“you don’t hold her correctly. Be careful with her head.”
“I’m being careful.”
“She always cries whenever you’re around. You frighten her.”
“Babies cry.”
“Your mustache—that’s what she’s afraid of.”
“I’ll shave it off.”
“That isn’t necessary. You look like a baby bird without one.”
“Then I won’t shave it off.”
“What’s new in the world? I feel so dumb, just up to my ears in diapers. I’m not keeping up on anything.”
“Relax. You haven’t missed anything, the world’s still spinning. You just had a baby.”
“Don’t tell me to relax. I hate when you say that.”
“I won’t say it anymore. Give Ewa back to me.”
“You don’t hold her head correctly. She’s afraid of you.”
the child cried incessantly because Kazimiera wasn’t producing enough breast milk. At three months, her supply had dried up completely. There was no choice but to travel to a faraway Polish village to stay with a first cousin whose wife had just given birth. She had agreed to help nurse, as she was producing enough milk for two infants.
When Kazimiera left, Lypynskyi stayed behind in Kraków. He felt abandoned and excluded. He was angry with himself, with Kazimiera, with everyone. To curb this frustration, he again dove headlong into work. Sometimes his mother-in-law, Mrs. Szumińska, would pop into the office to give an update on her daughter and granddaughter. Kazimiera wrote to her mother but never to Lypynskyi himself. This upset him even more. His letters to Kazimiera conveyed his growing exasperation:
“Are you planning on returning, and if so, when?”
“I too have a right to take part in Ewa’s rearing.”
“I’d like all of us to go visit my parents in Zaturtsi for Christmas together. What do you think, will that be possible?”
“We didn’t visit my parents for Christmas, so maybe for Easter? I’d like Ewa to start getting to know her other homeland.”
“Can’t she be fed with regular cow’s milk yet? What’s keeping you there, Kazimiera?”
in early 1912, Lypynskyi’s almanac From Ukraine’s History (Z dziejów Ukrainy), which he had worked tirelessly on for three years, was finally published in Polish. It was a massive tome that not merely covered Ukrainian history but specifically explored Ukraine as a historically political entity. Poles had never before looked at their eastern neighbors from such a viewpoint. And they didn’t look this time either. To Lypynskyi’s great disappointment, the almanac went completely unnoticed. It was neither lauded nor censured by friend or foe. The print run sat in Polish bookstores unsold. Lypynskyi hoped that, in light of the scarcity of scholarly historical literature, someone from Ukraine would at least undertake a translation of some part of it, but even that didn’t happen. The Ukrainian public was occupied with dreams of war. It was talked about more and more often as the only possibility for national liberation (or for the passage of Ukraine’s lands from Russia—viewed by many Ukrainians as inherently Asian—to European Austria). In Eastern Halychyna, the military society Sich was formed, made up of only Ukrainians, which could serve as the foundation of a national army in the future.
“The newspapers smell of war,” Chykalenko wrote to Lypynskyi from Kyiv. “This is our chance.”
But Lypynskyi didn’t share in the general enthusiasm. He was in agreement that war could work to the advantage of the oppressed, but the sacrifices it would bring would far outweigh the benefits. The best would die, he’d say, and when it came to building the state, there’d be no one to do it because the citizenry weren’t properly prepared. There’d be no choice but to be dependent on external circumstances, namely, the moods of the masses and the resolve of individual people. The Ukrainian idea hadn’t ripened yet; it didn’t have a sufficient number of adherents yet. It needed another fifteen years or so.
each successive day in Kraków became insufferable. Lypynskyi would hole up in his office and spend hours poring over articles, lacking the strength to write even a few sentences. There was droning in his ears, his vision was blurred, his mind refused to comply, and his thoughts would wander off to some other dimension. The aggravated Lypynskyi would set out for himself the volume of work he was supposed to complete before going to bed, but such quantities were impossible to accomplish, and he’d pace around his office feverishly until morning, when his exhausted body fell feebly from its feet.
“You have neurasthenia, esteemed sir,” the doctors would say, prescribing Lypynskyi absolute calm and a complete rest from work.
“But I’m not doing anything!”
“Then rest. Don’t think.”
“I always need to be thinking.”
“It’s not helping, dear sir. It’s not helping.”
He thus went to visit his parents in Volyn, where he let his mother look after him for two weeks. Klara Lipińska tackled the task with great zeal. She nursed her son with herbal teas and complained liberally about her bad daughter-in-law.
“Kazimiera’s behavior doesn’t surprise me,” she’d say. “This was to be expected. To be honest, I doubt whether she’s all right in the head. They say that that can happen to women after childbirth—that they don’t let their husbands near them anymore. You need to consult a lawyer. Lawyers can solve everything these days.”
Before heading back to Kraków, the recovered Lypynskyi stopped by Kyiv for a day or two, made the rounds of his old acquaintances, and with sadness came to the conclusion that he had less and less to talk about with them. Even in Kyiv, Lypynskyi felt shoved out, thrown out of the process of life, as if he had gotten off at some stopover station and the train had driven on with a rumble.
He shut down all his publishing projects, citing a lack of funding and poor health. “I have neurasthenia,” he lamented to everyone, at times boastfully. In reality, Lypynskyi had lost faith in the appropriateness and practicality of his chosen path. He yearned for quiet and calm, longed for his family, and often repeated that he now just wanted the simple things: to own his own home, work the land now and then, and watch his children grow up.
Chykalenko proposed that he become the editor-in-chief of Rada, but Lypynskyi categorically declined. A Catholic editor would undermine the newspaper’s credibility. Besides: “Literary work is very nerve-wracking, and my health is poor. I was even deemed unfit for the Imperial Russian Army. Through my parents’ residence in Zaturtsi, I was summoned to nearby Kovel for military exercises as a reserve warrant officer but was released after a few days without my even trying. That means I really am sick . . . There comes a moment in every man’s life when he has the desire to settle down . . . The spring is so impossible this year.”
Thoughts of his uncle’s farmstead had finally captured his imagination. From Kraków, Lypynskyi wrote to Kazimiera, who was still in the village, that he was going to visit Rokicki to help with the sowing, to which she, as usual, replied with silence. But Rokicki welcomed him with wide-open arms.
“I think I’m finally ready to put down roots in my own soil,” Lypynskyi said without unnecessary ceremony. His uncle, as it turned out, had been preparing for this conversation for a long time and immediately put forth a plan.
“I’m giving you ownership of my estate, Rusalivski Chahary. Take it, build a house for your family here, work the land, and my people and I will help.”
Lypynskyi accepted the offer.
they scheduled the start of construction for the fall of 1913 so that Lypynskyi would have time to settle all of his affairs by then. Lypynskyi wanted to personally oversee the erection of the house, and the autumn months sufficed for this. The family was supposed to move into the new residence by the new year. Heartened, Lypynskyi set off for Kraków, readying himself for a difficult conversation with his wife. She had just returned from the village, having gained some weight and tanned. Ewa didn’t cry anymore, just glanced distrustfully at the unfamiliar father with large black eyes.
“See? She doesn’t even recognize me,” Lypynskyi complained. “She takes after me, no? My eyes, my gaze . . . I need to talk to you, Kazimiera. My parents can’t support us any longer . . . I have an inheritance, you know. Rokicki and I spoke. He gave me a portion of his land . . . Why are you not saying anything?”
Lypynskyi outlined the construction plan for his wife and showed her the prepared sketches: “The windows of the house will face southwest, and you should see the views there! The library will need to be moved. The Ukrainian steppes are the prettiest in May.”
Kazimiera listened attentively, examined the sketches, but didn’t say anything.
With resignation, Lypynskyi packed his personal belongings with the intention of never again returning to Kraków. “I’ll write how the work is progressing, but you two prepare to move after Christmas, okay?”
Kazimiera didn’t respond. Later, it would become clear that during all these conversations, she no longer took her husband seriously. For her, he had long since lost touch with reality. The mad can talk very convincingly, but she wouldn’t be duped.
Kazimiera walked Lypynskyi to the train station and stood on the platform as the train prepared to depart. Through the windowpane, she looked her husband straight in the eyes. He looked away, flustered, then spread out the books he intended to read during the long journey before him and stared at their covers instead. His mind was occupied with dreams of a happy new life on his own land, but Kazimiera’s gaze—scalding him, straight through to his insides—foretold that there would be no happy life, no land of his own, only loneliness that would envelop and consume him. Kazimiera’s gaze was hard as a rock. It was a rebuke of Lypynskyi, his definitive sentence. You betrayed your family, it said. You sacrificed it for the sake of unrealized dreams. You prioritized your political convictions over your love for your wife and daughter. Have you ever actually loved anything other than that ghastly product of your imagination—a country that doesn’t exist? Go move to your wild steppes, you wretch. Build your house in the wide-open Ukrainian grasslands. Your child’s laughter will never ring through it.
In despair, Lypynskyi pulled a watch out of the inner pocket of his jacket, but he failed to compute how much longer these tortures would last. Kazimiera’s lonesome figure pulsated on the platform. Finally, the train heaved from its spot. The lonesome figure began to drift away, along with the world that, like a blanket, she had pulled over and onto herself. One large hot tear rolled down Lypynskyi’s pale cheek then, forever soaking up the remnants of this unendurable moment into itself—her gaze, her rebuke, her unspoken last words. Lypynskyi brushed away the tear, and it splintered into millions of sunbeam reflections. He glanced out the window, hopeful to catch her image one last time—he wanted to remember it for all the coming lonely years, to hide it in the deepest cellar of his most secret memories, so that he might reminisce over this precious treasure on holidays—but the lonesome figure had already been replaced by Kraków’s snaking streets, which jumped rapidly into his line of sight, one after another, as if showing off and trying to entice him to come to his senses and stay. Kraków had taken Kazimiera from him. Or maybe Lypynskyi had given her away voluntarily? Kraków was the altar of his sacrifice, the cemetery of his love.
When the city was firmly behind him, Lypynskyi breathed a sigh of sad relief.
But in Rusalivski Chahary, everything went wrong. The fall seemed intent on being rainy, and the construction of the house advanced more slowly than Lypynskyi had planned. The workers were lazy and dishonest, and Lypynskyi grew irritated, deciding at last to take all the work under his own control. In October, he was forced to move into the finished part of the building because leaving the building unattended overnight was becoming dangerous. Bands of robbers were roaming the area. One such band burned down his uncle’s largest mill on the Feast of the Intercession. In another village, a group of well-to-do louts tortured and killed an old peasant woman. By day, Lypynskyi worked; by night, he trembled with fear.
“Burglaries, arsons, murders—and all of it seemingly for sport,” he’d write to friends in Kyiv. “It’s sad to look at our denationalized villages, increasingly out of touch with their Ukrainian culture with each passing day . . . My circumstances are such right now that any possible literary work is out of the question. I have no choice but to establish a household in the steppe . . . I feel forgotten and ostracized, completely out of society. I have no dealings with the world whatsoever. Even Rada has stopped arriving in the mail, even though I’ve requested it. Maybe they’re worried that I won’t pay, though I’ve paid as punctually as possible till now . . . My library has arrived, so I’ll be able to write a little at a time. Don’t think that I’m boasting, but it’s the largest library in Ukraine on matters of history and sociology.”
eventually, lypynskyi’s manor was burglarized. It was the dead of night. A sensitive sleeper by then, he heard whispering outside the window. But he couldn’t stir. He was paralyzed. He knew that he would in no way be able to defend himself. The whispering died down; then he heard the front door creaking, as if someone were pressing against it with all their might. Lypynskyi considered running to the kitchen to find a knife but abandoned that idea because he would have been incapable of stabbing anyone. A cold sweat enveloped his entire body. He lay in bed without moving. This is what your love for the Ukrainian land will end with, he was thinking. They’ll slaughter you in bed like a piglet, and you won’t even be able to defend yourself. Then it grew quiet by the entryway, as if whoever had been trying to break in had stopped. A brief wordless scuffle could be heard, and then a hoarse male voice said, “What is it you’ve forgotten here, lads?”
The “lads,” of course, did not have an answer. They just mumbled something indistinct, something entreating. Lypynskyi rose from bed, threw on a dressing gown, and quietly crept to the door, grabbing a knife from the kitchen on his way just the same. The voice began speaking again: “Tell your people that this gentleman has around-the-clock protection. One more intrusion by someone, and that person will be left without a head. Do you understand me, lads?”
“We understand,” came the reply, and the pardoned “lads” scampered off at full speed. Lypynskyi could hear their steps receding. Only once they were out of earshot did he find the courage to open the door.
On his doorstep stood an old gray-haired man with a thick curling beard. The old man was grinning broadly at Lypynskyi, clutching an old bayonet in his hands.
“Did the scoundrels trouble you, sir? Please forgive us for being such unwelcoming neighbors. There’s been an increase in riffraff in these parts. The rich aren’t very liked around here these days.”
The old man’s beard grew not downward, but stuck out every which way, making his head appear disproportionately large on his small body. He looked like a white-maned lion.
“People call me Zanuda. The name’s Levko. If you like, I can help you with guarding the estate. You won’t get anywhere these days without protection. And a kitchen knife won’t help.”
Lypynskyi recovered his wits and shoved the knife he was wielding into the pocket of his dressing gown. His voice was slowly coming back to him.
“Thank you, Mr . . . Zanuda,” Lypynskyi uttered, unsure if Killjoy was the man’s nickname or a real surname.
The old man laughed.
“I’m no mister. I come from generations of peasants. I work the land, and when I die, I’ll go into the land.”
“Me too.”
“That makes both of us agriculturists.”
it turned out that the old man was a widower, and his children were grown. Lypynskyi proposed that the old man move in with him, and he agreed. He settled in the kitchen. During the day, he oversaw the workers, and at night, he guarded his master’s slumber with a bayonet in his hands.
“God himself sent you to me,” Lypynskyi would say with delight.
“Well, maybe not God himself, maybe just your uncle, but certainly not without God’s will. When will the lady of the house and your daughter arrive?”
“We agreed on sometime after Christmas.”
“Then we need to hurry, so that everything’s ready by their arrival.”
The illiterate Levko Zanuda loved most of all to sit in Lypynskyi’s library and blow the dust off the old tomes. When the master of the house was working, he’d instruct the workers to conduct themselves more quietly, so as not to disturb the course of his thoughts.
“This is an erudite man,” he’d say. “Such people need to be valued. He’s writing an article about the Ukrainian people’s six-hundred-year struggle for liberty right now!”
Lypynskyi’s longtime friend Andrii Zhuk had commissioned the article. Together, they had planned to publish the periodical Vilna Ukraina (Free Ukraine) in Lviv, but in the end couldn’t reach an agreement on an ideological strategy: Zhuk was a socialist, Lypynskyi was a convinced independentist, and the rest of the project’s participants were partial to Poland and not as focused on Ukraine’s independence. The article thus expanded into a fundamental political history of Ukraine.
Lypynskyi spent the long autumn evenings sharing with his guard his ruminations and doubts, and reading aloud what he had written that day. Zanuda listened attentively and even voiced observations. He carried letters for Lypynskyi from the post office; not one of them was from Kazimiera. The Catholic Christmas passed, Saint Sylvester’s Day passed, the Feast of the Epiphany passed, and news from his wife kept failing to arrive.
“the lady is lingering in Kraków,” the old man remarked when spring arrived. Lypynskyi’s health had again deteriorated. “The house has been built, and the lady hasn’t come.”
“She won’t come,” Lypynskyi replied, at that moment himself realizing this possibly for the first time. Heartbroken, he lay in bed with a fever, and once a day, Rokicki’s wife Henrykha would appear to feed him.
“She isn’t going to come,” Lypynskyi would say to her. “Kazimiera won’t allow her daughter to grow up in Ukraine. She wants to raise her to be as die-hard a Krakowian as she herself is. Kazimiera never understood me. Our marriage was a mistake. She won’t be coming.”
“Maybe things will still work out,” Henrykha would try to console him.
“There’s nothing to work out. My life is over. I built a manor for myself alone. Not a manor, but a huge coffin. For now, I’m still lying around, but soon I’ll die. There won’t even be anyone to nail the lid shut.”
“There is no untimely death,” Levko Zanuda would reassure Lypynskyi, who would usually turn away to the wall in silence. The first wheat sowing of his own, for which he had so prepared, he handed over completely to his uncle, only once venturing out into the fields on horseback just as the steppe was blossoming.
A heavy grief engulfed Lypynskyi, swallowing him with everything he had that was dearest to him. Work wholly lost meaning, the future ceased to exist, only the never-ending day, echoing with loneliness, which crept slowly like a slug over a dead body, droned before him. As he groped his way through the white fog that had enswathed him anew, unable to see even a step ahead, he was sure that where he was going, it wasn’t worth expecting anything good. A scorched heart, scorched land. A helpless inhale–exhale, inhale–exhale.
the first world war finally broke out in July, overfilling the chalice of Lypynskyi’s personal catastrophe. This time, a new medical commission, of the Kyiv Military District, recognized the reserve warrant officer as fit to serve and dispatched him to the Fourth Dragoon Regiment of General Samsonov’s Second Army, which was quartered in Bilostok right on the Prussian border. Lypynskyi was confident that he would die in the first battle. En route to his duty station, he wrote farewell letters to all of his close acquaintances, in which he asked forgiveness for having been so categorical in the past, and passed along his most sincere greetings to everyone to whom he didn’t have the time to write.
“I feel like a droplet in a large stream,” he wrote in a letter to Yefremov, the former correspondent of the now-discontinued Rada. “I’m going along with millions of our nation’s sons and believe that our blood won’t be lost in vain. From this blood will grow a better destiny for Ukraine; if it doesn’t, it wouldn’t be within Ukrainians’ power to survive the terrible nightmare that’s transpiring now.”
During its campaign in East Prussia, the Second Russian Army suffered a crushing defeat, its commander General Samsonov committed suicide, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed or taken captive. The remnant soldiers drowned while trying to wade across the Masurian Lakeland. The wounded Lypynskyi, upon finding himself in cold waters, grasped the mane of someone’s horse and thus managed to make it to the opposite shore. The horse, however, did not.
When he was admitted to a military hospital, Lypynskyi barely spoke or opened his eyes, just coughed occasionally, then wiped away from his chin the blood he had spit up. In addition to severe hypothermia, doctors diagnosed a nervous breakdown and sent him off to complete his treatment far away from the front, in Poltava. There, Lypynskyi grew truly guarded around people because what he saw when he looked at them horrified him.
From then on, every person he encountered appeared to him to have only one eye—right in the middle, at the bridge of the nose. That’s how it looked to Lypynskyi. Everywhere, he saw one-eyed men and women, even children. The human world had become a world of Cyclopes. I’ve gone mad, Lypynskyi thought. I won’t survive this war. And thank God.