BOOK REVIEW: The making of Yurii Shevelov (04/21/02)

BOOK REVIEW: The making of Yurii Shevelov

"Ya - Mene - Meni ... (i Dovkruhy). Spohady" (Memoirs) by Yuriy Shevelov (Yuriy Sherekh), Volume 1 - "V Ukraini" (In Ukraine), Volume 2 - "V Evropi" (In Europe). Kharkiv-New York: Vydannia Chasopysu Berezil, M. P. Kots Publishers, 2001.

by Dr. Oleh S. Ilnytzkyi

Yuriy (George) Shevelov (a.k.a. Yuriy Sherekh), born December 8, 1908, died on April 12, at age 93. This two-volume memoir, written over the course of many years, indelibly inscribes his life in Ukrainian culture - a culture he consciously chose and whose remarkable public servant he was for well over a half century. Through the power of the word, which he cherished above all else, Prof. Shevelov now comes to life and with him the age in which he lived.

Let us begin with the obvious: Prof. Shevelov is undoubtedly a towering cultural and scholarly figure. That much we intuit from encyclopedias where his achievements as world-renowned linguist and literary critic are noted in far too modest terms; that much we know as professors in Slavic disciplines, as graduate students and as lovers of Ukrainian literature. Many people have read his articles and books because they have become required readings in the subjects to which he contributed so mightily. Others have turned to his writings because they simply offer insight and understanding that is not available anywhere else.

But because Yuriy Shevelov walked and worked among us - in the DP camps of Europe, at Harvard and Columbia universities, in the scholarly institutions and journals of the diaspora - it is easy to confuse awareness of this outstanding person with knowing him. While no doubt there are privileged individuals who have been close to him, most people, like myself, were only acquainted with his writings and "knew" him from brief encounters, framed by professional settings. One of mine, as a graduate student, left me nervous, excited and feeling intellectually inadequate. Over the years, my mind constructed a summary impression of him as an intensely private but probing individual, a personality that harbored both gentleness and steel.

Now this superb memoir takes away some of the mystery surrounding the man and gives us even something much better: a complex and unexpected self-portrait against the background of nearly a century of Ukrainian history and myriad other lives.

Prof. Shevelov's memoir is a literary tour de force. The careful reader will find some repetitions and orthographic inconsistencies, but the work as a whole is a marvelously readable, self-contained narrative, realized in elegant and controlled prose. It invokes a vast panorama - the last years of the tsarist empire, the rise of Soviet power, the period of Ukrainization, the onset of Stalinism, the German invasion of Ukraine, the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine and émigré life in Europe. Prof. Shevelov sheds light on such topics as literature, scholarship, education, everyday social life, inter-ethnic relations and politics. All this is done through the sparkling prism of his urbane and sophisticated consciousness.

Prof. Shevelov's unwinding memory plays with the metaphor of film and the fragmentary nature of photographic slides. The autobiographical self is presented with a sense of distance, the occasional irony - as if the mature Shevelov were discovering a stranger from the past. But these are not self-absorbed memoirs. To a large degree they are a reflection on decades of Ukrainian culture, especially literature and theater. Prof. Shevelov brings his erudition and taste to bear on a variety of cultural events in Kharkiv, Lviv, Germany and elsewhere. In the hands of another, these mini-essays and travelogues could have been tedious, but Prof. Shevelov's are invariably interesting, gripping and historically priceless. Whether he is writing about the Berezil theater or the literary organization MUR, he leaves the reader with a tangible sense not only of cultural artifacts, but of the immediate social and historical moment that gave birth to them.

The literary qualities of this memoir are probably best embodied in the endless gallery of portraits. Some are no longer than a few phrases or sentences; others are extended physical and psychological characterizations. Prof. Shevelov recreates his contemporaries with wit and art, writing equally well about the famous, the infamous and the totally unknown. He describes his immediate and extended family, his colleagues and friends, and even his students, to whom he was very committed. He writes about Ukrainians, Russians and Jews (the latter included some of his closest friends). One of Prof. Shevelov's obvious tasks was to become an eyewitness for those whose voice was silenced by war and terror, often at a very early age. The last moments and brief lives of individuals like these are recorded here and there in laconic prose.

Prof. Shevelov's first-person narrator has an unsentimental voice, a razor-sharp intellect, a sense of irony; most of all he is endowed with culture. A man of the city (Kharkiv), he is somewhat alienated by the "rustic" temperament of most Ukrainians. This persona is an elitist in the best sense of the word, someone who does not suffer fools lightly. An ethical and honorable man, this Shevelov finds it impossible to be malevolent but is also incapable of offering forgiveness to those who might have transgressed against him or committed evil. The man writing these memoirs is a teacher and a professor, a professional critic who, while supportive, evaluates students and colleagues with devastating outspokenness. In a word, the Shevelov narrating this memoir is self-assured and firm in his opinions, a witness and practitioner of Ukrainian culture to be reckoned with.

But this confident narrator also gives us a perspective on a figure notably less poised and stately. This other Shevelov is the son of a German father and a half-German mother: a Shevelov that grew up in Russian culture. His father - a womanizer, a general in the tsar's army and a devoted servant of the empire - changed his German name "Schneider" to "Shevelov" to appear more Russian. Saddled with the wrong "social origins" after the revolution, the young Yuriy Shevelov lives in fear of being exposed as a general's son by Soviet authorities. This other Shevelov is an impractical, sickly, non-athletic and timid individual, prefiguring the scholar and professor only by his obsessive intellectual thirst, which, despite the hardships of the 1920s and 1930s, was quenched by a self-sacrificing mother and Kharkiv's cultural amenities.

The memoir, in short, is in part a "Bildungsroman," arguably one of the most interesting and moving aspects of this work. In his youth, Prof. Shevelov says he developed an inferiority complex, i.e., an inclination to settle for "second place" or what he calls "kompleks druhoi party" (the "second bench complex"), a reference to the second-row school bench he chose for himself in the classroom. He claims that this need to recede into the background (but never into last place) always kept him from taking leadership positions both in Soviet Ukraine and later in the diaspora:

"The complex of the second bench stayed with me for the rest of my life. During the Soviet period there was not much choice. I had a bad 'social pedigree' which I was forced to conceal, therefore there was no point in standing out, attracting much attention to oneself ... I worked hard, students did not like me, but I never tried to stand out ... All these circumstances could not but accentuate a 'complex of the second bench.' But it did not come from fear, caution or opportunism; it came about from my first contact with the world outside my family ... Fear and caution were ... rationalizations of a deep-seated, a natural second-bench complex. That is why it stayed with me after I escaped the Soviet orbit."

This doleful leitmotif serves as a refrain in the memoir.

Prof. Shevelov's not-so-sentimental education offers a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of his Ukrainian national identity, or, as he puts it, his "conversion" (navernennia) to Ukrainian culture. His first love was Russian literature, in particular the Romantics and Pushkin. He notes on several occasions the infectious enthusiasm with which Russian teachers (all women) spread the word of Russian letters to the young and counts himself among those who were thus inspired. Initially, there were no Ukrainian books in the Shevelov household and Shevchenko was available only in a bad Russian translation. To his sister's fiancée, Tolia (Anatolii) Nosiv, an anthropologist who was later arrested and sentenced to hard labor, the young Yuriy Shevelov declared that the Ukrainian language, if it in fact existed, was too ugly for use. Nosiv's answer - "A language spoken by millions of people cannot be ugly" - changed Prof. Shevelov's life. As he points out, the Ukrainian cultural renascence of the 1920s, Ukrainization also had an impact. But the words of Nosiv played a critical role in his metamorphosis.

After this, Prof. Shevelov was attracted to Ukrainian high culture, and he began identifying with Ukrainian "outsiders" and "underdogs," thus eliminating Russian and German as potential options for his identity. Prof. Shevelov's mother feared his "Ukrainian" choice but never discouraged it, even though she remained pessimistic about Ukrainian independence. Prof. Shevelov says that his first trip to Lviv after the Soviet takeover also transformed him thanks to the city's "real" Ukrainian spirit. However, the scholars he met there (e.g., Shchurat) made a poor impression on him.

Two people stood out in Prof. Shevelov's life: his mother and the linguist Leonid Bulakhovskyi, his professor in graduate school. Prof. Shevelov did not know and did not like his own father. He says he did not love his sister Vira, who died in 1925 because he was jealous of her. His mother, on the other hand is recalled fondly and frequently, as an intelligent and courageous woman who coped extremely well with her disastrous plunge of status from that of a general's wife to that of a Soviet cleaning woman, in the process passing on to her son, under extremely difficult conditions, the old imperial intelligentsia's cult of culture. Bulakhovskyi, a Jew, was clearly much more for Prof. Shevelov than a mentor; he became a friend. Prof. Shevelov looked up to him and several times recalls sadly that Bulakhovskyi was not able to say farewell to him when he was suddenly evacuated eastward when the Nazis approached Kharkiv. The respect Prof. Shevelov accords to Bulakhovskyi is entirely absent when he writes about Ivan Bilodid and Roman Jacobson, individuals he associates with perfidy.

In the introductory pages of his memoir Prof. Shevelov makes a promise to be sincere but clearly states that he will not speak about love and sex. Despite this caveat, he does circumspectly mention these subjects from time to time, and not without some wry humor. The intimacy he establishes with the reader is not founded on the voyeuristic but the intellectual. Is this memoir, therefore cold, without emotions? Hardly. This is ultimately an intensely human and humane document, a history of one man and, in large measure, a history of several generations, their hopes, achievements and failures. It ends with Yuriy Shevelov leaving for America to take up a position at Harvard University. The present two volumes foreshadow the new life with several cryptic and unsympathetic references to Roman Jacobson, professor of Harvard and MIT. However, for now, there is no third volume titled "In America," only excerpts published in Suchasnist (December 1994).

For everyone who has known, heard or wondered about Yuriy Shevelov these memoirs will be a gratifying reading experience both for what they reveal about this scholar and what the scholar reveals about the 20th century.

Dr. Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj is a full professor in the department of modern languages and cultural studies, University of Alberta, where he teaches in the Ukrainian Language Program. He is the author of "Ukrainian Futurism, 1914-1930." His most recent co-authored publication is the "Concordance to the Poetic Works of Taras Shevchenko" in four volumes. He is also the editor of Canadian Slavonic Papers. In recognition of his research and scholarship, Dr. Ilnytzkyj was awarded the McCalla Professorship for 2001-2002 by the University of Alberta.

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