a world of cyclopes: What would it have seemed like? How would it have felt? What did Lypynskyi think when he encountered his first one-eyed creature? Did he realize immediately that it was an illusion, an illness of the mind; that the one-eyed people were actually fine, that it was the person seeing them that wasn’t? Was he fathoming just how the ongoing world war was forever changing the world, forever changing mankind, forever changing him? Did he, a person of the glorious old epoch of empires, grasp that a new era was setting in—one in which there would be no more victorious marching of the strong and healthy to the jaunty clang of shiny weaponry, just the disparate and lonely glances of madmen like him, cast about fearfully in the utter silence?
When you looked, it would no longer be possible to anticipate what it is you’d see. Human consciousness had revealed its dark sides—the previously unknown ones—and the demons that had been skulking there from the moment of their creation had finally broken out. Through the unbridled madness of modern war, the world had ceased to be a place where one could be sure of oneself, and the terror unleashed by this new reality gripped Lypynskyi in the same way that it gripped me a hundred years later.
Lypynskyi had an existentialist nature and, simultaneously, a corporeal one, because he would hole himself up in his chest, in some center invisible to X-rays, and direct his body and mind from in there like a rag doll. Terror became a full-fledged organ of his body but remained invisible, so that it couldn’t be excised with a scalpel. I stopped going outside when I realized that I too possessed this same terror.
i began to stand on my head.
One doctor told me that sometimes it was beneficial to see things from a different angle, in particular upside down.
When I’d stand on my head, the entire weight of my body would shift to my shoulders, neck, and skull; I would be exerting myself to such an extent that I wouldn’t have a chance to examine anything around me. Standing on my head, I comprehended that an upside-down world was different—completely different—but I didn’t really have time to notice how so. The blood coursing through my body, after some resistance, would first slow down, then—reluctantly, almost with a screech—come to a stop, and finally, under the influence of earth’s gravity, turn around and flow in the opposite direction. All the while, my head would throb deliriously, particularly my eyes, and there’d be a din in my ears. I would last like that for a few dozen seconds, then softly drop onto the cushions of my big toes and, for another minute, lay face down, my knees tucked under me. I would be scared to return to my customary vertical position again. Maybe a customary position had never existed at all. There was no being sure of anything anymore.
“World War I has broken out in my chest,” I would joke to my third golden-haired man, who understood nothing and took my reclusion as an alarming sign. He would try to persuade me in every way imaginable to go out for a walk and breathe some fresh air, to which I would reply that I could breathe perfectly well out the window too. In reality, any attempts at breathing well were unsuccessful because breathing itself had transformed into penal hard labor.
“Breathe deep, inhale–exhale,” the man would bid me, to ease my suffering. For some reason he believed that deep rhythmic lung work was relaxing and overall healthful. That isn’t true. As soon as I would try to control my breathing process, especially how deeply I inhaled, the terror of not being able to take in the next portion of air would become tremendous—quite simply, all-consuming. It would seem as though I had forgotten how to breathe, had unlearned it, had lost that ability, and, by exhaling, was dooming myself to a slow convulsive death from oxygen deficiency.
it was then that a certain doctor visited us, a friend of one of the man’s friends, since I was refusing to go to the hospital. She heard out my complaints listlessly and measured my blood pressure. She wanted to draw some blood for analysis but, despite protracted efforts, never did manage to get the needle into a vein. Finally, she informed me rather flatly, “I’m not really seeing any physical abnormalities.”
I gave a little smile, because after everything I had been through, that sort of diagnosis sounded like mockery.
“There are obvious problems with my heart,” I objected, and the man nodded spiritedly that yes, with my heart, he could attest to that.
“I’ve had pangs on the left side of my heart for a long time now,” I continued, and showed her where exactly the pangs occurred, below my left breast.
“That’s from nerves. That’s not where the heart hurts.”
The doctor took my hand, which was still holding on to my left side, and moved it to the center of my chest, a little below my throat. “That’s where the heart hurts.”
I was at a loss, even disappointed. My heart had never hurt there, but I had been certain that my attacks were cardiac in nature.
“It’s worth doing an echocardiogram, but I think that you’re perfectly healthy. Change your lifestyle, spend more time in the fresh air”—here the man again nodded spiritedly—“quit smoking if you smoke, and don’t drink coffee or alcohol. Your attacks are from nerves.”
I had the urge to spit in the doctor’s face. I turned away.
“But she doesn’t go outside,” the man jumped in. “She hasn’t gone out in a month, no matter how much I’ve asked. She can’t even get close to the door.”
The doctor didn’t say anything in response, just motioned quickly with her hand—a gesture I only half glimpsed—and went to the hallway for her coat. Maybe she made a cuckoo sign. People like me just pretend to be sick, so we drive people like her crazy. We think that the whole world owes us something; we can’t pull ourselves together; we’re lazy weak beings—hypochondriacs and malingerers. Hmph. The man paid the doctor a hundred hryvnias, and she left. From the doorway, she added, “Standing on your head helps with panic attacks. It’s overall beneficial to sometimes look at a problem from a different angle.”
The next attack occurred that very evening, a hundred times stronger than the last. The man slowly led me by the hand around the apartment, the way one leads the elderly, and tried to calm me down, ordering me to breathe deeper.
“If it doesn’t get better, we’ll call an ambulance.”
“I know that it won’t get better. Call one now,” I was whispering, but the man never did call an ambulance. By then, he too had evidently stopped believing in any physical causes to my illness.
i launched into reading old newspapers. All I did for entire days was just wash the floors and read. First I studied everything I could find on the internet; then I got in touch with the librarian at the regional library, who remembered me from when I was a university student. Claiming illness—not quite a deadly disease, but almost—I persuaded the good, kind woman to let me take old bound newspaper books home for the weekend. My third golden-haired man would stop by the library on Fridays, five minutes before closing, to pick up the newspapers, and would then return them for me Monday morning. The librarian could have been fired for such antics. I reassured her that I was researching an extremely important topic and that the book I was currently writing would be my last. Perhaps I even believed it.
“What do you need this old junk for?” the man would sometimes ask, to which I would respond, “I want to understand what time is.” He would shrug. Soon he began to distance himself from me, slowly but undeniably. That’s how this new terror that consumed me came first between me and him, and eventually between me and everyone who had ever been important to me.
The only things I ever felt anymore were fear and, on occasion, a driving curiosity. The desire to discover the root cause, to discern the meaning of something that had no meaning at first glance, was the only thing that, apart from the panic attacks, could still occupy me at times. I no longer felt love, gratitude, tenderness, hatred, or guilt. There was no joy; there was no despair. Nothing disturbed my one-dimensional coordinate system, save for curiosity. I couldn’t satisfy this curiosity with the present, so, in desperation, I turned to the past, so be it that it belonged to someone else. Old newspapers, random stories, and forgotten unimportant facts served as my lifebuoy.
“The Government Department for Alcohol Sale reports that in 1905 in Tsarist Russia, with a population of 132,240,000, a total of 75,037,174 pails of vodka were sold.”
“Last year, Mars was located in a position that allowed astronomers to examine it closely. Through the help of telescopic observations, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli asserted that there were very straight, artificial-looking canals on Mars, both wide and long ones, that could be the work of intelligent beings.”
“Ukraina Stelo, the first Ukrainian periodical in the Esperanto language, has commenced publication in Kolomyia.”
I needed to organize the past for an important experiment. That’s the only way I’d be able to deduce some common law out of the boundless quantity of individual details, to construct a history of history, to understand—or at least approach understanding of—the mystery that was still keeping me from definitively drowning in the gloom of the subconscious. Time? What is time? Maybe it’s a sagging crag, and human life is just a frail sapling trying to clasp on to it with its roots? A glimmering flame that pierces the endless darkness? A singular cry in an apathetic voicelessness?
Why do I even exist?
Questions without answers bounced back to where they had come from—back into the utter nothingness of my existence.
I imagined how Lypynskyi—until recently, a promising historian and publicist, an upstanding community activist, a husband and father—abandoned and forgotten by everyone during the most intense years of the war, roamed the environs of Poltava aimlessly. There, east of the Dnipro River, Reserve Officer Viacheslav Lypynskyi looked after the backup horses. The white fogs that he had seemingly subdued long before enveloped him fully again, head and all. On Protopopivskyi Boulevard, his gaze stumbled hundreds of times on the bust of Ivan Kotliarevskyi, the one that had caused such a commotion among the Ukrainian citizenry in 1903. Now the bust seemed like any ordinary mute hunk of metal erected someplace, by someone, for some reason.
Why did he, Lypynskyi, even exist?
lypynskyi’s body temperature remained elevated for months as the illness began to desiccate him from the inside. “I run around for a day, then I’m in bed for three,” he wrote in his trusty breast-pocket notepad, the pages of which remained empty more and more often. In order to conclusively normalize his personal life, Lypynskyi sent a letter from Poltava to his wife in Kraków, in which he released her from any and all marital obligations to him and offered—once the war was over, if he survived that long—to divorce officially. In the letter, he stressed that he was by no means renouncing his daughter and promised to do everything befitting a father, so that Ewa would not want for anything. Kazimiera, as usual, didn’t reply. Perhaps her response simply got lost in the whirlwind of military events. One such letter sought its addressee for over a year and arrived when it was already too late.
“Where are you, son?” Klara Lipińska was asking, simultaneously informing Lypynskyi that she and his father had had to evacuate from the family estate in Zaturtsi eastward, to Zhytomyr, and that the day following their escape, the house lay destroyed beneath its fabulous columns. Kazimierz Lipiński, a nobleman bearing the Brodzic coat of arms, couldn’t endure this and, as the letter informed, had died at age seventy-one from sudden cardiac arrest.
As soon as he received the letter, Lypynskyi requested leave. He found Klara in a tiny Zhytomyr apartment, wasted away like a gray-haired ghost. She cried for a long time; she hadn’t expected to see her son alive.
“I don’t know if I’m happy that I survived,” Lypynskyi admitted honestly over a modest lunch. “I can’t shake the feeling that my life is over already too.”
“You have no right to say such a thing!” Klara exclaimed. “Wishing for your own death is an unforgivable sin.”
Lypynskyi didn’t respond.
“You have a daughter, after all. Think about her.”
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. I don’t take part in raising her, I never see her, I don’t even remember what she looks like”—and here Lypynskyi was exaggerating, because he never would have been able to forget his baby bird’s face that once nestled in his arms.
“And what about your Ukrainian state? American President Wilson is promising the right to self-determination for unfree peoples. The prospects may be good before long.”
“Since when does Ukraine and its statehood interest you?”
Klara served her son his favorite linden tea and noted that the ruddiness in his cheeks was very unhealthy. Consumptives were often that ruddy.
“I got nipped by frost while crossing the Lakeland,” Lypynskyi replied. “I can’t seem to recuperate.”
Klara relayed that his younger brother Stanisław was making plans to rebuild the destroyed family manor, in order to engage in the agricultural selection of potatoes and wheat in Zaturtsi after the war’s end. “That’s good, he should rebuild it. I already have my estate.”
What’s true was that Lypynskyi hadn’t been at Rusalivski Chahary since July 1914 and only occasionally received short notes from the unlettered Levko Zanuda that had evidently been dictated to someone else. The guard would laconically send word that the fields had been sown, then that the wheat was flowering, then that the crop had been harvested. His notes reassured Lypynskyi that the Uman region was calm and the little house was awaiting its owner. But the owner was in no hurry to travel there.
“Your father and I were always proud of you,” Klara Lipińska said to her son in parting.
“You called me a fool.”
“Fools also evoke pride, sometimes even more so.”
That was the last time they saw each other.
lypynskyi returned to his duty station in an overcrowded train wagon. Soldiers, mostly deserters who were quitting the front, sat in the aisles with weapons in hand. When the train accelerated too much or made a sharp turn, those sitting on the roof lost their balance and quietly fell onto the tracks, their deaths unsurprising.
“Have you heard?” the passengers who had managed to squeeze into the train at the station in Myrhorod, not far from Poltava already, were crying excitedly. “There’s a revolution in St. Petersburg! The tsar’s abdicated!”
A clamor arose. Some soldiers couldn’t hold back their tears.
“The end of the war!”
“Freedom!”
“Freedom!”
It was February 1917. Euphoria was spreading through the air like some toxic, vexatious bacillus. There was bedlam in Kyiv too. Through the efforts of predominantly leftist autonomist circles, the Tsentralna Rada—the Central Council—was formed there, becoming a first Ukrainian parliament of sorts. On March 17, the history professor Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, who had been arrested at the start of the war, was elected its chairman. Now Hrushevskyi was hurrying to Kyiv from exile to commence fulfilling his duties.
The time to act had arrived, Lypynskyi had no doubt. Serhii Shemet, a cloth factory owner and likable patriot from the noble Ukrainian family of Shemet-Kezhhailo, bearers of the Lebid coat of arms, was waiting for Lypynskyi at the train station in Poltava.
“We need to organize into a political movement!” Serhii Shemet declared. Serhii’s younger brother Mykola had studied with Lypynskyi in Kraków and later, in 1905, had been the founder of the first Ukrainian newspaper in the Russian Empire, Khliborob. Tsarist reactionaries had imprisoned a Shemet brother for this newspaper, just not Mykola, but Volodymyr Shemet, the oldest of the three, who then developed a severe delusional disorder that he was forever being followed and persecuted. Now Volodymyr was being treated in a clinic for the mentally ill. To everyone’s surprise, Mykola became an officer and fought on the side of the Tsar’s army, while Serhii Shemet, the likable patriot, engineer, and factory owner, energetically engaged in political activity.
Serhii was a man of tall stature, with unusually straight posture, as if he had been fitted with an oak plank instead of a spine and, hapless, couldn’t bend down even if he had wanted to. He barely moved his neck, didn’t turn his head, and never lowered it; in order to check if a phaeton driving past had spattered the hem of his topcoat, Shemet would fold at the waist to almost ninety degrees just to keep his neck, wrapped in an elegant white collar, straight. His eyes were little, his teeth were large—overall, he looked a bit like a rodent—and later, because of his gnawing character, it would be said that appearances are never deceiving.
Now Serhii Shemet was persuading Lypynskyi to become a member of the newly formed Democratic Agrarian Party.
“To the best of my knowledge, Viacheslav Kazymyrovych,” he said, “our views regarding the unconditional independence of Ukraine are fully aligned.”
“Yes,” Lypynskyi answered, “but the paths to take to this independence matter. Democrats, as you call yourselves, have never built a state out of nothing anywhere in the world. Only strong Ukrainian monarchical rule will be able to keep our land from chaos right now.”
“And where will you enjoin us to look for a Ukrainian monarch? Perhaps we should borrow one from the Germans or the Austrians?”
Lypynskyi didn’t yet have an answer to this question. He ruminated over Shemet’s proposal for some time and finally decided to write the party statute, in the margins of which he scratched four words: “Honor, discipline, idealism, nobleness.” No one understood the purpose of those words.
“before engaging in community work, the spirit of one’s internal ruins must be overcome,” Lypynskyi would say, more to himself than to his fellow party members. “One’s internal wild steppe must be tamed.”
Unexpectedly, an incredible calm enveloped Lypynskyi. His body temperature normalized, and the world of Cyclopes turned back into a world of normal people who yearned for change. The time for action had arrived, he decided: it was now or never. His long-standing dream of being witness to the emergence of a Ukrainian state was on the verge of being realized. Lypynskyi couldn’t and had no right to stand on the sidelines.
The tragedy of his personal life retreated to the very edge of his soul, into the Tartarus abyss where, according to Greek mythology, the rebelling Titans had been cast. Lypynskyi peeped in there less and less often, and to the frequent queries about his wife he replied succinctly, “God gives familial happiness to some, and not to others. I wasn’t given any.”
In June 1917, the first congress of the Democratic Agrarian Party took place not far away in Lubny, attended by over a thousand delegates.
In Poltava, Lypynskyi would wake up at five o’clock in the morning and work on his writing projects. At ten, he’d meet with like-minded acquaintances or those he wanted to sway to his side. After lunch, Lypynskyi would carefully study the press and the arguments of his political opponents, particularly the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats who were now in power in Kyiv and—wooing with their revolutionary slogans of “Down with the masters!” and “Land to the peasants without buybacks!”— were fostering hopes of autonomy for Ukraine in the framework of a democratic Russia. Lypynskyi didn’t believe that Russia—even if a democratic one—would be loyal to Ukraine. In the evening, he’d write letters, sometimes twenty at a time, in which he polished his political views. The Bolshevik coup that autumn put an end to autonomist Ukrainian politics, which had envisioned Ukraine’s future within a democratic Russia, and in January 1918 the Central Council proclaimed the full independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, with Hrushevskyi as its president. Four days later, the Red Army occupied Kyiv.
Putting his officer rank to use, Lypynskyi actively Ukrainianized tsarist military units by appealing to individual soldiers’ national identity, though, as one of his contemporaries noted, “the Bolsheviks had better slogans than the Ukrainians.” The poorer peasants, who had nothing before then, rallied into gangs and created mini-revolutions wherever they happened to live, burning down the estates of landowners and wealthier, property-owning peasants everywhere. The powerlessness of the Central Council of the Ukrainian People’s Republic only invigorated the general chaos, and it was proposed that President Mykhailo Hrushevskyi be strung up on the building where the council met, in lieu of a coat of arms.
in april 1918, a local Bolshevik gang neared Lypynskyi’s manor, and the watchman Levko Zanuda came out to meet them with a bayonet.
“Move over, old man, this estate is subject to nationalization. It now belongs to the people.”
“In order to socialize it,” said the old man with the beard that resembled a lion’s mane, “you’ll have to step over my corpse first.”
“If that’s what you want, then here you go,” said Hryhorii Velbivets, one of the attackers who happened to be from Zanuda’s home village, before cutting off the old man’s head with a saber. The head flew several meters through the air. At that same moment, the manor that Lypynskyi had built with such love for his family burst into flames. His hopes had long since burned away; now it was his library and archive burning, his unfinished fundamental political history of Ukraine, his letters, and the photographs of him and Kazimiera, which, unsurprisingly, he would regret losing the most.
He would dedicate his next book to his “loyal friend and good neighbor” Levko Zanuda, who, as he would describe it, had been killed by “evil and dark people.” Lypynskyi would often imagine the hairy head flying through the air; sometimes the head would appear in his dreams, winking with its bulging eyes as if to say, Don’t be afraid of anything, I’ll take vengeance on the miscreants, they’ll pay for everything yet. The miscreants, however, would remain unpunished, and the villager Velbivets, later an active Communist, would take pride in his deed till the end of his life, exaggerating how far his victim’s head flew more and more with each passing year.
in the spring of 1918, German forces liberated Kyiv, and on April 29, at an agrarian congress held in the theater building of the Kyiv Circus, a Ukrainian State headed by Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi was proclaimed. This former tsarist general was an indirect descendant of the final Cossack hetman from the eighteenth century, Ivan Skoropadskyi. Thus, a Ukrainian monarch had turned up on his own. He offered Viacheslav Lypynskyi a ministerial post, which he declined due to his poor health, saying that heading a Ukrainian embassy was the most he would be capable of. His ambassadorial candidacy was quickly approved, and Viacheslav Lypynskyi became the envoy of the Ukrainian State to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The once-mighty empire had only months left.
He embarked for Vienna alone. There was no one on the Kyiv platform on the other side of the window of his compartment; no one was seeing him off. His mother had just died in her sleep, and his brother was rebuilding the family’s country estate. Out of habit, Lypynskyi laid out before himself the books he intended to read on the journey, then started when a stranger poked his head into the compartment and immediately closed the door and left. Kyiv’s hills slowly receded into the distance and, with them, the country whose birth Lypynskyi had so eagerly awaited.
It was so cold in the train car at night that Lypynskyi had to request an additional blanket. He was coughing. They passed the Russian–Austro-Hungarian border quickly. In Lviv, the train stopped for an hour, and Lypynskyi got off to stretch his legs. In Kraków, when the train stopped for half an hour, he didn’t exit the car; he didn’t even glance out the window. He arrived in Vienna early in the morning. He walked out into the Northwest Train Station and, to escape the begging cripples, immediately hired a carriage to Hotel Bristol.
“who is this lypynskyi?” my third golden-haired man asked me. I remember that day very well. It was a Friday afternoon. I was lying in bed, surrounded by books and newspapers on all sides, and my head was muddled with all the information that I was swallowing like sea plankton, by millions of tons at a time, unable to satiate myself.
“Why are you studying his life in such detail?”
“There are just certain things about him that I find very interesting,” I replied.
“You haven’t gone out in three months. This isn’t normal.”
Only then did I notice that the man had put on his coat and was waiting to tell me something important.
“Are you meeting up with someone?”
“No, I’m just leaving. I can’t do this anymore. You need professional help.”
Our gazes met a few times. The man’s sky-blue eyes were murky and filled with pain, even despondency.
“Don’t do this,” I pleaded. “Don’t leave me. I love you. I want to marry you.”
“When I leave, you’ll be forced to reach out for help. You need help, don’t you understand that? You’re sick.”
He leaned down to hug me, but I didn’t move. I heard the door to the apartment open and close, and listened as the footsteps on the stairs grew more distant. My chest was pounding wildly. Unable to bear it, I jumped out of bed and went after him barefoot. I opened the door and ran down to the first floor. I darted outside. I shouted his name; I was screaming, I think. My eyes went dark; the world became plasticky like a toy; then everything turned upside down as if I were standing on my head. Under my feet, the blue sky dangled.
I exhaled and frantically tried to inhale but couldn’t. I leaned against the wall and helplessly sank to my knees. The man was nowhere in sight; maybe he had gotten into a cab.
“Are you okay?” I heard a voice above me. It was the very fat woman from the building opposite mine. Her shaggy little white dog came running up and licked my face.
“Help me back into my apartment, please,” I whispered.
The woman reached under my arms and helped me stand up.
“Maybe I should call an ambulance?” she asked with what even seemed like worry.
“Yes, call an ambulance. I don’t feel well at all. I’m very sick.”