Abstract
Despite the tense geopolitical situation in interwar Eastern Europe, Ukrainian litterateurs at first elided the physical and ideological boundaries guarded by state authorities on either side of the Polish-Soviet border. Cultural leaders on the far right and far left, separated by a chasm of fear and loathing, nevertheless read andresponded to one another’s works. In some cases, representatives of the two sides shared common influences, beliefs, and aesthetic ideals, and even took the risk of signalling their admiration for the theories and creative accomplishments of sworn enemies in the opposing camp, favourably invoking “foreigners” to serve opposing agendas. Amid the relative openness, fluidity, and experimentalism that characterised the first (i.e. pre-Stalinist) half of the interwar period in Ukraine, few regarded nationalism and socialism, or even Bolshevism, as mutually exclusive concepts. Rather, there were synergies and points of contact between the two. Examining the public interaction of the Communist writer Mykola Khvyl’ovyy (1893–1933) and the nationalist literary critic Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), I argue that the Ukrainian cultural and political ferment of the 1920s was transgressive in two senses. Firstly, it cut across the political boundaries of party membership and citizenship that divided Ukrainians into Soviet and non-Soviet, socialist and nationalist. Secondly, it defied expectations of ideological purity and loyalty at a time of growing but not yet insurmountable hostility. The result was a symbiosis of right and left-wing agitation, in both Soviet Ukraine and south-eastern Poland, for a revolutionary, anticolonial, and modernist Ukrainian literature.
Highlights
Malgré les tensions géopolitiques au sein de l’Europe de l’Est de l’entre-deux-guerres, les écrivains ukrainiens ont initialement échappé aux frontières physiques et idéologiques, défendues par les autorités de l’État, des deux côtés de la frontière polono-soviétique
The interwar period looms large in contemporary Ukraine
Given the ubiquity of memory politics and propaganda based on these events, and the ways in which they have been weaponised on both sides of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, scholarly treatments of the interwar years can scarcely avoid being implicated in present-day political debates
Summary
The interwar period looms large in contemporary Ukraine. Considering the parallels between and the frequent invocation of this era in current political, cultural, and scholarly discourse makes sense. This narrative developed among the post-war Ukrainian diaspora of Europe and North America, many of whom were veterans of the nationalist movement in western Ukraine/south-eastern Poland, in particular the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).2 Representatives of this camp tend to dismiss claims that the OUN and UPA were fascist organisations as rehashed Russian-Communist disinformation, rather praising them as the champions of a popular liberation struggle that lacked any totalitarian elements, and opposed Nazism as well as Stalinism (В’ятрович 2011; Квіт 2013). Lviv’s Ukrainian readers across the political spectrum followed interwar Soviet Ukraine’s literary scene and press in closely, consuming imported pro-Communist publications such as Chervonyy Shlyakh [Red Path], Bil’shovyk Ukrayiny [The Bolshevik of Ukraine], Pluh [The Plough], and Hart [Tempering]
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