Works of Ukrainian nationalists Teliha, Bahriany released in Kyiv (11/26/06)

Works of Ukrainian nationalists Teliha, Bahriany released in Kyiv

by Olena Labunka
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

KYIV - To honor the 100th anniversary of their births, the Kyiv-based publishing house Smoloskyp published "Selected Works" of Olena Teliha and Ivan Bahriany, two prominent Ukrainian authors whose names were erased from history during the Soviet era and only recently revived.

In addition to the "Selected Works," which were published in October as part of the "Rozstriliane Vidrodzhenia" (Executed Renaissance) series, Smoloskyp also published Bahriany's "Publitsystka," a collection of his editorial work.

"We celebrate those people for whom the soul grieves, which every generation will uncover, " said Yevhen Sverstiuk, a Soviet dissident who discussed the authors' significance at an October 27 book presentation in Kyiv.

"Someone will open the texts, someone will open the person, someone will open Teliha's 'civil bravery,' someone will open Bahrianyi's 'Kozak bravery.' All this is lacking in our zombified, fearful, passive world. We all lack Bahrianys and Telihas."

Teliha and Bahriany were at the forefront of a pre-World War II Ukrainian nationalist phenomenon in Soviet Ukraine, he said. They were so different, yet at the same time so similar in their yearnings, Mr. Sverstiuk said.

"Bahriany was the Zaporizhian type, and Teliha was the aristocratic type," he continued.

Bahriany was an example of Kozak resistance, "a traditional type of Ukrainian person who never gives up under any circumstances" he said.

Instead, a type of faux Kozak-nationalist is cloning itself today, which repeats slogan after slogan, but really demeans the patriotic idea in deeds and doesn't do anything to support it, Mr. Sverstiuk said.

What distinguishes Teliha and Bahriany is their stalwart Ukrainian patriotism during an era of diabolical Soviet persecution.

Born July 21, 1906, in Russia, Teliha was a "poet of infinite anxiety" who demonstrated "high culture and great bravery," and was a "Ukrainian nationalist who didn't write (overt) patriotic poems and slogans," as Mr. Sverstiuk described her.

Ms. Teliha's family moved to Kyiv in 1918 when her father, a prominent engineer, accepted a professorship at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and became a minister in the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic government.

Teliha's "Selected Works" include poetry and editorial essays, memoirs written by her close confidante Oleh Zhdanovych, critiques of her work and a bibliography.

They play a valuable role in revealing how her contemporaries and the current generation view her, said Osyp Zinkewych, the collection's editor and Smoloskyp international charity fund chair.

"The works by our proud Ukrainian Teliha will always be relevant, and entire generations of Ukrainians will now be verifying her thoughts with her words," said Olena Lohvynenko, a prominent Ukrainian literary scholar.

"Her books should be in school libraries and in the other libraries of our nation," she added.

After a life spent as a political activist, poetess, writer and unbroken fighter for Ukrainian independence, Teliha was shot by German National Socialists in 1942 in Kyiv's Babyn Yar along with her husband, Mykhailo.

Another talented Ukrainian writer, poet and political activist of the same era was Ivan Bahriany, whose works were forbidden for a long time but nevertheless inspired the struggle for the Ukrainian people's dignity and independence, in the view of many intellectuals.

Bahriany was born on September 9, 1906, in a village in the Poltava region but grew up in the Sumy Oblast.

Despite fierce persecution and arrests by Communists for his writings, Bahriany would eventually become recognized as the most prominent eastern Ukrainian writer of his era.

Bahriany's prose, poetry, journalistic work, literary critiques, as well as critiques of his own work, appear in his "Selected Works," edited by the young Kharkiv scholar Maksym Balaklytskyi, who also authored the collection's preface and commentary.

The other collection, "Publitsystka," includes Mr. Bahriany's lectures, articles, pamphlets, reflections and essays, which were published when he lived in Germany between 1946 and 1963 in the magazine, Our Positions and the newspaper Ukrayinski Visti.

Oleksii Konoval edited "Publitsystka" and both collections of Bahriany's works were published with financing from the U.S.-based Bahriany Foundation.

To this day, Ukrainian society is still not able to properly appreciate its true heroes and honor their self-sacrifice for the great Ukrainian idea, Mr. Sverstiuk said.

For example, during a recent parliamentary hearing to consider a proposal commemorating Bahriany's 100th anniversary, Communist Party National Deputy Valentyn Matveyev labeled him an "enemy of the people," who stained himself with cooperation and participation in subversion against communism.

The lack of objective historical information gives rise to twisting of facts and political speculation, Mr. Sverstiuk said, which is why it's so important today to publish books of forgotten authors, or those repressed by the Soviet Union.

Smoloskyp was launched in Baltimore, Md., in 1967, publishing dissident literature, samvydav materials and works of Ukrainian authors in the English language.

After Ukraine regained its independence, Smoloskyp moved to Kyiv.

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