“this is the regimen: you can’t consume salt, all manner of canned goods, sausage, salo, vinegar, Maggi seasoning, or vodka.
“You can consume, but in limited quantities, meat (at most three hundred grams per week), fresh fish, black pepper, beer, coffee, and tea (with just enough milk to color it, no more).
“You can consume milk (up to one and a half liters per day) and all other dairy products, provided they’re unsalted. Eat as much produce as possible too. All baked goods must be without salt, including bread. Eggs, sugar, and honey are allowed.
“In lieu of salt, use garlic, onions, mint, bay leaves, horseradishes, lemons, marjoram, parsley, and other root herbs.”
This “sans diet” distracted and protected Lypynskyi from his memories. Solitude became his everyday norm; illnesses became his escape from the life that had dealt him a crushing defeat. Being ill meant being preoccupied, which, in turn, meant feeling less. The pain his body suffered soothed his incorporeal pain—the one that was a hundredfold harder to endure.
Lypynskyi went into hiding in the foothills of the Alps, in the resort town of Reichenau, where he survived on the twenty dollars that his brother sent him monthly from Zaturtsi. Mountains were the favorite domicile of tubercular consumptives. Sometimes the payments were delayed because Stanisław didn’t have enough for himself or the harvest was poor. Then Lypynskyi would tighten his belt even more and feverishly work on his Letters to My Agrarian Brethren, viewing writing as the only means by which he could potentially earn money. Physical work was no longer an option for him.
contrary to popular hopes, Bolshevism persisted in Ukraine and had no intention of caving; the much-awaited “breathing space” that its demise would have brought was a long time in coming. Meanwhile, Eastern Halychyna was definitively subsumed by Poland. Those who had once been great became nobodies. Conversations died out, plans were wrecked, money ran out, and newspapers shut down. Of the Viennese newspapers, the socialist Nova Hromada (New Community), which the Bolsheviks continued to finance through 1925 for propaganda purposes, survived the longest. But there was no one left to read it. Through the irony of fate, the newspaper’s enthusiastic publisher, the ardent communist Semen Vityk, would eventually become a victim of Stalinist repressions himself, dying in a gulag labor camp.
Otaman Petliura, the military commander and former head of the UPR’s Directorate, moved to Paris. There he rented a secret apartment without a kitchen in the Latin Quarter. He subsisted on eggplants and coffee, the cheapest diet he could come up with. On May 25, 1926, at 14:10, he paused next to a bookstore on the corner of Rue Racine and Boulevard Saint-Michel to look at a window display and received seven bullets from the revolver of emigrant Sholom Schwartzbard, ostensibly out of revenge for the Jewish pogroms committed by the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. A great epoch was ending, leaving behind no traces.
The regulars’ tables of Ukrainian refugees in Vienna broke up, and former ministers and military commanders scattered throughout European cities or headed overseas to North or South America. Correspondence between old friends revived only on Christmas or Easter, dying away before long for once and for all. The most courageous—or the most naïve—returned home, to the now Ukrainian SSR, which had joined the new Soviet Union as one of its original four republics in 1922. They returned home fearfully and at their own risk, and were soon shot dead by Soviet authorities for alleged membership in nonexistent counter-revolutionary organizations.
Lypynskyi had no intention of returning to Ukraine. His estate, inherited from Uncle Rokicki, had been nationalized and was no longer his, and in 1925 his uncle had also been forced to flee headlong with his wife. The Bolsheviks had swiftly confiscated his uncle’s jumping horses for the needs of the revolution and were supposed to come back any day to confiscate the man himself. The only thing that is known for certain is that the Rokicki forded the Zbruch River—the border waterway between Poland and the newly formed Soviet Union—but never resurfaced abroad. The couple simply vanished. Yet another tragedy with which Lypynskyi was forced to live. His family was being rooted out, and he too was turning from a flowering plant into an unneeded weed.
even though lypynskyi’s manner of thought was more than rational, he transferred the question of his own purpose and the pain of political defeat onto a religious and spiritual plane, in order to save himself from self-destructive despair. He wrote in his little breast-pocket notebook that he hadn’t come upon the idea of Ukrainianness himself, that it had come to him on its own, it had come from God, and if God had designated him to do this work, that meant it was necessary to his design. It wasn’t for Lypynskyi’s intellect to question God’s design.
His daughter, who was growing up in Kraków, thought otherwise. Like Kazimiera, she couldn’t forgive her father for his decision to prioritize Ukraine’s independence above all else, and refused all contact with him.
“It’s Kazimiera instigating her,” Lypynskyi would complain to his housekeeper Fin Yulí, so enraged he trembled. Again and again, his letters to his daughter returned unopened.
Again and again, Lypynskyi’s body temperature rose sharply, and he would find himself sending postcards to cancel acquaintances’ visits or his own outings to Vienna, then take to his bed for several days, sometimes several weeks. Like that, lying in bed, he’d scribble off letters to some of the other four hundred people with whom he routinely corresponded.
The written correspondence of “the monarchist in Reichenau,” as Lypynskyi was known now among colleagues, reached an immense scale. Barely traveling anywhere, he coordinated the entire Hetmanate movement from the foothills of the Alps. Under the influence of Lypynskyi’s theoretical texts, this movement was gaining considerable popularity, particularly among Ukrainian émigrés. Supporters of the movement (the “like-minded members,” as he called them) bombarded him with questions, and Lypynskyi obligingly replied to each in detail, explaining the most minute nuances of a rather complex ideological system. For as long as his secretary Tsyprianovych was able to still decipher his chicken scratch, he typed out the letters on his typewriter. These impassioned missives later passed from hand to hand or were read aloud like true sacred writings at evening gatherings of Ukrainian émigrés as far away as Canada’s Hafford or as close by as Poděbrady in Czechia.
In some respects, Lypynskyi really did behave like the leader of a new faith, demanding from his disciples obedience, self-discipline, and a complete inner rebirth. Lypynskyi ventured so far as to offer instructions in areas that were none of his business: what a hetman-follower should read, who he should be friends with, how he should dress, and what he should dream about. What made him lose his composure the most was receiving questions from hetman-supporters in envelopes bearing addresses written with mistakes. When someone forgot a diacritical marker in the name of a little-known Czech town, Lypynskyi would explode in an angry tirade, saying that those kinds of mistakes only evoke irreverence toward the person who makes them. In his responses, Lypynskyi didn’t hesitate to seek pity for his health:
“Forgive my illegible writing, but I’m working lying down.”
“Someday I’ll ask Tsyprianovych to take a photograph of me as I’m writing a letter to you. That’ll give you an idea of how I take care of my correspondence now.”
“This spring [this winter/this autumn/this swelter] is simply killing me.”
a brief medical history of Lypynskyi would be as follows:
In 1920, he had an ocular ulceration and some sort of pleural effusion. In addition to that, he suffered from chronic fever and insomnia. He routinely broke out in sweats.
In January 1922, he fell ill with a severe flu.
In 1923, he had fits of “old age and neurasthenia.” He began treatment for tuberculosis with the drugs Elmizen, produced by Dr. Wojnowski in Warsaw, and Mineralogen, from a pharmacy in Berlin. He ordered five little bottles of each in syrup form by mail, which he sedulously drank every morning on an empty stomach. But it helped little. Lypynskyi closely monitored the latest medical discoveries and always maintained confidence that tuberculosis would be managed just like diabetes. Two Canadian doctors had just received the Nobel Prize for their discovery of insulin. But Lypynskyi wouldn’t live to see the discovery of the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. Only in 1952 would the American Selman Waksman, an emigrant from the Kyiv area, receive the Nobel Prize for streptomycin.
Some of Lypynskyi’s associates tried to intimate to the patient that his illnesses were psychological in nature. Osyp Nazaruk, the lawyer and journalist from Halychyna, who had suddenly become his closest pen pal, wrote from the United States that people like Lypynskyi were now referred to as “hypochondriacs” and were being successfully treated by means of autosuggestion. This required repeating sentences like, “I am healthy,” “The disease is diminishing,” and “Soon I will be completely well,” throughout the day.
“Those are pretty sentences,” Lypynskyi retorted exasperatedly, “but when there’s a hole in your lungs right above your heart that’s the size of a fist and another one on the other side that’s a little bit smaller, then repeat whatever you want, it won’t make the holes close up.” Then, as was typical of him, he immediately apologized: “It’s the illness that’s made me so sharp-tongued . . . Tell me whether or not you read what I write. If not, I’ll write less, but will do so more clearly.”
in 1925, lypynskyi stayed at the Wienerwald Sanatorium under the care of Hugo Kraus, a pulmonologist known throughout Europe, who confirmed that Lypynskyi’s lungs were very damaged, but reassured him that the tubercular process itself was langsam, that is, slow, and not acute, as the patient had previously thought. Lypynskyi spent all day long lying in the open air, quit all mental work, and was reviving well. It was then that an experimental method of treatment was tested on him: air was pumped into his lungs.
Lypynskyi put on three kilograms, though the intensive work on the preface to the full edition of his Letters quickly undid the small gains. Lypynskyi knew that this edition was his final battle, that with his personal war lost and his health steeply declining, he wouldn’t be able to write anymore; perhaps that’s why he pushed himself in the end. Progressive Ukrainian society was eagerly awaiting the publication of the book, in order to, famished, pounce at the expansive preface (the letters themselves had appeared earlier in periodicals), gulp it down in a matter of minutes, and, after swallowing it, hold their breath, unable to speak, and lie in wait with the presentiment of the incredible scandal that would inevitably erupt.
That same year, in 1926, another well-known book was published, namely, Nationalism by Dmytro Dontsov, Lypynskyi’s greatest opponent since their first meeting in the Polish town of Zakopane. A historic battle took place on the pages of these two publications, Letters to My Agrarian Brethren and Nationalism—between Lypynskyi, a champion of state slogans that would unite all residents of Ukraine in the interest of their common land, and Dontsov, editor of the Lviv-based Literary-Scientific Bulletin, who had suddenly gone from being an extreme leftist to an extreme rightist and become an ideologue of integral Ukrainian nationalism.
Despite Lypynskyi’s impassioned warnings, despite all his counterarguments and insults (in his preface he called Dontsov a skunk supreme who “sprays his internal fetid seepage on everything that stands in the way of taking advantage of Ukraine’s destruction”), it would be Dontsov’s book, and not Lypynskyi’s, that would become the bible for the next generation of Ukrainian youth, who would flail between socialist and nationalist ideologies like between the banks of a swift mountain river onto which few manage to clamber alive.
In his Letters, Lypynskyi’s admonishments were unsparing:
“In the foreboding that, after the destruction, the youth would turn to lofty idealism and political engagement, I begged all of you that we remain united and strong, to seize the ideological wave that approaches. This wave came, but to the detriment of Ukraine, it’s being seized by nationalists because those of us who hold truth in our hands are too rotten and too individualistic to seize this wave.”
“Without honor, discipline, idealism, and nobleness, which only monarchies can uphold, there’s no need to even dream about an independent Ukraine. Only on the axis of the Hetmanate can Ukrainians turn away from Poland and not swing back to Moscow. Without the Hetmanate, Ukraine can only remain a thick fog. Powerless, the fog will sometimes drift east, sometimes west, depending on who’s blowing on it, and you alone, the ‘Ukrainians’ of chaos and everlasting night, will feel comfortable in this fog.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t belong to the same ‘Ukrainian nation’ as you, and I won’t challenge your places in your cutthroat rivalries and pantheons.”
in 1926, lypynskyi lost eleven pounds all at once. At Skoropadskyi’s insistence, he relocated to Berlin, where the hetman had been living in exile for a number of years already, and accepted a position as a lecturer on the political history of Ukraine at the new Ukrainian Scientific Institute at 28 Französischen Strasse. The hetman wanted to have his maker within reach. But dealing with the maker was becoming increasingly difficult. Lypynskyi had become categorical, demanded an almost utopian morality from the Hetmanites and the hetman himself, rejected all compromises, and displayed enormous willpower, against which everyone else seemed like pusillanimous good-for-nothings. Evidently, theory was easier for the hetman-maker than practice.
People traveled just to have a look at Lypynskyi. Everyone had read his books, but few had seen him in real life. He would come out to meet his guests, “smiling amicably and nonchalantly, a man of medium height, attractive, with dark hair combed back, elegantly dressed, with military bearing,” as one of his visitors described him. His eyes gleamed feverishly; his cheeks were flushed. The guests didn’t believe that Lypynskyi was as sick as was said about him. They’d declare from the outset: “Your retinue, Mr. Lypynskyi, must love and value you very much if they exaggerate the poor state of your health so much.”
Lypynskyi would remain silent, a grimace frozen on his face. After each such visit, he wouldn’t get out of bed for several days. For Lypynskyi, displaying physical infirmity in front of strangers was unbefitting of a true Hetmanite. His secretary Tsyprianovych knew this opinion of Lypynskyi’s well but was by nature indecisive and taciturn. As such, he failed to forewarn Lypynskyi’s colleagues from the institute of this preference when they were organizing a lecture for him and, knowing about the tuberculosis, decided to cleverly facilitate his ascent up the stairs. The assembly hall where the lecture was to be held was located on the fourth floor. Everyone was already gathered and waiting for the speaker.
Lypynskyi was just walking up to the main door when four students holding a wheelchair ran out to meet him. Just like that, on a wheelchair, like some pharaoh on a golden throne, they were supposed to transport Lypynskyi upstairs.
He froze. His chest once again tightened and crackled, as it had back when he had fallen off his horse at his uncle’s racetrack. The feebleness of his body suddenly became both an insurmountable burden and a source of shame. A curse. A prison from which he couldn’t break free. Lypynskyi turned around and walked away. The lecture was canceled.
in 1928, lypynskyi began to refer to himself as a cripple, occasionally describing himself as a cripple lost in a desert. His Berlin doctors urged him to return to the mountains, and the patient, barely alive, left for Austria. His little house in Reichenau was already occupied by someone else (“My moving from there was a big mistake,” he would later write), and another one couldn’t be found in the area at an affordable price. He ended up having to look in Styria, which was cheaper. The search lasted several months, over the course of which Lypynskyi experienced an acute crisis and became convinced that now, at long last, he was at death’s door. Fin Yulí held his hand and wiped the sweat from his brow, as Kazimiera once had, while his loyal dog Tsyprianovych read aloud old letters from his closest friends. For instance, from Osyp Nazaruk, who had returned to Lviv and become the editor-in-chief of the religious newspaper Nova Zoria (New Star).
“You, esteemed and dear Mr. Envoy,” Tsyprianovych read, “completely underestimate the power of the ‘propaganda’ with which Moscow has felled our statehood for a second time now, meanwhile the billionaire Wrigley has accustomed an entire nation—a hundred million people—to chew gum in America! These are facts that need to be reckoned with.”
Lypynskyi smiled through his feverish daze and bade the secretary to send a postcard with his greetings to Lviv. He had been dissuaded from a friendship with Nazaruk on more than one occasion, but Lypynskyi liked those kinds of people—energetic and insufferably candid, just like him.
Finally, with a donation from a wealthy philanthropist from Canada and additional help from his brothers, he acquired a dilapidated cottage in a remote area near Graz, naming it das Sterbehaus, the “death house.” Out of all his medications, Dicodid alone helped—an opium-derivative drug that was significantly stronger than morphine.
“My brothers, Stanisław and Włodzimierz, who consider themselves Poles, bought me, a Ukrainian who was robbed by Ukrainians, this little house so that, living in a strange land, I would at least not have to die in a stranger’s house . . . To reach me, you must first travel from Vienna to Graz, and then take the train to the Lieboch station. Mr. Tsyprianovych will meet you there and help you get to the house. Please let me know if you enjoy walking and are able to do so: the walk from the station to my house in Badegg is about two kilometers. Otherwise, we’ll send a wagon because this place is a backwater with no carriages for hire.”
The cottage was single-story, with a small terrace that the housekeeper bestrewed with potted flowers. Lypynskyi occupied one wing—a room that served simultaneously as a bedroom and an office. In the middle stood a desk, which increasingly served the household as a dinner table. In the other wing, Fin Yulí occupied a smaller room, while the guest room, which was even more tiny, was occupied by Tsyprianovych. When guests visited, the secretary would relocate to the barn if it was warm or, if it was cold, to Fin Yulí’s room. The kitchen was located in the corridor between the two wings.
Lypynskyi would wake up very early, drink tea that he prepared himself—whenever he was able to—in an electric kettle gifted by Tsyprianovych for his forty-fifth birthday, then sit down to write. No one had the right to disturb him. He talked to himself while drafting letters. Sometimes he’d shout something in a spurt of anger; other times he’d become annoyed because he understood more and more what the world should be like and how people should live in it, but the world and its people—for some reason, as if on purpose—did everything contrariwise.
osyp nazaruk, lypynskyi’s favorite “pupil,” was the most resistant to Lypynskyi’s didactic ways. He’d publish articles in the newspaper he edited by people who, in his teacher’s opinion, were utterly undeserving. In one of his biting letters to Nazaruk, Lypynskyi suggested snidely that such behavior could be explained solely by material gain. On more than one occasion he had heard talk that Nazaruk was fond of easy money because he was very afraid of dying of hunger.
Once sweetly adulatory toward Lypynskyi and perfectly capable of managing his mentor’s brash communication style, in 1929 Nazaruk unexpectedly bared his teeth and bit down hard. Everyone was shocked.
“By accusing me of graft,” he said to certain people, who relayed everything verbatim to Lypynskyi, “the honorable envoy forgets that he himself received close to two hundred dollars many years ago from the government of Halychyna through my hands but never did write the history of Ukraine for schools as promised. I’m telling you this, and it’s the truth. You can quote me.”
It was a punch in the gut: Lypynskyi no longer had the strength to straighten himself up again. For him, who had sacrificed everything—even his family—for the sake of the Ukrainian idea, the accusation of misappropriating government funds was the greatest possible insult. He had accepted the financial assistance in the form of an honorarium for a school textbook only at the insistence of Nazaruk himself, and later tried to give back the money many times, but Nazaruk wouldn’t allow it, assuring him that Lypynskyi had long since paid off any debts to Ukrainians with his Letters.
The conflict detonated Lypynskyi and Nazaruk’s longtime friendship like an explosive. Outsiders watched its developments with curiosity and gaping mouths, some even getting dragged into it personally, but not a single soul stood up for Lypynskyi, not even his closest associates. In long letters to him, they offered evasive excuses, hinting that perhaps Lypynskyi really was a bit too harsh, perhaps it wasn’t worth being so categorical. To which Lypynskyi responded: “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to write, ‘Dear Viacheslav Kazymyrovych, I love you very much, but getting involved in a fight on your behalf is awkward for me’? The result was this: no one defended me, and I, an active Ukrainian statesman, am entering history as some sort of swashbuckling rogue who makes money off ideas or, as Nazaruk put it, misappropriates government funds. Meanwhile, the ones who were passive and spineless will be lauded as Ukrainian patriots, even though they never actually did anything and didn’t even know what they should have been doing, and instead allowed themselves to be suppressed by noxious Muscovites and Poles.”
Only thanks to intermediaries was a court rigmarole between the two avoided. Lypynskyi sent Nazaruk a few more harsh letters, enclosing in the final one a handkerchief spattered in coughed-up blood.
Nazaruk reacted haughtily: “My pen itches to mock you caustically, but I’ll spare you that mockery. I’m responding because I have a habit of responding to even my greatest enemy . . . It’s clear that you were mistaken in thinking that I’d allow myself to be terrorized, because that sort of thing isn’t possible with a character like mine. You’ve calmed your demeanor through harsh discipline, so it’s difficult to discern what immeasurable pride, in the sense of the first cardinal sin, and what indignation are hiding behind it.”
Here, Nazaruk hit the bull’s-eye. Indignation and pride were all that Lypynskyi had left. He was prone to ranting and raving. In the final years of his life, he had become an angel of vengeance.
his former comrade-in-arms Serhii Shemet, now Hetman Skoropadskyi’s secretary in exile, undermined the authority of Lypynskyi’s ideology with increasing frequency, considering it individualistic scholasticism infected by religious mysticism. In truth, the goal was to curb the inflexible Lypynskyi’s power in the party and reduce his influence over the Hetmanate movement as a whole.
“The aspiration to make a Mohammad out of Lypynskyi and his Letters into a Qur’an is an exaggeration,” Shemet wrote in a party bulletin. “Such an exaggeration only pushes the realistically attuned Ukrainians, who are seeking political know-how, not political faith, away from us. For such Ukrainians, among which I count myself as well, the Letters remain a textbook, not a Qur’an.”
After several proposals at compromise, the indignant Lypynskyi decided to act in the most radical way possible. He disavowed the hetman and all his former fellow party members, those “damned, blind, deaf, and dumb, yet simultaneously pleasant and likable Shemets,” those “slaves, scoundrels, political tricksters, cowards, and doltish fame-seekers, unfit for government work.” Lypynskyi liquidated the Union of Agrarian-Statists as the chairman of its Council of Jurors, publishing a biting communiqué with detailed explanations in the Lviv-based Dilo.
“I most definitively opposed the gossip from the hetman’s house and, with the hetman’s knowledge, protested against ideological and organizational chaos, and even more adamantly against this ‘Smerdyakov-ness’ [from Pavel Smerdyakov, a protagonist in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov], which stifles any and all enthusiasm, any and all advances, any and all desire for creative polemics and further work. Because how am I to convince anyone that I’m not vying to become a Mohammad and to have my Letters be a Qur’an? How do I defend against Smerdyakov-ish scoffing of that which is holy for me, that to which I’ve devoted my whole self, my peace, my health, my life? Over my long years of public service to Ukraine, I’ve seen enough of the devastation spread by Smerdyakov-ness. It’s the only thing killing supporters of Ukrainianness with the tragic question: Is this sort of thing really worth dying for? Smerdyakov-ness is a contagion a hundredfold more dangerous than the entirety of communism. Because in the fight against communism, this anti-Christian idea, the idea of Christ can revive. But Smerdyakov-ness is a putrid poison that brings forth only decay, rot, and death.”
In response, the Hetmanites pronounced Lypynskyi a mentally and spiritually enfeebled incendiary, who was destroying his life’s work with his own hands: “The sun of a great mind has begun to dim. Lypynskyi has gone mad.”
With a supply of obituaries, they waited, like Komodo dragons, close by for the bitten antelope to collapse from their venomous bite.
“Don’t you dare,” Lypynskyi warned them, “quote my works as mottos for your bulletins. Don’t you dare refer to me as your ideologist, because I’m not your ideologist. And should you not comply with these demands, I’ll find a way to put an end to your political infamies . . . I will not be engaging in any more polemics with you.”
His Ukraine had died. All that Lypynskyi had left was pride and indignation. And his Orpington chickens.