Hard Times

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

How many famous humorists can you list? Now limit the selection to those who were writing in Europe in the 1920s. Chances are you did not even need to reach for your pencil. Humorists often suffer from a diminished reputation over time, regardless of how well received and influential they were in their own day. Such is the case with Ostap Vyshnia. Back in the 1920s, Vyshnia was one of Ukraine’s most popular entertainers. His newspaper feuilletons reached a wide and appreciative audience. In an era when expressing a wrong opinion could get you into serious trouble, Vyshnia’s irreverent satire and hearty jokes on topics far and wide—often politically sensitive ones—gave ordinary folks a chance to enjoy a good laugh and breathe a little easier. The story of his own life illustrates just how important and how dangerous such satire can be.

Ostap Vyshnia (the surname means cherry) was born Pavlo Hubenko on a farmstead near the town of Hrun, some 75 km north of Poltava, in 1889. His parents were peasants and Pavlo was one of seventeen children. By remarkable coincidence, his older brother Vasyl also became a well-known Ukrainian humorist, under the pseudonym Chechniavsky. As a young man Pavlo finished the Kyiv School for Feldshers—that is, emergency and ambulance health-care providers. He began working in a hospital run by the South-Western Railroad Administration of the Russian Empire. When the Tsarist government collapsed and an independent Ukrainian National Republic was declared, he joined the ranks of the republic’s armed forces and soon rose to the position of director of the medical division of its Ministry of Railroads. It was at this time that he began to write humorous feuilletons for local papers, often satirizing the various political formations and developments of those revolutionary times. It was he who formulated one of the most biting and well-known epithets about the limited power and effectiveness of the Directory, the continuously retreating government of Symon Petliura: ‘Inside the railway car is the Directory, beneath it is its territory.’ But his jokes were abruptly cut short at the end of 1919, when Pavlo Hubenko was captured by the bolsheviks and imprisoned in Kharkiv until the end of hostilities in 1921.

With some help from influential communists who were familiar with his humor, Pavlo Hubenko got back on his feet in the early 1920s and established himself as Ostap Vyshnia, one of Ukraine’s most popular authors, publishing feuilletons in a variety of newspapers with very wide circulations, including the official Visti VUTsVK. These short pieces were also collected and republished in books, usually coordinated around a general theme (village life, urban life, literary life, theatrical life, women’s issues, holidays in Crimea, industrialization, travel abroad, etc.). Vyshnia was also active in literary organizations, among them Pluh and Hart. He contributed to various journals, took part in theatrical productions, and became a pillar of Ukrainian literary life overall. But in Stalin’s world, pillars were meant to be toppled, particularly Ukrainian ones. Being a stalwart of Ukrainian culture was a dangerous undertaking. In 1933 Vyshnia was arrested and convicted of anti-Soviet terrorist activity, specifically of trying to assassinate Pavel Postyshev, Stalin’s personal envoy to Ukraine and the man most responsible for organizing the Holodomor Ukrainian famine and the anti-Ukrainian campaigns of that period. The charges were ridiculous, but the consequences were real. Vyshnia spent the next ten years in the Gulag, mainly in the mining camps near Ukhta and along the Pechora River in the Komi Republic. Some details of Vyshnia’s suffering in these camps can be gleaned from the memoirs of his fellow prisoner Iosyp Hirniak (in his Spomyny, New York, 1982). Then, in the midst of WWII, Vyshnia’s career took another turn. In December of 1943 he was released. The Soviets were advancing against German armies. Ukrainian nationalists, who were fighting against both the Nazis and the Soviets were gaining adherents among some Ukrainians who were horrified by Stalinist repressions. The Kremlin needed Vyshnia as a propagandist against anti-Soviet Ukrainians, and so Vyshnia was released as a sign that the Soviets were not anti-Ukrainian. But this was a bargain with the devil. Vyshnia had to attack the nationalists, branding them as fascists and Nazi collaborators. The most popular humorist of the 1920s was now obliged to prop up the regime that had imprisoned him, tasked with keeping up the fighting spirit of Ukrainians on the Soviet side, and disparaging patriotic Ukrainians who opposed it. This propaganda was kept up for a while after the war, but then Vyshnia drifted back to his familiar, if somewhat half-hearted, anecdotes about the foibles of the human condition. He still knew how to be funny, but the political straightjacket he was wearing meant the jokes lacked the depth and nuance of his earlier writing. After Stalin’s death Vyshnia was rehabilitated (he was officially cleared of the “crimes” for which he had been imprisoned). He died soon afterwards, in 1956.

Vyshnia’s humor covers a broad range of subjects, but much of it is based on the familiar premise of presenting something complex through the eyes of a simple, down-to-earth person. In the Ukrainian context, this opened some interesting possibilities. The Ukrainian village has long been a subject of satire. It was such in the works of Nikolai Gogol during the mid-nineteenth century and in Ukrainian realist prose later in that century. The Ukrainian village was often satirized in the hijinks of the modernists in the early twentieth century and even in post-Stalinist Soviet Ukrainian literature. In the works of Ostap Vyshnia, the ultra-modern world of revolutionary Soviet society was readily juxtaposed with traditional Ukrainian village culture. The satire worked both ways. The village bumpkins were hilarious because they were so far behind the times. The urban sophisticates were just as comical because their pretentious posturing was just village foolishness in urban garb. What gave the whole sum of Vyshnia’s humor a particular coloring was the traditional ingrained sense among his readers that Ukrainian culture—real Ukrainian culture—was essentially a peasant phenomenon and that all these modern Soviet innovations were just the product of some city-slickers (like Gogol’s Inspector-General) trying to pull one over on the Ukrainian peasant simpletons.

This perspective is most evident in Vyshnia’s stories on the peculiar topic of Ukrainization. Two of the best-known pieces on this subject are “Chukhraintsi” and “Deshcho pro ukrainizatsiu.” The latter appears in this volume under the title “Ukrainian Studies.” Ukrainization, which was official Soviet policy in the 1920s, called for a thorough cultural transformation of Ukraine, from a land where Russian colonial culture was dominant and Ukrainian culture was the quaint preserve of an unenlightened aboriginal population to a country in which its native culture was dominant and respected no less than any other. Of course, everyone knew, and developments eventually proved, that Russian bolsheviks had no real intention of allowing Ukrainian culture to be dominant in Ukraine. Vyshnia’s humor on this topic was particularly effective because everyone understood how delicate the underlying questions really were. On the one hand, he pretended to teach the colonialists about Ukraine as if they really wanted to learn, while on the other hand he also pretended to explain to the benighted natives what a wonderful culture they really had, as if it might be allowed to flourish. Not only did this maneuver provide an excuse for every kind of ethnic joke imaginable (excepting how many Ukrainians it takes to screw in a lightbulb—maybe because lightbulbs were a relatively recent innovation) but it also created in his feuilletons a politically charged atmosphere that never overstepped or criticized official policy, but nevertheless threw winks and nods to those who understood the true nature of Soviet reality.

Given the enormity of Vyshnia’s oeuvre and the breadth of his topics, no small collection of his works can do justice to the diversity of his writing. Translations face additional problems, since so much of his humor depends on linguistic peculiarities, puns, local knowledge, and the many other amorphous qualities of good verbal humor. Yuri Tkacz, this volume’s translator, together with its editors are to be commended for their valiant effort to present to the English reader the fine humor and incisive social commentary reflected in Ostap Vyshnia’s enduring achievement.

Professor Maxim Tarnawsky

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

University of Toronto