“Poison of Thirst” and “Poison of Suppressed Hatred” (Panteleimon Kulish on Yevhen Malaniuk’s Scales of State Formation)

Abstract

The paper focuses on Y. Malaniuk’s search for the national-state criteria of evaluating the activities of prominent figures in the national history, in particular, the classics of the Ukrainian literature. Most clearly this issue was raised in the article “On the Anniversary of Kulish”, written in 1947 in the DP camps. Y. Malaniuk criticized a number of fundamental scales in interpreting P. Kulish’s social activity and creative work, which were used by such critics as S. Yefremov, D. Dontsov, Yu. Lypa, and V. Petrov. Y. Malaniuk was skeptical about attempts to find a ‘unifi ed universal formula’ that would cover ‘all Kulish’ emphasizing his ‘vacillations’ and ‘treasons’. At the same time, in those attempts Y. Malaniuk saw the subconscious belief of such researchers that P. Kulish still held the ‘integrity’ of some kind. On the contrary, for those who assess P. Kulish’s personality Y. Malaniuk suggested taking into account not ‘small’, but ‘considerable facts’ of his great social life and creative work. In Malaniuk’s opinion, P. Kulish’s entire activity was ‘state-forming’, and he himself was a politically conscious ‘cultural activist’. Even when his words sounded as disclosure, in the sonnet “Kulish”, Y. Malaniuk emphasized the writer’s “poison of thirst” for the national statehood. Instead, in the writings of some Soviet scholars-emigrants, among which were the researchers of the works by P. Kulish, in particular, V. Petrov, Y. Malaniuk felt ‘infernal poisonous breath of suppressed hatred, devilish lie’ ‘disguised under scholarly forms’, which was aimed at political demoralization of Ukrainians. Y. Malaniuk urged to reveal it ‘slowly reading’ the publications of some critics whom he considered to be the agents of the Kremlin influence.