destiny of Ukraine, they would both carry the love of this country for decades on end. But it was not only patriotism that bound the two uncommon individuals. A feeling, too strong to be called love, flared up in them and never died throughout their lifetime. In all probability, it was passion on the part of Malaniuk and nostalgia on the part of Livytska.
He was always a ladies’ man. Handsome, manlike, athletic, six-feet-tall, Malaniuk kept falling in love and knew how to cast a spell on the fairer sex. In the distant 1918, in Kyiv, the poet was briefly in love with the daughter of a tsarist general. In his youth, the poet’s father had robbed that general of his fiancee, the would-be mother of Yevhen. So Malaniuk the junior repeated his father’s “exploit” and fell in love with the “unattainable” girl. He also went through many battlefield romances, when true love, passion, life and death were closely intertwined into an unbreakable whole.
A tsarist army lieutenant and machine-gun crew leader on the Western Front, Malaniuk distinguished himself with extraordinary courage. In the Civil War he served as a company commander in the Ukrainian Army and then as aide-de-camp to Vasyl Tiutiunnyk, the commander of the UNR Armed Forces. After the victory of the Red Army he spent a few months in an internment camp in Poland, where he also composed his first poetic lines. Both enemies and friends of Malaniuk called him “a bristling wolf with a singed hide, who howls at a black steppe.” He really was a wolf, and he was hunted like a mortally dangerous predator. After World War II, the USSR Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky demanded that the Allies extradite the “dangerous war criminal Malaniuk,” although the poet had not taken up arms after the Civil War.
The “iron poet” rejected lyricism as unnecessary — in man-to-woman relationships, in writing, and in politics. Malaniuk saw beauty in force. He dreamed of a Roman-type ironclad Ukrainian empire. But he dreamed pragmatically: “Ukraine must become as indispensable as pants — only then will it rise. And as long as it is a comedy, an ornament, and a song, it will not exist.” Many Ukrainian patriots cannot forgive the poet these words even now.
IN EXILE HE DREAMED OF HIS SWEETHEART’S HANDS
A true, deep, exciting, and dramatic feeling suddenly swooped over the poet in 1924. Fate decreed that Yevhen, a student at the engineering faculty of the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in the Czech town of Podebrady, met and fell in love with a young poetess, Natalka Livytska. The tall, slender, and handsome young man instantly drew the attention of an ecstatic girl.
She was born and raised at a hamlet near the village of Helmiaziv, now Zolotonosha district, Cherkasy oblast. Natalka’s father had been a minister in the UNR government, so after the defeat of the Ukrainian army the Livytskys fled to Warsaw and then moved to Prague. That was the beginning of a hard life in exile.
Natalka had and often visited many friends in Podebrady. The girl met Malaniuk in rather a romantic way. Livytska once came to relax at a party, where Ukrainian emigres talked freely, recited poems, sang and danced. Youth remained youth even during a hard life in a foreign land.
When Natalka was chatting with a friend, Lesia Krat, Malaniuk suddenly approached them and whispered something into Lesia’s ear. Livytska herself later recalled the first meeting with the well-known poet as follows: “Lesia suddenly says to me: ‘Natusia, give me your flower,’ I immediately took the flower out of my hair and gave it to her.
Then I was suddenly surprised to see the flower travel to her interlocutor. He inserted it into the loop of his jacket and thanked me with a low bow.”
Livytska could not resist Malaniuk’s poetic gift and masculine charm. They established a warm relationship. He became the most attentive listener to and an unsparing critic of her first poems. He would take her to all kinds of literary and artistic soirees and often introduce her as “our Anna Akhmatova.” The embarrassed girl, crazed about Akhmatova at the time, smiled as her face turned red. At first they were seen as just friends. But the friendship of Malaniuk and Livytska immediately reached the unheard-of heights of love. Yet their feelings followed different paths: while Yevhen was head over heels in the whirlwind of passion, Natalka was, for some reason, afraid of this fury and confined herself to a light flirtation and cordial communication.
In the first letter to his sweetheart, Malaniuk confesses that, like a teenager in love, he awaits an unusual and magic fairytale of love: “You know very well what a spring you aroused in me — cherries are blossoming in my heart…” He dreams of his sweetheart’s hands, emptiness abandoned him, “and April ran riot.” At the same time he writes a poetic declaration of love, in which he compares his only and the world’s best woman to the first sprout of spring. Yevhen wrote to her in simple but very penetrating terms: “You, my little child with a Polovtsian shape of eyes.”
INSTEAD OF “FURIOUS” MALANIUK LIVYTSKA CHOSE “QUIET” KHOLODNY
Yet the shower of love letters really scared the young Natalka. The poet dreams of and looks forward to an intimate date with trepidation. But the girl is not exactly rushing to give an affirmative answer and evades the contact. For this reason, Malaniuk’s heart is more and more often wrung with pain and loneliness. He fears that someone else will take his sweetheart from him.
At last Natalka dares tell Yevhen the bitter truth. She finds him interesting as a close friend and a talented poet, but she has no true feelings for him. She frankly wrote this to him in a letter. This frankness of Livytska turned out to be a terrible tragedy for Malaniuk.
So the passionate love brought both of them neither happiness nor consolation: he was tormented with the indifference of his beloved Natalka and she felt it extremely difficult to say “no” to Yevhen because the girl’s heart had already been captured by a serious and steady feeling for the talented artist Petro Kholodny Jr., her future husband. The poetess would spend about 65 years of her lifetime with him and survive her husband by 15 years, ending her earthly journey in 2005 in Canada.
Malaniuk was on the verge of committing suicide, but the aristocratic pride of a poet and a soldier kept him from leaving this life so mindlessly. Seeking oblivion and perhaps trying to find solace in a woman’s embrace, the next year in Prague Yevhen married a Poltava region-born medicine student, Zoia Ravych. She was wildly in love with Malaniuk, but they never found marital bliss.
The poetess Olena Teliha, who knew very well all the details of Malaniuk’s and Livytska’s dramatic love because she was a close friend of Natalka’s, once said inadvertently that Zoia Ravych was no match for a “furious Malaniuk.” Olena told Natalka that such men “are afraid of wise women who can protect them on their pedestal,” so they choose “little gray mice” as wives. Yet some researchers believe that the well-known poetess said this out of jealousy because she also admired Yevhen and his pulsing poetry.
Five years later Malaniuk’s first marriage broke up. Zoia soon married a quieter man and was happy with him, while the poet embarked again on a journey in search of a happier destiny.
His next wife was Bogumila Savycka, a Czech. He met her in Warsaw, where the woman worked at the Czechoslovak embassy. They married in 1933, and their son, Bohdan, was born the next year. The family moved to the wife’s home country. Yevhen lived with Bogumila until the spring of 1945, when the Red Army occupied Czechoslovakia. He promptly escaped for fear of being arrested. Then he stayed in West Germany and Bogumila and her son in Prague. Malaniuk could not see his family for 17 years.
Bogumila tried several times to illegally cross the German border, only to be apprehended by border guards. They saw each other again in 1963 in Warsaw in the twilight of their lives. The date was very brief because they were deathly afraid of the KGB. They were cautious enough not to bring their son over. The poet saw him two years later, when his wife was no longer living.
THE LAST ENCOUNTER ON THE THRESHOLD OF DEATH
Yet the iron poet’s flame was hard to die. Even when Livytska became Kholodna and Malaniuk married Zoia Ravych, he continued writing letters in which he still called his Natalka “my dear and beloved.”
Malaniuk carried his pure, serene, albeit tragic, love throughout his lifetime. In 1971, looking back on the past, Natalka Livytska-Kholodna confessed to readers:
That was an inimitable time / Like the poetry of Malaniuk, / And it was not said to the end / Like a poem without a line…
Yevhen and Natalka last saw each other in late 1967 in New York a few months before the poet’s death. The two not-so-young people with a glorious past, in which the old sweet feeling was still smoldering, but without a future met to mark a sad date — the 25th anniversary of Olena Teliha’s violent death.
The poet looked reserved and did not speak much. Maybe, the ardent love of his youth had sunk into oblivion. Or, maybe, Malaniuk still bore an old grudge against Livytska with whom he could have been happy. The lonely gray-haired man just kept silent. And that’s all. As if he was on the threshold of death.
The poet was immensely popular among Ukrainian emigrants in the US. Friends knew that Yevhen liked apples and fried eggs with fatback. He would also consume spoonfuls of honey. As a true aristocrat, he also honored the cognac Le Courvoisier and smoked the pipe. On the evening of February 16, 1968, he was about to go to a theater. But Malaniuk was found dead in the afternoon in his modest dwelling. During the funeral, his writer colleagues cried and recited his poems.
When Livytska-Kholodna learned about his death, she told, perhaps for the first time, the truth about her tangled relationship with Malaniuk in the poem For Whom the Bell Tolls:
Somebody died, somebody who is alien, / Neither a brother nor a lover / And there were so many curtains between us!
Maybe, if this woman herself had not hung those curtains, they would have been happy. Who knows…
