Turning the pages back... January 10, 1983 (01/09/00)

Turning the pages back...

January 10, 1983

Yevhen Shabliovsky was one of the Stalinist hacks and janissaries who helped keep Ukrainian culture in Russia's thrall and distorted by socialist realism for two-thirds of the past century.

Born on April 27, 1906, in the village of Kamin-Koshyrskyi in Volyn, he was an adolescent when revolution swept his country and studied at what had been Kyiv University until 1931.

The very next year he published his first academic work, "Proletarska Revoliutsiya i Shevchenko" (The Proletarian Revolution and Shevchenko), which was the first attempt to treat Taras Shevchenko's life and works according to official ideology - as that of a revolutionary democrat and student of Russian critics such as Vissarion Belinskyi (the man who virulently attacked "The Kobzar" in 1842 and denounced the poet after his arrest in 1847) and Nikolai Chernyshevskyi (author of the influential "Chto Delat" [What is to be Done]).

In 1933, as the famine raged and the attack on Ukraine's intelligentsia was in full swing, Dmytro Bahalii was removed as the head of the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Research Institute (which eventually became the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR).

Shabliovskyi was appointed as Bahalii's successor, and ensured that the Kharkiv-based institute was basically inactive during his two-year tenure. He produced the programmatic "Shevchenko i Rossiyska Revoliutsiyna Demokratiya" (Shevchenko and Russian Revolutionary Democracy, 1934).

Then as Yagoda's NKVD was unleashed to eat the revolution's own, Shabliovskyi was arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp. He languished in the gulag for 19 years, emerging after Stalin's death. Shabliovskyi was formally reinstated in 1956 at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and in the 1960s was back to his specialization.

He took part in what the scholar Bohdan Rubchak described as "the practice of writing Shevchenko's biography by committee or brigade." Together with Yevhen Kyryliuk and Vasyl Shubravskyi, Shabliovskyi helped produced "T.H. Shevchenko: Biohrafiya" (1964), in which the poet's alleged materialist humanism is highlighted, as is his putative decision to cleave to Russian revolutionary democratic circles, rather than the liberals of the Brotherhood of Ss. Cyril and Methodius.

In 1965, in a spasm of self-negation typical of Soviet Ukrainian literarians, Shabliovsky published "Shliakhamy Yednannia" (Along the Paths of Unity), which emphasized the beneficent influence of Russians as saviors of the Ukrainian people throughout the ages.

In August 1968 he participated in the infamous sixth International Congress of Slavists in Prague, where the Soviet delegation dictated terms of "the establishment and development of socialist realism in national literatures" to the proponents of "Socialism with a human face." The tanks rolled that month.

In the early 1970s he further contributed to the Soviet canon of socialist realist theory, through works such as "Sotsialistychnyi Realizm i Svitova Kultura" (Socialist Realism and World Culture, 1973) and "Svoboda Tvorchosti i Hromadska Vidpovidalnist Pysmennyka" (Freedom of Creativity and the Civic Responsibility of Writers, 1973).

In the late 1970s he focused on Chernyshevskyi and the guiding role of Russian literature in the formation of Ukrainian literature. Shabliovskyi died in Kyiv on January 10, 1983.

Sources: "Shabliovskyi, Yevhen," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); G.S.N. Luckyj, ed. "Shevchenko and the Critics" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).

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