he was painful to look at. This city of relentless wind had now transformed into a city of endless frost. By 1920, it seemed as though the war had sucked all the life out of him, all the warmth, leaving only a chitinous shell over him, like from a long-dead insect. The magnificent Viennese palaces stuck out amid the poverty and misery like the idols of yore—mute witnesses to a past lavishness. From a distance, the green chariots jutting from the roofs of the government structures that lined the Ringstraße looked like moss-covered crosses in littered, neglected cemeteries. Which dignitaries and functionaries were lying in these cemeteries and why had long been forgotten. The uniforms, blue as the sky, had disappeared; the elegantly dressed, carefree crowds milling in the streets had disappeared; pedestrians swiftly passed by in threadbare clothing and with troubled countenances. Everyone in the city was cold and hungry, even the animals in the imperial zoo. Wine and water were the only sustenance available to everyone. Coal and bread were now the most sought-after commodities, worth their weight in gold. The society women of Vienna were ready to sell their bodies and souls for them. Their husbands had either died or been maimed in battle for the sake of the now-dead Austro-Hungarian Empire and, short an arm or a leg, were begging outside the churches. Any healthy man spotted walking down the street was likely either a Hochstapler—a swindler and a fraud—or some emigrant. There were more of the latter in Vienna now than there was sewage in the Danube.
Just a few years earlier, in the local cafés, writers and philosophers, artists and architects, psychologists and composers—the entire bloom of that majestic imperial epoch that World War I had definitively brought to an end—had been writing, drinking, conversing, and lazily awaiting the onset of a new era. Georg Trakl and Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav Klimt and Otto Wagner, Joseph Roth and Hugo von Hofmannsthal—all of them sat here. Sigmund Freud smoked his twenty daily cigars in Café Central. Leo Trotsky played chess. They lived and created here, listing the cafés as their return postal addresses. But when the era that everyone had so been waiting for finally arrived, those that had been most eager for its arrival would prove the least likely to witness it, some dying and others simply leaving.
The poet and addict Georg Trakl, unable to forget the inhuman carnage near the Ukrainian town of Horodok outside Lviv, ingested a lethal dose of cocaine in November 1914. The artist Oskar Kokoschka took a bullet in the head near Lutsk, and survived, but never returned to Vienna. In 1918, the artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele died a few months apart—the latter from the devastating Spanish flu epidemic, at just twenty-eight years old.
Viennese cafés abruptly emptied. Vacant tables appeared, and newcomers, mostly foreigners, unceremoniously grabbed the seats. These were the previously unnoticed people who the mighty wave of war had scraped from the bottom of the great empire and pushed out onto the surface of its ruins. Ukrainians, for example. Had anyone even heard of them just a few years earlier?
the chief of vienna’s police, Johann Schober, had conscientiously reported to Count Burián, the imperial foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, the arrival of the Ukrainian diplomatic mission and that it had taken up residence at Hotel Bristol. Count Burián didn’t believe in Ukraine, but at noon on July 5, 1918, he had met with the envoy of the newly created Ukrainian State, Viacheslav Lypynskyi, and personally accepted his credentials.
“How’s the situation on the eastern front?” he had asked his cachectic guest, though he knew perfectly well the latest news from his ambassador in Kyiv, Count János Forgách. The war was ending, and each state, as it ratified peace treaties, was trying to haggle whatever it could from whoever it was negotiating with. At the negotiations in Brest-Litovsk early that year, the Ukrainian mission had insisted on the partition of Halychyna and the integration of its eastern part, with its predominantly Ukrainian population, into Ukraine. An appropriate pact between Austria-Hungary and the UPR had been signed. But Count Burián was in no rush to put it into effect because he had already promised Eastern Halychyna to the Poles. (Within months, the original copy of the pact would be secretly burned in Berlin, and Envoy Lypynskyi would find himself sending official letters of protest wherever he could in vain.)
“We’re waiting, Your Excellency Mr. Minister, for the ratification of the peace accord,” Lypynskyi began firmly. “Regarding the matter of the division of Halychyna, we’re taking a principled stand. Its eastern part ought to go to Ukraine.”
Such directness piqued Count Burián. “And we’re waiting for Ukrainian grain!”
“It’s growing, noble sir. The harvesting will be soon. There’ll be enough Ukrainian wheat for everyone, I assure you of that.”
When the guest had taken his leave, Count Burián summoned Schober. “Keep an eye on him,” he advised his chief of police. “Especially who he’s meeting with and what he’s discussing. To whatever extent possible, check his mail, particularly encrypted telegrams. And spell out for me in a separate report who in the world these Ukrainians are. I’ve never even heard of them, yet suddenly here they are out of nowhere!”
“Count Lypynskyi is a Pole, Mr. Minister,” Schober remarked courteously. “I reported on him to you last week.”
“A count? A Pole? Why is he so fixated on Halychyna being part of Ukraine?”
“I’ll try to find out.”
“Please, do find out. But write more briefly, Schober. I don’t have the time to read your novels.”
Schober and Count Burián were externally similar, like two drops of water. They differed in that one of them, a haughty and pompous aristocrat, was nearing the end of his career without suspecting it yet (in a few months’ time, Austria-Hungary would fall, and he’d sink along with it into the ignominious past), while the other, the product of a modest family with many children, was just beginning his career. An ordinary policeman, Schober would twice hold the post of federal chancellor of the young Republic of Austria, subsequently serving as vice chancellor as well.
on behalf of austria’s foreign ministry, Schober tended to the “matter of the Ukrainians” personally from the very beginning. Outside of Ukraine, Schober was likely the only person who had a consummate understanding of Ukrainian politics and attached at least some significance to it. Between the lines of Schober’s dry, meticulous reports to the ministry, a faint fondness toward the object of his surveillance was discernible, possibly for the simple reason that a hopeless pursuit always looks beautiful. At first glance, the formation of a Ukrainian state did indeed look beautiful; it was just a pity that few were able to fully appreciate its subtle aesthetics.
In his reports to the leadership of the new Austrian republic, Schober wrote that the withdrawal of German forces from Kyiv had left Hetman Skoropadskyi alone with and at the mercy of revolutionary forces. A few days after the fall of Austria-Hungary, in early winter of 1918, the troops of Otaman Symon Petliura (a journalist, no military education, a neutral-to-negative personal reputation) had captured Kyiv and proclaimed the restoration of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The government of the UPR was named the Directorate, and Volodymyr Vynnychenko (a writer with radical views, no military education, loyal to Bolshevism, a hysteric) was appointed its first head. The Ukrainian monarchy had fallen, not lasting even a year, and Ukrainian anarchy had taken its place.
Surveilling Envoy Lypynskyi, Schober saw how he was increasingly cowering and bending before the foreign powers, like a tree whose trunk was softening from excessive heat. The news of the change of power in Ukraine caused a boil to form on Lypynskyi’s neck, which began to fester, and during a minor operation, the doctors discovered gangrene. They had to cut all the way to the throat. The patient spent a month after that sitting bandaged up in his hotel; after recovering, he resumed his diplomatic work even though the state whose diplomat he was—the Ukrainian State, or the Second Hetmanate—no longer existed.
Lypynskyi received guests and looked for funds, passports, and visas for various delegations, missions, and political refugees, more and more of whom were arriving in Vienna with each day. In Lviv, after a quick overthrow, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic had been formed, also in November 1918, but the advance of Polish troops soon forced its government to cede city after city. By the autumn of 1919, the government of this state—together with its new dictator, appointed a few months prior to head an emergency government—finally ended up in exile in Vienna as well. The embassy of the WUPR rented rooms in the Zita-Hof Building on Mariahilferstraße, and the WUPR’s dictator Yevhen Petrushevych (private address: Laudongasse 28/8, 8th District) would for a number of years still cherish naïve dreams and hold talks with the rulers of neighboring countries in hopes of securing assistance in the fight against the Poles. The army of Halychyna, which had previously fought side by side with the UPR, made an unexpected alliance with Anton Denikin’s supporters, the anti-Bolshevik White Russians, whereupon the Directorate of the UPR—possibly out of revenge—tried to gain the support of the Poles at the price of Halychyna. In sacrificing Ukraine’s western territories, Petliura, now the president of the UPR, hoped to save at least some lands for Ukraine. A terrible conflict erupted between the elites of Halychyna and Greater Ukraine, which put an end to efforts to unite Ukraine’s central and eastern lands with its western ones.
late one evening, an exhausted Lypynskyi returned to his hotel suite, and the porter obligingly helped him with his outer garments, whispering in his ear that some strangers were waiting for him in his private rooms, probably with requests for favors or help.
“Be careful, Mr. Envoy, these people didn’t give their names. Maybe they’re Bolsheviks, come here to kill you. They have these funny hats, like the Tatars from Mongolia.”
“Have you ever even seen Tatars from Mongolia, my friend?” Lypynskyi asked half-jokingly.
“I haven’t, but that’s about how I always imagined them.”
The guests were laughing boisterously. They were wearing two mink coats apiece; decorative silver tableware and cutlery grabbed hurriedly as they fled Ukraine jingled in their bags; and a few gold chains each with huge gold crosses lay heavily on the women’s necks and ample breasts. The “great migration of peoples”—the mass “exodus” of Ukrainian democracy—was in full swing.
in starving vienna, these newcomers from Ukraine behaved like grand seigneurs, throwing around state funds in hotels and restaurants and having such fun that Ukrainians began to be viewed as some rich nation—about as rich as Americans but markedly less cultured. Their ill repute became so firmly fixed that for a while Viennese hoteliers refused to admit people with Ukrainian passports at all.
The new revolutionary government in Ukraine considered Lypynskyi a cursed landowner and a Polish scoundrel but didn’t bother him, either acknowledging his professional qualities or simply not having the time to be picky, occupied as it was up to its ears with continual wars with the Bolsheviks, Denikin supporters, Poles, and intra-Ukrainian otamans. Kyiv, like a loose woman, changed hands over ten times during this tumultuous period, and each new seizure ended in bloody purges of the predecessors. There were days when the Kyivans didn’t know who was in charge of the city—the Ukrainians, the anti-Bolshevik Russian Whites, or the Bolshevik Russian Reds. And inevitably, Kyivans who welcomed the coming of the first, the second, or the third could always be found.
Finally, in January 1919, the government of the UPR was forced to evacuate Kyiv in its entirety and never return again. The last train with the remnants of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, all involved in one way or another in the struggle for independence, left the capital a little over a year later, in June 1920. This train traveled slowly, traversing every kilometer with incredible difficulty, waiting out shelling at destroyed stations and, now and then, rebuilding with the hands of its own passengers the destroyed railbed. Some train cars were missing flooring, to say nothing of windows or bedding. At the forced stops, secretaries, publishers, and writers, accompanied by wives and children, suffering from hunger and thirst, fetched water in little bowls from neighboring villages and solicited hunks of bread from the dubious populace. The villagers, exhausted by the endless combat, didn’t trust anyone anymore. What’s more, the word “Petliurites,”—as these members of Symon Petrliura’s UPR Directorate were called—no longer aroused sincerely patriotic feelings in them, as it had previously. Now that word elicited fear and condemnation because the Petliurites always retreated, and the power void they left would always get filled by the Bolsheviks, who always shot and killed.
in vienna, another envoy with the word “Ukrainian” in his title appeared in 1920—Yurko Kotsiubynskyi, the envoy of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the son of the now-deceased eminent Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi. He scoured the Austrian capital in a commissar’s leather coat and persuaded the floundering Ukrainian emigrants to return home to help build the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, which had been proclaimed in Kharkiv the preceding year—for the time being, as he would say, the only legitimate republic in Ukraine. To many Ukrainians, national communism really was starting to seem like a not-so-horrible political alternative, all the more so because the former Ukrainian leaders had long since fled to Austria and lived either in Vienna, like Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, the chairman of the Central Council (private address: Klostergasse 10, 6th District) or in Semmering, a former imperial health resort, like the author Vynnychenko. They considered Russian Bolshevism their closest ally, even when this “ally” had entered Kyiv in tanks with “Death to Ukrainians!” signs and ousted them into exile. Now Ukrainian leaders were puffing cigars in Viennese cafés, continuing to develop socialist ideas in front of a group of unpracticed students, “babies,” as the local journalists quipped.
About Vynnychenko, the journalists wrote that “it won’t be a pity if the Bolsheviks hang him as a politician because he did Ukraine a lot of harm as a politician; but as a writer, it will be a pity, as there are so few writers in Ukraine.” “It is more practical,” the press would rejoin about Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, the former master of Ukrainian historiography, “for the esteemed professor to enlighten bourgeois Europe with the light of socialism from the Herrenhof than have to endure it firsthand.”
The Herrenhof was a café on Herrengasse in Vienna. The left wing of the Ukrainian emigrants would gather there at noon. Their opponents—the independent democrats or individuals without a distinct ideological position—would take their seats an hour later in Café Central across the street. In one of the alcoves of the Tsentralka, as the latter was called by the Ukrainians, Viktor Pisniachevskyi (a physician, bacteriologist, and journalist; poor vision; a charismatic and hot-tempered rabble-rouser; private address: Majolikahaus, Linke Wienzeile 40/38, 6th District) was assembling an editorial staff for his newly founded weekly Volia (Freedom). At this time of day on Herrengasse, the Ukrainian language completely drowned out German. Pisniachevskyi ruled in the Tsentralka like some governing premier. Everyone who wanted an audience with him, while waiting their turn, sipped dreadful-tasting coffee with wet red sugar at the nearby tables.
In the first issue of the weekly, Pisniachevskyi—tall, skinny, with thin whiskers and a pince-nez, sharp of tongue and chin—wrote to his readers, emigrants just like him: “Far away in this foreign land, in days of ‘grief and tribulation,’ in ‘days of scatteredness,’ we begin our difficult work. Much of the Ukrainian intelligentsia have dispersed throughout the cultured world. They live here and there, some of their own free will and others involuntarily, plodding at their jobs and, like bees from flowers, collecting real-world experience into their own hives. But the time of liberation will come. The bees will rise into the air and fly off in great swarms to their native apiary.”
Over a dozen such periodicals arose in Vienna at that time. They could be purchased, along with freshly published Ukrainian books, at the Goldschmidt Bookstore at Wollzeile 12 in the 1st District. Every political force and every embassy, using the funds they had taken with them while fleeing Ukraine, produced some newspaper in which it fervently waged war against its political opponents. The pages of these newspapers witnessed the birth, development, and death of ideas that would never come to fruition and often weren’t even useful. The bees themselves would never see their native apiary again.
in the spring of 1919, Lypynskyi ventured on a short trip to Halychyna, which would be his final one to the region. He wanted to speak with the senior leadership of the UPR—those who hadn’t fled yet—and see with his own eyes what was actually going on. Stanislaviv, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, remained virtually the only city under Ukrainian rule. There, in Hotel Union, Lypynskyi met with Colonel Petro Bolbochan, whom Otaman Petliura had been keeping under house arrest for many months now on suspicion of preparing a revolt against him. Lypynskyi, on the other hand, considered Bolbochan one of the best and most professional Ukrainian military men, of which there were few in the Ukrainian army.
As a sign of protest, the detained Bolbochan wrote an open letter addressing the leadership of the UPR: “We’re fighting Bolshevism, the entire cultured world is rising to fight it, and yet the newly established Ukrainian government is going out to greet it! Here you are pushing yourselves into the top ranks of global politics as ministers, otamans, and leaders of a large state when you don’t even understand the simplest things in life.”
In early June, an impromptu military court sentenced Bolbochan to death, and with Otaman Petliura’s approval, the sentence was carried out with two shots to the head from a revolver. Lypynskyi had already returned to Vienna by that time. He received news of the colonel’s murder via telegram in the lobby of Hotel Bristol. It was crowded—some large delegation was checking in—so few noticed how Lypynskyi, losing his balance for a moment, sank down onto a sofa upholstered in red satin by the window and began to weep bitterly. A stranger walked up to him and silently handed him a handkerchief. Lypynskyi wiped his tears and blew his nose.
“Thank you, dear sir, my nerves are completely shot. Leave your address, and my maid will send you the handkerchief washed and ironed.”
“There’s no need,” the stranger replied. “Keep it.”
Glancing at his Good Samaritan, Lypynskyi exclaimed in surprise, “You bear an incredible resemblance to Count Burián, the minister of foreign affairs of Austria-Hungary!”
“I don’t even know who that is,” Schober mumbled, and disappeared into the crowd.
At that moment, Schober was fulfilling his task of gathering information about the well-known Ukrainian figures who had found refuge in Vienna, so his superiors could know their plans. Schober compiled a table, listing each figure’s name and, alongside it, their address, the position they had held in Ukraine and which party they belonged to, their personal characteristics, contacts, and whether they were a possible threat to Austria. The list was six pages long. For greater clarity, Schober Germanized the Ukrainian names, though not always uniformly: Andrii became Andrei one time, Andreas another, Mykhailo—Michael, Hryhorii—Gregor, Mykola—Nikolaus, Ivan—Johann, Osyp—Josef. Only Lypynskyi for some reason was left with his hard-earned Viacheslav. The columns next to his name noted: former envoy, resigned due to disagreement with the political direction of the UPR, ill, doesn’t pose a risk, place of residence still unknown.
Lypynskyi was immediately removed from surveillance.
lypynskyi really had grown very sick. With the last of his funds, he left for Baden for treatment at Gutenbrunn Sanatorium, where he would consider what to do next. He couldn’t return to Ukraine because he would have been immediately shot for his work in Hetman Skoropadskyi’s government. He couldn’t afford to remain abroad. His wife had reached out from Kraków and asked for money; she and his daughter were almost starving. Lypynskyi promised to think of something.
In the meantime, a reception of the Ukrainian press was held in the Kursalon music hall in the Stadtpark, Vienna’s large central park, in honor of the UPR’s new envoy to the Austrian government, who expressed “hope for the imminent victory of the Ukrainian cause.”
“All people, without exception, seem crazy to me,” Lypynskyi wrote to Yevhen Chykalenko, who had just lost all his money and property and would soon move to Vienna as well. “But maybe I’m mistaken, and I’m the one that’s crazy? What else is there to hope for? Ukraine no longer exists. . . .
“Nonstate pigs can’t be refashioned into state eagles,” Lypynskyi wrote to his friend. “It’s a nation of churls, wreckers, and ‘fourleggers,’ no better than animals.”
Lypynskyi had thought up the word “fourleggers” himself, just as he had the word “selfstatelessness.” He flaunted his neologisms in conversations with his new maid Fin Yulí.
A feeling of absolute defeat coated everything around him: the streets, the people Lypynskyi met, even himself. The defeat tasted like fine sand. Lypynskyi would take in a mouthful of it and grind his teeth at night, trying to spit it out, instead biting the insides of his cheeks until they bled. At times attacks of uncontrollable sobbing would overwhelm him, and in such moments Lypynskyi felt like a good-for-nothing worm, a failure who had lost everything that had ever been his. His dream had been right there in his hand—not paradise on earth, just his own independent state—but it had been snatched away from him and trampled by people who never understood its value.
Lypynskyi’s university friend Mykola Shemet, an officer in the UPR’s army, upon receiving an order to shoot at his rebelling compatriots near Lubny, shot himself instead.
Though he had an aversion to weapons (as well as to umbrellas), Lypynskyi regretted that he hadn’t kept some sort of pistol at his disposal. A bullet in the temple would have helped him too, finally quelling this unbearable internal pain that returned every morning as soon as he opened his eyes and held him in a tight embrace until he once more sank into a heavy, stone-like sleep.
“I wanted to become a stone, but I’ll become sand instead,” he’d say to himself. “I’ll scatter ingloriously, I’ll vanish in the tiniest crevices of time, and no one will remember me because failures are the first to be forgotten. No one will tell the story of how vigorously I strove for victory and what I sacrificed for it, but there will undoubtedly be those who will write how loudly I cried and will relish how briefly I’ll be mourned.”
“Mr. Envoy!” an unfamiliar voice called out to Lypynskyi just as he was departing to the sanatorium for treatment. “Mr. Lypynskyi!”
A short, stooped man with almost no hair on his head but with a thick ruddy mustache was standing next to the exit. The furious porter was trying in vain to get rid of him.
“I’ve already told you that there’s nothing worth waiting for here, that the gentleman is no longer an envoy!”
“Who are you?” Lypynskyi asked, addressing the ruddy-mustached man.
“Mykhailo Petrovych Savur-Tsyprianovych,” the man introduced himself desperately. “I’m a secretary. I worked in the office of the Ministry of Education under the Directorate government. We were evacuated in full from Kyiv.”
“What languages do you know?”
“I know German, French, and Russian.”
“Do you know Ukrainian?”
“It’s my native tongue.”
“Come visit me at the Gutenbrunn Sanatorium in Baden, just south of Vienna, in a month. I lost in politics, so maybe I’ll write something worthwhile. If we reach an agreement, you can be my secretary. I’m looking for one right now. I can’t pay much, but it’ll be better than nothing.”
Tsyprianovych thanked him. His eyes welled with dog tears of devotion, but he brushed them away with the sleeve of his frayed frock coat. The hotel door swung open from a strong gust of wind, and Lypynskyi exited, covering his face with his hands. A carriage was waiting for him. Vienna’s Central Train Station receded in the distance. Ahead of Lypynskyi, a desolate scorched wasteland was already opening up.
many years later, in July 1927, another chance encounter would take place in this same hotel at Ringstraße 1. En route from Berlin to Styria, Lypynskyi would make a stopover in the familiar walls to recover a bit. He’d be in the process of carrying in his belongings when heavily armed police units would come marching down the street toward the Parliament Building. A staid man would watch the procession through the lobby window.
“There’s unrest, a lot of unrest,” the worried porter would say to Lypynskyi. “Who knows what will happen?”
A bit later, panicked screams and loud gunfire would be heard from outside. Dense black smoke would come rolling in from the direction of Maria-Theresien-Platz. The staid man, who would look horribly familiar to Lypynskyi, would continue to soak up the events outside the window with expressionless eyes.
“The Palace of Justice is on fire!” people would be shouting from that direction. “There’s shooting! Many dead!”
Some nimble courier would come running into the hotel and hand the staid man a note. The man would read it quickly and hide it in the pocket of his well-tailored, expensive suit jacket. He’d stand there for another minute, as if paralyzed. And then he’d feebly sink onto the sofa upholstered in red satin and begin to weep bitterly. Lypynskyi would hand him his handkerchief.
“Thank you,” the man would say. “My nerves are failing me.”
An indelible bloodstain would creep across the impeccable career of the two-time chancellor and longtime chief of the Vienna police. Despite numerous reservations, Schober would give permission for the use of weaponry during a mass demonstration against an unjust court verdict. Eighty-nine innocent people would be killed.
“Are you in Vienna for long, Mr. Lypynskyi?” Schober would suddenly inquire, after blowing his nose and wiping away his tears.
Lypynskyi would shake his head energetically: “By no means, dear sir. I’m just passing through for one night. Living in Vienna, with my lungs, is pure suicide. There are always winds blowing here . . .” He’d start coughing. “Where do you know me from, sir?”
But Schober would be gone. That same evening, after dinner, Lypynskyi would find the laundered and ironed handkerchief with his initials on it in his hotel room.